TREES 87 



weight of an unspeakable sorrow, and 

 could get no help from the complicated 

 and ingenious religiosity of the Roman 

 Catholic Church, in which she had been 

 brought up. To her, in this dreadful 

 time, God, and even her Saviour, were 

 "as dim as darkness itself." It is not 

 beyond the truth to say that religiously 

 considered she was utterly friendless and 

 utterly alone. 



Some years ago, at a period of my life 

 when Wordsworth's poetry was to me 

 almost such a tonic as it was to John 

 Stuart Mill, I tried to appreciate and 

 gather up into full poetic expression this 

 intense tree-experience of Elizabeth of 

 Austria. I wrote a little poem (later 

 published in The Independent), in which 

 I aimed to reproduce the delicate, mystic 

 note of the lyric, "I wandered lonely as a 

 cloud." Whether I achieved any small 

 meed of success, I will leave to the de- 

 cision of those, and only those, who still, 

 in these garish days, care for the simple 



