spell, with which in imagination we endow the Where 

 noon silences, the eves and dawns of faery the Forest 

 twilights. Murmurs. 



Still, the silence and the witchery of the 

 forest solitudes in November are of the spell 

 of autumn. The last enchantment of mid- 

 winter is not yet come. 



It is in ' the dead months ' that the forest 

 permits the last disguises to fall away. The 

 forest -soul is no longer an incommunicable 

 mystery. It is abroad. It is a communicable 

 dream. In that magnificent nakedness it 

 knows its safety. For the first time it stands 

 like a soul that has mastered all material 

 things and is fearless in face of the immaterial 

 things which are the only life of the spirit. 



In these 'dead months' of December and 

 January the forest lives its own life. It is 

 not asleep as the poets feign. Sleep has 

 entered into the forest, has made the deep 

 silence its habitation : but the forest itself is 

 awake, mysterious, omnipresent, a creature 

 seen at last in its naked majesty. 



One says lightly, there is no green thing 

 left. That, of course, is a mere phrase of 

 relativity. There is always green fern some- 

 where, even in the garths of tangled yellow- 

 brown bracken. There is always moss some- 

 where, hidden among the great serpentine 



9 



