370 THE ADIRONDACK. 



unutterable yearnings, or sighed over the shadowy forms 

 it vainly sought to grasp. Still, there are doubtless 

 times when even these rough sons of the forest feel sub- 

 dued and solemn, and are conscious of another nature 

 belonging to them besides the mere animal one. Their 

 whole life moving on a different plane from ours, it 

 requires other objects and associations to stir the deeper 

 wells of feeling. The tall pine lifting its green crown 

 so far into the heavens, filled with strange whisperings, 

 and swaying so majestically above the forest below, 

 suggests nothing to them but the amount of clean lumber 

 it will cut. The thousand low and delicate sounds, that to 

 a cultivated ear make the great forest like a harp swept 

 by invisible fingers, he never hears. But when the 

 thunder goes crashing through its green arcades, and the 

 fast- rooted tree is shivered into fragments before his 

 eyes, he thinks of a power above and beyond him. So 

 the starry sky, bending so strangely beautiful above the 

 sleeping lake, fails to kindle his imagination ; but let a 

 comet go streaming through the azure depths, and it is 

 aroused to intensest action, showing his common brother- 

 hood, and that we differ only in degree, not in kind. 

 Thus we stand, alike, yet separate on the earth. 



