Music of the Wild 



as incense around you. Sunlight, streaming in 

 white shafts through small interstices, suggests 

 candles. Altars are everywhere, carpeted with 

 velvet mosses, embroidered with lichens, and dec- 

 orated with pale-faced flowers, the eternal symbol 

 of purity and holiness. Its winds forced among 

 overlapping branches sing softly as harps, roar 

 and wail as great organs, and scream and sob as 

 psalters and hautboys. Its insect, bird, and ani- 

 mal life has been cradled to this strange music 

 until voices partake of its tones, so that they har- 

 monize with their tree accompaniment, and all 

 unite in one mighty volume, to create the chorus 

 of the forest. 



I doubt if any one can enter a temple of wor- 

 ship and not be touched with its import. Neither 

 can one go to primal forests and not feel closer 

 the spirit and essence of the Almighty than any- 

 where else in nature. In fact, God is in every 

 form of creation; but in the fields and marshes 

 the work of man so has effaced original conditions 

 that he seems to dominate. The forest alone 

 raises a chorus of praise under natural conditions. 

 Here you can meet the Creator face to face, if 

 anywhere on earth. Yet very few come to make 

 His acquaintance. 



The reason lies in the discomfort; the gloomy, 

 forbidding surroundings. It may be that there 

 yet lingers in the hearts of us a touch of that fear 

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