secret oracular things of lost wisdoms. This Still 

 is no fanciful challenge of speculation. In Waters, 

 the order of psychology it is as logical as in 

 the order of biology is the tracing of our 

 upright posture or the deft and illimitable use 

 of our hands, from unrealisably remote periods 

 wherein the pioneers of man reached slowly 

 forward to inconceivable arrivals. 



But whatever primitive wildness, whatever 

 ancestral nearness we recover in communion 

 with remote Nature, there is no question as 

 to the fascination of beauty exercised by the 

 still waters of which we speak, of their en- 

 during spell. What lovelier thing in Nature 

 than, on a serene and cloudless October day, 

 to come upon a small lake surrounded by tall 

 elms of amber and burnished bronze, by beech 

 and maple and sycamore cloudy with superb 

 fusion of orange and scarlet and every shade 

 of red and brown, by limes and aspens 

 tremulous with shaken pale gold ? Beautiful 

 in itself, in rare and dreamlike beauty, the 

 woods become more beautiful in this silent 

 marriage with placid waters, take on a beauty 

 more rare, a loveliness more dreamlike. There 

 is a haze which holds the fluent gold of the 

 air. Silence is no longer quietude as in June ; 

 or a hushed stillness, as in the thunder-laden 

 noons of July or August ; but a soundless 

 261 



