34 BIRDS AND MAN 



will into the mind of another ; let us further imagine 

 that some one in the audience who had wondered 

 at that saying, finding it both dark and hard, had 

 asked me to explain it ; and that in response I 

 had shown him, as by a swift succession of lightning 

 flashes a scare or a hundred images of birds at their 

 best the unimaginable loveliness, the sunlit colour, 

 the grace of form and of motion, and the melody 

 how great the effect of even that brief glance into 

 a new unknown world would have been ! And if I 

 had then said : All that you have seen the pictures 

 in one small room in a house of many rooms is not 

 after all the main thing ; that it would be idle to 

 speak of, since you cannot know what you do not 

 feel, though it should be told you many times ; 

 this only can be told the enduring images are but 

 an incidental result of a feeling which existed already ; 

 they were never looked for, and are a free gift from 

 nature to her worshipper ; if I had said this to him, 

 the words of the speech which has seemed almost sheer 

 insanity a little while before would have acquired 

 a meaning and an appearance of truth. 



It has curiously happened that while writing 

 these concluding sentences some old long-forgotten 

 lines which I read in my youth came suddenly into 



