NEWS OF SPRING 



vented a beauty peculiar to ourselves. All our architectural, 

 all our musical motives, all our harmonies of colour and light 

 are borrowed direct from nature. Without calling upon the 

 sea, the mountains, the skies, the night, the twilight, what 

 might one not say, for instance, of the beauty of the trees? 

 I speak not only of the tree considered in the forest, where it 

 is one of the powers of the earth, perhaps the chief source of 

 our instincts, of our perception of the universe, but of the 

 tree in itself, the solitary tree, whose green old age is laden 

 with a thousand seasons. Among those impressions which, 

 without our knowing it, form the limpid hollow and per- 

 haps the subsoil of happiness and calm of our whole exist- 

 ence, which of us does not preserve the recollection of a few 

 fine trees? When a man has passed mid-life, when he has 

 come to the end of the wondering period, when he has ex- 

 hausted nearly all the sights that the art, the genius and the 

 luxury of men and centuries can offer, after experiencing and 

 comparing many things, he returns to very simple memories. 

 They raise upon the purer horizon two or three innocent, in- 

 variable and refreshing images, which he would wish to carry 

 away with him in his last sleep, if it be true that an image can 

 pass the threshold that separates our two worlds. For myself, I 



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