The Long Island Woods 93 
the fields for the love of beauty—and for 
love of one’s couniry. How can one afford to 
miss those evanescent impressions which 
cannot be had again throughout the year; 
how can one fail to heed this finer call of his 
country? To leave the sooty and noisome 
city behind, to escape from this hideous and 
terrible human pen, and find oneself in green 
pastures amidst tender signs of spring: dan- 
delions and violets and delicate greens of un- 
folding leaves, and like some lovely drapery 
around the edges and trailing through the 
woods, the pink and white and cupreous 
splashes of the dogwood, so exquisite, so 
radiant—this is the revelation of a better 
world the gods permit each year to break 
upon our troubled sleep. 
And consider the wood thrush! The dog- 
woods have unfolded their leaves and through- 
out the length of those moraine hills the 
wonderful hymn of the wood thrush rises from 
the cloistered woods. After the winter si- 
lence it is as if intoning priests had re-entered 
a deserted cathedral. Perhaps no music has 
been written so eminently sacred in its im- 
port, so suggestive of religious feeling, so un- 
wordly and beautiful withal as this bird hymn. 
And this hypethral temple, sacred not less to 
