The Plains of Patagonia. 263 
earth ; forest and river and hill; the blue haze and 
distant horizon; shadows of clouds sweeping over 
the sun-flushed landscape—to see it all is like re- 
turning to a home, which is more truly our home 
than any habitation we know. The cry of the 
wild bird pierces us to the heart; we have never 
heard that cry before, and it is more familiar to us 
than our mother’s voice. ‘I heard,’’ says Thoreau, 
“a robin in the distance, the first I had heard for 
many a thousand years, methought, whose note I 
shall not forget for many a thousand more,—the 
same sweet and powerful song as of yore. O the 
evening robin!” Hafiz sings :— 
O breeze of the morning blow me a memory of the ancient time ; 
If after a thousand years thy odours should float o’er my dust, 
My bones, full of gladness uprising, would dance in the sepulchre ! 
And we ourselves are the living sepulchres of a 
dead past—that past which was ours for so many 
thousands of years before this life of the present 
began; its old bones are slumbering in us—dead, 
and yet not dead nor deaf to Nature’s voices; the 
noisy burn, the roar of the waterfall, and thunder 
of long waves on the shore, and the sound of rain 
and whispering winds in the multitudinous leaves, 
bring it a memory of the ancient time; and the 
bones rejoice and dance in their sepulchre. 
Professor W. K. Parker, in his work On Mam- 
malian Descent, speaking of the hairy covering 
almost universal in this class of animals, says: 
“This has become, as every one knows, a custom 
