38 BIRDS AND MAN 



lightning flashes a score 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 had seemed almost sheer insanity a httle 

 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 my mind, as if some person sitting 



