142 WITH EARTH AND SKY 
and listens for it at each arriving spring here 
with new delight accentuated by the years of 
hearing it and not in one tittle dimmed by all 
the songs he has heard. The last song is the 
sweetest song which has ever slipped from that 
sunlit breast. So on the prairie. where this bird 
has his festival of delight, there had I known 
him and his altogether bonnie melody which out- 
witcheries the blowing wind. And the pine tree, 
when was it I did not love that seeretive musician 
with the eternal cadence in the voice and the 
perpetuated tears in the heart? I was not boy 
nor youth with the pine. I never met the pine 
tree growing in his grouped majesty of mood and 
music till I was man grown. Therefore my love 
was not that of association. Mayhap I learned 
it of the poets, who are all votaries of the pine. 
That solitary unsmiling reticence has played his 
tunes to all their hearts. ‘The music of seas 
far away”’ is forever on the pine. I know spaces 
where the pines are just out of hearing of the sea. 
A plunge through and over sand dunes and you 
are confronted by the old magnificence of the 
sea with its hoary music. And many’s the time 
that I lie under the drone of the eternal melody 
of shipwrecks unregretted and am drenched in 
the wild contagion of sea voices which have come 
far and have never lost a note of sadness but 
pour the tears of ages on a body’s ears as if that 
was why the sea had come and that was why 
you had come to the sea. And then I have gone 
