piness! Look at those poor
weather-beaten firs, always the same . . . look at the knotty arms
issuing from all up my poor mutilated trunk--here I am, such as they
have made me, and I do not believe either in your hopes or in your
illusions.'"

And after thus exercising his imagination, Prince Andre still casts
backward glances as he passes by, "but the oak maintained its obstinate
and sullen immovability in the midst of the flowers and grass growing at
its feet. 'Yes, that oak is right, right a thousand times over. One must
leave illusions to youth. But the rest of us know what life is worth; it
has nothing left to offer us.'"

Six weeks later he returns homeward the same way, roused from his
melancholy torpor by his recent meeting with Natasha.

"The day was hot, there was storm in the air; a slight shower watered
the dust on the road and the grass in the ditch; the left side of the
wood remained in the shade; the right side, lightly stirred by the wind,
glittered all wet in the sun; everything was in flower, and from near
and far the nightingales poured forth their song. 'I fancy there was an
oak here that understood me,' said Prince Andre to himself, looking
to the left and attracted unawares by the beauty of the very tree he
sought. The transformed old oak spread out in a dome of deep, luxuriant,
blooming verdure, which swayed in a light breeze in the rays of the
setting sun. There were no longer cloven branches nor rents to be seen;
its former aspect of bitter defiance and sullen grief had disappeared;
there were only the young leaves, full of sap that had pierced through
the centenarian bark, making the beholder question with surprise if this
patriarch had really given birth to them. 'Yes, it is he, indeed!' cried
Prince Andre, and he felt his heart suffused by the intense joy which
the springtime and this new life gave him . . . 'No, my life cannot end
at thirty-one! . . . It is not enough myself to feel what is within me,
others must know it too! Pierre and that "slip" of a girl, who would
have fled into cloudland, must learn to know me! My life must colour
theirs, and their lives must mingle with mine!'"

In letters to his wife, to intimate friends, and in his diary, Tolstoy's
love of Nature is often-times expressed. The hair shirt of the ascetic
and the prophet's mantle fall from his shoulders, and all the poet in
him wakes when, "with a feeling akin to ecstasy," he looks up from his
smooth-running sledge