the first time since childhood I knew what joys intimacy brings. I
was one of a brotherhood, and wherever I went was sure of a friendly
salutation. Things that grew in silence became my friends; I was with
them at all hours, in light and shadow, in warmth and cold, watching
their gracious and responsive existences, which reject no good gift, but
radiantly grow towards the light while it endures. Insensibly the spirit
of this gentle expansive life was infused within me, until the heart
which I had deemed useless and outworn, began to open like a flower
scathed by frost, at the full coming of spring. The plants and trees
were human to me, the brooks spoke with articulate voice; by that
ancient witchery of animism, old as the relationship of man and nature,
I was put to school again: until at last, absorbed in the vicissitudes
of small things and surrendering reason to a host of pathetic fallacies,
I was taught the great secret that life may not be centred in itself,
but in the going out of the heart is wisdom. And as among human friends
there are some to whom a man is bound by deeper and tenderer links than
to the rest, so it is with these other friends which have no language,
but only the wild-wood power of growing about the heart. Among their
gracious company each man will discover his own affinity, and having
found it will look on the rest of nature with brighter eyes. Some learn
the great lessons from mountains, lakes, and sounding cataracts; others
from broad rivers peacefully flowing to the sea. To me there spoke no
such romantic voices. My wanderings led me through a country of simple
rural charm, and the friends that became dearest to me were just our
English elms.

Who but the solitary, artists alone excepted, understand the full charm
of elms in an English landscape? To us there is an especial appeal in
their loneliness, as they range apart along the hedgerows, embayed in
blue air and sunlight which do but play upon the fringe of your huddling
forest. See them on a breezy August morning across a tawny corn-field,
printing their dark feathery contours on a blue sky and holding the
shadows to their bosoms; or on a June evening get them between you and
the setting sun, and mark the droop and poise of the upper foliage
fretted black upon a ground of red fire. Here are no cones or
hemispheres, or shapeless bulks of green, but living beings of
articulated form, clothed in verdure as with the fine-wrought drapery
that