ve known.

The woods are all alive to one who walks through them with his mind in
an excited state, and his eyes and ears wide open. The trees are always
talking, not merely whispering with their leaves, (for every tree talks
to itself in that way, even when it stands alone in the middle of
a pasture,) but grating their boughs against each other, as old
horn-handed farmers press their dry, rustling palms together, dropping
a nut or a leaf or a twig, clicking to the tap of a woodpecker, or
rustling as a squirrel flashes along a branch. It was now the season of
singing-birds, and the woods were haunted with mysterious, tender music.
The voices of the birds which love the deeper shades of the forest are
sadder than those of the open fields: these are the nuns who have taken
the veil, the hermits that have hidden themselves away from the
world and tell their griefs to the infinite listening Silences of the
wilderness,--for the one deep inner silence that Nature breaks with her
fitful superficial sounds becomes multiplied as the image of a star in
ruffled waters. Strange! The woods at first convey the impression of
profound repose, and yet, if you watch their ways with open ear, you
find the life which is in them is restless and nervous as that of a
woman: the little twigs are crossing and twining and separating like
slender fingers that cannot be still; the stray leaf is to be flattened
into its place like a truant curl; the limbs sway and twist, impatient
of their constrained attitude; and the rounded masses of foliage swell
upward and subside from time to time with long soft sighs, and, it may
be, the falling of a few rain-drops which had lain hidden among the
deeper shadows. I pray you, notice, in the sweet summer days which will
soon see you among the mountains, this inward tranquillity that belongs
to the heart of the woodland, with this nervousness, for I do not know
what else to call it, of outer movement. One would say, that Nature,
like untrained persons, could not sit still without nestling about or
doing something with her limbs or features, and that high breeding was
only to be looked for in trim gardens, where the soul of the trees
is ill at ease perhaps, but their manners are unexceptionable, and a
rustling branch or leaf falling out of season is an indecorum. The real
forest is hardly still except in the Indian summer; then there is death
in the house, and they are waiting for the sharp shrunken months to come