pecked about and put in between
whiles their little chit-chat across the boughs, while the bobolink
called to us like a comrade, and the phoebe-bird gave us a series of
imitations, and the scarlet tanager and the wild canary put in a vivid
appearance, to show what can be done with colour, though they have no
song.

Yet, while one was grateful for such long, green silence as we found
along that old canal, one could not help feeling how hard it would be
to put into words an experience so infinite and yet so undramatic. Birds
and birds, and trees and trees, and the long, silent water! Prose has
seldom been adequate for such moments. So, as my friend and I took up
our walk again, I sang him this little song of the Silence of the Way:

Silence, whose drowsy eyelids are soft leaves,
And whose half-sleeping eyes are the blue flowers,
On whose still breast the water-lily heaves,
And all her speech the whisper of the showers.

Made of all things that in the water sway,
The quiet reed kissing the arrowhead,
The willows murmuring, all a summer day,
"Silence"--sweet word, and ne'er so softly said

As here along this path of brooding peace,
Where all things dream, and nothing else is done
But all such gentle businesses as these
Of leaves and rippling wind, and setting sun

Turning the stream to a long lane of gold,
Where the young moon shall walk with feet of pearl,
And, framed in sleeping lilies, fold on fold.
Gaze at herself like any mortal girl.

But, after all, trees are perhaps the best expression of silence, massed
as they are with the merest hint of movement, and breathing the merest
suggestion of a sigh; and seldom have I seen such abundance and variety
of trees as along our old canal--cedars and hemlocks and hickory
dominating green slopes of rocky pasture, with here and there a clump of
silver birches bent over with the strain of last year's snow; and all
along, near by the water, beech and basswood, blue-gum and pin-oak, ash,
and even chestnut flourishing still, in defiance of blight. Nor have I
ever seen such sheets of water-lilies as starred the swampy thickets, in
which elder and hazels and every conceivable bush and shrub and giant
grass and cane make wildernesses pathless indeed save to the mink and
the water-snake, and the imagination