know the mystic song
Chanted when the sphere was young,
Aloft, abroad, the paean swells;
O wise man! hear'st thou half it tells?

Sitting there, with the deep peace of the place sinking into the soul,
the solitude was full of companionship; the very silence seemed to give
Nature a tone more commanding, an accent more thrilling. At intervals
the gusts of wind reaching the borders of the wood filled the air with
distant murmurs which widened, deepened, approached, until they broke
into a great wave of sound overhead, and then, receding, died in
fainter and ever fainter sounds. There was something in this sudden
and unfamiliar roar of the pines that hinted at its kinship with the
roar of the sea; but it had a different tone. Waste and trackless
solitudes and death are in the roar of the sea; remoteness, untroubled
centuries of silence, the strange alien memories of woodland life, are
in the roar of the pines. The forgotten ages of an immemorial past
seem to have become audible in it, and to speak of things which had
ceased to exist before human speech was born; things which lie at the
roots of instinct rather than within the recollection of thought. The
pines only murmur, but the secret which they guard so well is mine as
well as theirs; I am no alien in this secluded world; my citizenship is
here no less than in that other world to which I shall return, but to
which I shall never wholly belong. The most solitary moods of Nature
are not incommunicable; they may be shared by those who can forget
themselves and hold their minds open to the elusive but potent
influences of the forest. He who can escape the prison of habit and
work and routine can say with Emerson:

When I am stretched beneath the pines,
When the evening star so holy shines,
I laugh at the lore and the pride of man,
At the sophist schools and the learned clan;
For what are they all, in their high conceit,
When man in the bush with God may meet?

IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN

Go with me: if you like, upon report,
The soil, the profit, and this kind of life,
I will your very faithful factor be,
And buy it with your gold right suddenly.

"AND I FOR ROSALIND"

Chapter XXI

In the Forest of Arden.

I

Under the greenwood tree,
Who loves to lie with me,
And turn his merry note
Unto the sweet bird's throat,
Come hither, come hither, come hither.

Rosalind had just laid a spray of ap