gling her treasures. With that figure
before me, I thought of nearer and more sacred things than the old
woodland gods that might have strayed that way centuries ago; I had no
need to recall the vanished times and faiths to interpret the spirit of
an hour so far from the commonplaces of human speech, so free from the
passing moods of human life. The sweet unconsciousness of that face,
bent over the mass of wild flowers, and akin to them in its unspoiled
loveliness, was to that hour and place like the illuminated capital in
the old missal; a ray of colour which unlocked the dark mystery of the
text. When one can see the loveliness of a wild flower, and feel the
absorbing charm of its sentiment, one is not far from the kingdom of
Nature.

As these fancies chased one another across my mind, lying there at full
length on the moss, I, too, seemed to lose all consciousness that I had
ever touched life at any point than this, or that any other hour had
ever pressed its cup of experience to my lips. The great world of
which I was once part disappeared out of memory like a mist that
recedes into a faint cloud and lies faint and far on the boundaries of
the day; my own personal life, to which I had been bound by such a
multitude of gossamer threads that when I tried to unloose one I seemed
to weave a hundred in its place, seemed to sink below the surface of
consciousness. I ceased to think, to feel; I was conscious only of the
vast and glorious world of tree and sky which surrounded me. I felt a
thrill of wonder that I should be so placed. I had often lain thus
under other trees, but never in such a mood as this. It was as if I
had detached myself from the hitherto unbroken current of my personal
life, and by some miracle of that marvellous place become part of the
inarticulate life of Nature. Clouds and trees, dim vistas of shadow
and flower-starred space of sunlight, were no longer alien to me; I was
akin with the vast and silent movement of things which encompassed me.
No new sound came to me, no new sight broke on my vision; but I heard
with ears, and I saw with eyes, to which all other sounds and sights
had ceased to be. I cannot translate into words the mystery and the
thrill of that hour when, for the first time, I gave myself wholly into
the keeping of Nature, and she received me as her child. What I felt,
what I saw and heard, belong only to that place; outside the Forest of
Arden they are incomprehensible. I