t is enough to say that I had parted
with all my limitations, and freed myself from all my bonds of habit
and ignorance and prejudice; I was no longer worn and spent with work
and emotion and impression; I was no longer prisoned within the iron
bars of my own personality. I was as free as the bird; I was as little
bound to the past as the cloud that an hour ago was breathed out of the
heart of the sea; I was as joyous, as unconscious, as wholly given to
the rapture of the hour as if I had come into a world where freedom and
joy were an inalienable and universal possession. I did not speculate
about the great fleecy clouds that moved like galleons in the ethereal
sea above me; I simply felt their celestial beauty, the radiancy of
their unchecked movement, the freedom and splendour of the
inexhaustible play of life of which they were part. I asked no
questions of myself about the great trees that wove the garments of the
magical forest about me; I felt the stir of their ancient life, rooted
in the centuries that had left no record in that place save the added
girth and the discarded leaf; I had no thought about the bird whose
note thrilled the forest save the rapture of pouring out without
measure or thought the joy that was in me; I felt the vast irresistible
movement of life rolling, wave after wave, out of the unseen seas
beyond, obliterating the faint divisions by which, in this working
world, we count the days of our toil, and making all the ages one
unbroken growth; I felt the measureless calm, the sublime repose, of
that uninterrupted expansion of form and beauty, from flower to star
and from bird to cloud; I felt the mighty impulse of that force which
lights the sun in its track and sets the stars to mark the boundaries
of its way. Unbroken repose, unlimited growth, inexhaustible life,
measureless force, unsearchable beauty--who shall feel these things and
not know that there are no words for them! And yet in Arden they are
part of every man's life!

And all the time Rosalind sat weaving her wild flowers into a loose
wreath.

"I must not take them from this place," she said, as she bound them
about the venerable tree, as one would bind the fancy of the hour to
some eternal truth.

"Yesterday," she added, as she sat down again and shook the stray
leaves and petals from her lap--"yesterday was the first day of my
life; to-day is the second."

It is one of the delights of Arden that one does not need to put