scene to take possession of me.
One needs preparation for the sanctities and solemnities of the woods,
and in the slow progress which I always make hitherward the world slips
away with the village that sinks behind the hill at the first turn and
reminds me no longer by sight or sound that life is fretting its
channels there and everywhere with its world-old pathos and onward
movement, caught on the sudden by unseen currents and swept into wild
eddies, or flung over a precipice in a mist of tears. As I go on I
feel a return of emotions which I am sure have their root in my
earliest ancestry, a freshening of sense which tells me that I am
nearing again those scenes which the unworn perceptions of primitive
men first fronted. The conscious, self-directed intellectual movement
within me seems somehow to cease, and something deeper, older, fuller
of mystery, takes its place; the instincts assert themselves, and I am
dimly conscious of an elder world through which I once walked--and yet
not I, but some one whose memory lies back of my memory, as the
farthest, faintest hills fade into infinity on the boundaries of the
world. I am ready for the woods now, for I am escaping the limitations
of my own personality, with its narrow experience and its short memory,
and I am entering into consciousness of a race life and dimly surveying
the records of a race memory.

At last the road turns abruptly from the hillside to which it clings
with the loyalty of ancient association, and, running straight across a
low-lying meadow, enters a deep wood, and vanishes from sight for many
a mile. It is with a deep sigh of content that I find myself once more
in that dim wonderland whose mysteries I would not fathom if I could.
I am at one with the genius of the place; I have escaped customs,
habits, conventions of every sort; the false growths of civilisation
have fallen away and left me in primitive strength and freshness once
more; my own personality disappears, and I am breathing the universal
life; I have gone back to the far beginning of things, and I am once
more in that dim, rich moment of primeval contact with Nature out of
which all mythologies and literatures have grown. How profound and
all-embracing is the silence, and yet how full of inarticulate sound!
The faint whisperings of the leaves touch me first with a sense of
melody, and then, later, with a sense of mystery. These are the most
venerable voices to which men have ever li