their little
season and pass. Even the half-gods only rise and stir and pass away.
But when the half-gods go, the Gods arrive.

... You would not do less than this to bring forth men--you who have the
call.... You must learn the world--be well grounded in the world. You
need not forget the Old Mother. Your feet are of clay--but you must have
the immortal gleam in your eyes. Do not forget the Old Mother--yet it is
only when the Father appears that you can see her as she really is. It
is the light of His spirit that has shown you the passion of the rose,
the goodness of the wheat, the holiness of the forests. By His
quickening you are hushed in the beauty of the Mother.... The myriads of
makers of books have not yet sensed this beauty.

There is a _different_ love of Nature. We cry aloud in our surface
ecstasies--that the Old Mother was never so beautiful, her contours and
colourings. We travel far for a certain vista, or journey alone as if
making a pilgrimage to a certain nave of woodland where a loved hand has
touched us.... But this lifted love of nature is different from the
Pipes of Pan, from all sensuous beauty. The love of Nature that I mean
is different even from wooings and winnings and all that beauteous
bewilderment of sex-opposites--different from all save the immortal
romances.

I wonder if I can suggest what is in the heart; it cannot be more than a
suggestion, for these things have not to do with words. You who have
felt it may know; and in those high moments you were very far from the
weight and symbols of Nature, but very close to her quickening
spirit.... I walked for hours alone, through different small communities
of beech and oak and elm; and on a slope before my eyes there was a
sudden low clearing of vapour, as if a curtain were lifted, and I saw a
thicket of dogwood in the mystery of resurrection, the stone of the
sepulchre rolled away.

I do not know to this day if they were really there. I have never found
the trees again.... I was sitting here one fall night, a South Wind
straight from the great water, and the mignonette came in and
lingeringly passed. The garden was behind to the North. I went to it and
it gave me nothing, moved around it, and there was no respiration of
the heaven-breath. Yet the oneness and the spirit of life had touched me
from the miracle, like the ineffable presence of the dogwood in bloom on
that fairy slope.

The love of Nature, the different love, is a matter of