lly leapt and danced, so why should you not sympathetically do
this for the energizing of the crops? In every country of the world
the vernal season and the resurrection of the Sun has been greeted with
dances and the sound of music. But if you wanted success in hunting
or in warfare then you danced before-hand mimic dances suggesting the
successful hunt or battle. It was no more than our children do to-day,
and it all was, and is, part of a natural-magic tendency in human
thought.

(1) See The Golden Bough, i, 139 seq. Also Art and Ritual, p. 31.

Let me pause here for a moment. It is difficult for us with our
academical and somewhat school-boardy minds to enter into all this, and
to understand the sense of (unconscious or sub-conscious) identification
with the world around which characterized the primitive man--or to look
upon Nature with his eyes. A Tree, a Snake, a Bull, an Ear of Corn. WE
know so well from our botany and natural history books what these things
are. Why should our minds dwell on them any longer or harbor a doubt as
to our perfect comprehension of them?

And yet (one cannot help asking the question): Has any one of us really
ever SEEN a Tree? I certainly do not think that I have--except most
superficially. That very penetrating observer and naturalist, Henry D.
Thoreau, tells us that he would often make an appointment to visit a
certain tree, miles away--but what or whom he saw when he got there, he
does not say. Walt Whitman, also a keen observer, speaks of a tulip-tree
near which he sometimes sat--"the Apollo of the woods--tall and
graceful, yet robust and sinewy, inimitable in hang of foliage and
throwing-out of limb; as if the beauteous, vital, leafy creature could
walk, if it only would"; and mentions that in a dream-trance he actually
once saw his "favorite trees step out and promenade up, down and around
VERY CURIOUSLY." (1) Once the present writer seemed to have a partial
vision of a tree. It was a beech, standing somewhat isolated, and
still leafless in quite early Spring. Suddenly I was aware of its
skyward-reaching arms and up-turned finger-tips, as if some vivid life
(or electricity) was streaming through them far into the spaces of
heaven, and of its roots plunged in the earth and drawing the same
energies from below. The day was quite still and there was no movement
in the branches, but in that moment the tree was no longer a separate or
separable organism, but a vast being ramifyi