ds and the
untilled wastes. Curving opposite the south, the hollow side of the
brook has received the sunlight like a silvered speculum every day
that the sun has shone. Since the first violet of the meadow, till
now that the berries are ripening, through all the long drama of the
summer, the rays have visited the stream. The long, loving touch of
the sun has left some of its own mystic attraction in the brook.
Resting here, and gazing down into it, thoughts and dreams come
flowing as the water flows. Thoughts without words, mobile like the
stream, nothing compact that can be grasped and stayed: dreams that
slip silently as water slips through the fingers. The grass is not
grass alone; the leaves of the ash above are not leaves only. From
tree, and earth, and soft air moving, there comes an invisible touch
which arranges the senses to its waves as the ripples of the lake
set the sand in parallel lines. The grass sways and fans the
reposing mind; the leaves sway and stroke it, till it can feel
beyond itself and with them, using each grass blade, each leaf, to
abstract life from earth and ether. These then become new organs,
fresh nerves and veins running afar out into the field, along the
winding brook, up through the leaves, bringing a larger existence.
The arms of the mind open wide to the broad sky.

Some sense of the meaning of the grass, and leaves of the tree, and
sweet waters hovers on the confines of thought, and seems ready to
be resolved into definite form. There is a meaning in these things,
a meaning in all that exists, and it comes near to declare itself.
Not yet, not fully, nor in such shape that it may be formulated--if
ever it will be--but sufficiently so to leave, as it were, an
unwritten impression that will remain when the glamour is gone, and
grass is but grass, and a tree a tree.

NATURE AND ETERNITY

The goldfinches sing so sweetly hidden in the topmost boughs of the
apple-trees that heart of man cannot withstand them. These four
walls, though never so well decorated with pictures, this flat white
ceiling, feels all too small, and dull and tame. Down with books and
pen, and let us away with the goldfinches, the princes of the birds.
For thirty of their generations they have sung and courted and built
their nests in those apple-trees, almost under the very windows--a
time in their chronology equal to a thousand years. For they are so
very busy, from earliest morn till night--a long summer