A Memory of Summer

In the pine woods, or floating under overhanging branches on the silent and almost motionless river, I have had visions of my study fire during the summer months, and, now that I find myself once more within the cheerful circle of its glow, the time that has passed since it was lighted for the last time in the spring seems like a long, delightful dream. I recall those charming days, some of them full of silence and repose from dawn to sunset, some of them ripe with effort and adventure, with a keen delight in the feeling of possession which comes with them; they were brief, they have gone, but they are mine forever. The beauty and freshness that touched them morning after morning as the dew touches the flower are henceforth a part of my life; they have entered into my soul as their light and heat entered into the ripening fruits and grains. I have come back to my friendly fire richer and wiser for my absence from its cheer and warmth; my life has been renewed at those ancient sources whence all our knowledge has come; I have felt again the solitude and sanctity of those venerable shades where the voices of the oracles were once heard, and fleeting glimpses of shy divinities made a momentary splendour in the dusky depths.

Wordsworth's sonnets are always within reach of those who never get beyond the compelling voice of nature, and who are continually returning to her with a sense of loss and decline after every wandering. As I take up the little, well-worn book, it opens of itself at a familiar page, and I read once more that sonnet which comes to one at times with an unspeakable pathos in its lines—a sense of permanent alienation and loss:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.
This sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like springing flowers—
For this, for everything, we are out of tune.
It moves us not. Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn,
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Almost unconsciously I repeat these lines aloud, and straightway the fire, breaking into flame where it has been only glowing before, answers them with a sudden outburst of heat and light that make a brief summer in my study. When one goes back to the woods and streams after long separation and absorption in books and affairs, he misses something which once thrilled and inspired him. The meadows are unchanged, but the light that touched them illusively, but with a lasting and incommunicable beauty, is gone; the woodlands are dim and shadowy as of old, but they are vacant of the presence that once filled them. There is something painfully disheartening in coming back to Nature and finding one's self thus unwelcomed and uncared for, and in the first moment of disappointment an unspoken accusation of change and coldness lies in the heart. The change is not in Nature, however; it is in ourselves. "The world is too much with us." Not until its strife and tumult fade into distance and memory will those finer senses, dulled by contact with a meaner life, restore that which we have lost. After a little some such thought as this comes to us, and day after day we haunt the silent streams and the secret places of the forest; waiting, watching, unconsciously bringing ourselves once more into harmony with the great, rich world around us, we forget the tumult out of which we have come, a deep peace possesses us, and in its unbroken quietness the old sights and sounds return again. Youth, faith, hope, and love spring again out of a soil which had begun to deny them sustenance; old dreams mingle with our waking hours; the old-time channels of joy, long silent and bare, overflow with streams that restore a lost world of beauty in our souls. We have come back to Nature, and she has not denied us, in spite of our disloyalty.

I know of nothing more full of deep delight than this return of the old companionship, this restoration of the old intimacy. How much there is to recall, how many confidences there are to be exchanged! The days are not long enough for all we would say and hear. Such hours come in the pine woods; hours so full of the strange silence of the place, so unbroken by customary habits and thoughts, that no dial could divide into fragments a day that was one long unbroken spell of wonder and delight. So remote seemed all human life that even memory turned from it and lost herself in silent meditation; so vast and mysterious was the life of Nature that the past and the future seemed part of the changeless present. The light fell soft and dim through the thickly woven branches and among the densely clustered trunks; underneath, the deep masses of pine needles and the rich moss spread a carpet on which the heaviest footfall left the silence unbroken. It was a place of dreams and mysteries.

Heed the old oracles,
Ponder my spells;
Song wakes in my pinnacles
When the wind swells.
Soundeth the prophetic wind,
The shadows shake on the rock behind,
And the countless leaves of the pine are strings
Tuned to the lay the wood-god sings.
Hearken! hearken!
If thou wouldst know the mystic song
Chanted when the sphere was young,
Aloft, abroad, the paean swells;
O wise man! hear'st thou half it tells?

Sitting there, with the deep peace of the place sinking into the soul, the solitude was full of companionship; the very silence seemed to give Nature a tone more commanding, an accent more thrilling. At intervals the gusts of wind reaching the borders of the wood filled the air with distant murmurs which widened, deepened, approached, until they broke into a great wave of sound overhead, and then, receding, died in fainter and ever fainter sounds. There was something in this sudden and unfamiliar roar of the pines that hinted at its kinship with the roar of the sea; but it had a different tone. Waste and trackless solitudes and death are in the roar of the sea; remoteness, untroubled centuries of silence, the strange alien memories of woodland life, are in the roar of the pines. The forgotten ages of an immemorial past seem to have become audible in it, and to speak of things which had ceased to exist before human speech was born; things which lie at the roots of instinct rather than within the recollection of thought. The pines only murmur, but the secret which they guard so well is mine as well as theirs; I am no alien in this secluded world; my citizenship is here no less than in that other world to which I shall return, but to which I shall never wholly belong. The most solitary moods of Nature are not incommunicable; they may be shared by those who can forget themselves and hold their minds open to the elusive but potent influences of the forest. He who can escape the prison of habit and work and routine can say with Emerson:

When I am stretched beneath the pines,
When the evening star so holy shines,
I laugh at the lore and the pride of man,
At the sophist schools and the learned clan;
For what are they all, in their high conceit,
When man in the bush with God may meet?