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.
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