But there was no answer to
that in any book concerning the "life and conversation of animals." I
found it in other works:
In Brown's Philosophy - another of the ancient
tomes on our shelves - and in an old volume containing appreciations of
the early nineteenth-century poets; also in other works. They did not
tell me in so many words that it was the mystical faculty in me which
produced those strange rushes or bursts of feeling and lifted me out
of myself at moments; but what I found in their words was sufficient
to show me that the feeling of delight in Nature was an enduring one,
that others had known it, and that it had been a secret source of
happiness throughout their lives.
This revelation, which in other circumstances would have made me
exceedingly happy, only added to my misery when, as it appeared, I had
only a short time to live. Nature could charm, she could enchant me,
and her wordless messages to my soul were to me sweeter than honey and
the honeycomb, but she could not take the sting and victory from
death, and I had perforce to go elsewhere for consolation. Yet even
so, in my worst days, my darkest years, when occupied with the
laborious business of working out my own salvation with fear and
trembling, with that spectre of death always following me, even so I
could not rid my mind of its old passion and delight. The rising and
setting sun, the sight of a lucid blue sky after cloud and rain, the
long unheard familiar call-note of some newly-returned migrant, the
first sight of some flower in spring, would bring back the old emotion
and would be like a sudden ray of sunlight in a dark place - a
momentary intense joy, to be succeeded by ineffable pain. Then there
were times when these two opposite feelings mingled and would be
together in my mind for hours at a time, and this occurred oftenest
during the autumnal migration, when the great wave of bird-life set
northwards, and all through March and April the birds were visible in
flock succeeding flock from dawn to dark, until the summer visitants
were all gone, to be succeeded in May by the birds from the far south,
flying from the Antarctic winter.
This annual spectacle had always been a moving one, but the feeling it
now produced - this mingled feeling - was most powerful on still
moonlight nights, when I would sit or lie on my bed gazing out on the
prospect, earth and sky, in its changed mysterious aspect. And, lying
there, I would listen by the hour to the three-syllable call-note of
the upland or solitary plover, as the birds went past, each bird alone
far up in the dim sky, winging his way to the north. It was a strange
vigil I kept, stirred by strange thoughts and feelings, in that
moonlit earth that was strange too, albeit familiar, for never before
had the sense of the supernatural in Nature been stronger.
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