It was
now the season of singing-birds, and the woods were haunted with
mysterious, tender music. The voices of the birds which love the
deeper shades of the forest are sadder than those of the open fields:
these are the nuns that have taken themselves away from the world and
tell their griefs to the infinite listening Silences of the
wilderness,--for the one deep inner silence that Nature breaks with
her fitful superficial sounds becomes multiplied as the image of a
star in ruffled waters. Strange! The woods at first convey the
impression of profound repose, and yet, if you watch their ways with
open ear, you find the life which is in them is restless and nervous
as that of a woman: the little twigs are crossing and twining and
separating like slender fingers that cannot be still; the stray leaf
is to be flattened into its place like a truant curl; the limbs sway
and twist, impatient of their constrained attitude; and the rounded
masses of foliage swell upward and subside from time to time with
long soft sighs, and, it may be, the falling of a few rain-drops
which had lain hidden among the deeper shadows. I pray you, notice,
in the sweet summer days which will soon see you among the mountains,
this inward tranquillity that belongs to the heart of the woodland,
with this nervousness, for I do not know what else to call it, of
outer movement.
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