He Had Been Long Dead - Oh, Quite Twenty Or
Twenty-Five Years.
I was sorry that he was dead, and was haunted with a desire to find
out his resting-place so as to plant the flower that bore his name on
his grave.
He, surely, when he discovered it, must have had that
feeling which I had experienced when I first beheld it and could never
describe. And perhaps the presence of those deep ever-living roots
near his bones, and of the flower in the sunshine above him, would
bring him a beautiful memory in a dream, if ever a dream visited him,
in his long unawakening sleep.
No doubt in cases of this kind, when a first impression and the
emotion accompanying it endures through life, the feeling changes
somewhat with time; imagination has worked on it and has had its
effect; nevertheless the endurance of the image and emotion serves to
show how powerful the mind was moved in the first instance.
I have related this case because there were interesting circumstances
connected with it; but there were other flowers which produced a
similar feeling, which, when recalled, bring back the original
emotion; and I would gladly travel many miles any day to look again at
any one of them. The feeling, however, was evoked more powerfully by
trees than by even the most supernatural of my flowers; it varied in
power according to time and place and the appearance of the tree or
trees, and always affected me most on moonlight nights. Frequently,
after I had first begun to experience it consciously, I would go out
of my way to meet it, and I used to steal out of the house alone when
the moon was at its full to stand, silent and motionless, near some
group of large trees, gazing at the dusky green foliage silvered by
the beams; and at such times the sense of mystery would grow until a
sensation of delight would change to fear, and the fear increase until
it was no longer to be borne, and I would hastily escape to recover
the sense of reality and safety indoors, where there was light and
company. Yet on the very next night I would steal out again and go to
the spot where the effect was strongest, which was usually among the
large locust or white acacia trees, which gave the name of Las Acacias
to our place. The loose feathery foliage on moonlight nights had a
peculiar hoary aspect that made this tree seem more intensely alive
than others, more conscious of my presence and watchful of me.
I never spoke of these feelings to others, not even to my mother,
notwithstanding that she was always in perfect sympathy with me with
regard to my love of nature. The reason of my silence was, I think, my
powerlessness to convey in words what I felt; but I imagine it would
be correct to describe the sensation experienced on those moonlight
night among the trees as similar to the feeling a person would have
if visited by a supernatural being, if he was perfectly convinced that
it was there in his presence, albeit silent and unseen, intently
regarding him, and divining every thought in his mind. He would be
thrilled to the marrow, but not terrified if he knew that it would
take no visible shape nor speak to him out of the silence.
This faculty or instinct of the dawning mind is or has always seemed
to me essentially religious in character; undoubtedly it is the root
of all nature-worship, from fetishism to the highest pantheistic
development. It was more to me in those early days than all the
religious teaching I received from my mother. Whatever she told me
about our relations with the Supreme Being I believed implicitly, just
as I believed everything else she told me, and as I believed that two
and two make four and that the world is round in spite of its flat
appearance; also that it is travelling through space and revolving
round the sun instead of standing still, with the sun going round it.
as one would imagine. But apart from the fact that the powers above
would save me in the end from extinction, which was a great
consolation, these teachings did not touch my heart as it was touched
and thrilled by something nearer, more intimate, in nature, not only
in moonlit trees or in a flower or serpent, but, in certain exquisite
moments and moods and in certain aspects of nature, in "every grass"
and in all things, animate and inanimate.
It is not my wish to create the impression that I am a peculiar person
in this matter; on the contrary, it is my belief that the animistic
instinct, if a mental faculty can be so called, exists and persists in
many persons, and that I differ from others only in looking steadily
at it and taking it for what it is, also in exhibiting it to the
reader naked and without a fig-leaf expressed, to use a Baconian
phrase. When the religious Cowper confesses in the opening lines of
his address to the famous Yardley oak, that the sense of awe and
reverence it inspired in him would have made him bow himself down and
worship it but for the happy fact that his mind was illumined with the
knowledge of the truth, he is but saying what many feel without in
most cases recognizing the emotion for what it is - the sense of the
supernatural in nature. And if they have grown up, as was the case
with Cowper, with the image of an implacable anthropomorphic deity in
their minds, a being who is ever jealously watching them to note which
way their wandering thoughts are tending, they rigorously repress the
instinctive feeling as a temptation of the evil one, or as a lawless
thought born of their own inherent sinfulness. Nevertheless it is not
uncommon to meet with instances of persons who appear able to
reconcile their faith in revealed religion with their animistic
emotion.
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