I suppose my feeling toward this place was like that about a ruin, only this seemed older than a ruin.  I could not hear my horse’s foot-falls, and an apple startled me when it fell with a soft thud, and I watched it roll a foot or two and then stop, as if it knew it never would have anything more to do in the world.  I remembered the Enchanted Palace and the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, and it seemed as if I were on the way to it, and this was a corner of that palace garden.  The horse listened and stood still, without a bit of restlessness, and when we heard the far cry of a bird she looked round at me, as if she wished me to notice that we were not alone in the world, after all.  It was strange, to be sure, that people had lived there, and had had a home where they were busy, and where the fortunes of life had found them; that they had followed out the law of existence in its succession of growth and flourishing and failure and decay, within that steadily narrowing circle of trees.

The relationship of untamed nature to what is tamed and cultivated is a very curious and subtle thing to me; I do not know if every one feels it so intensely.  In the darkness of an early autumn evening I sometimes find myself whistling a queer tune that chimes in with the crickets’ piping and the cries of the little creatures around me in the garden.  I have no thought of the rest of the world.  I wonder what I am; there is a strange self-consciousness, but I am only a part of one great existence which is called nature.  The life in me is a bit of all life, and where I am happiest is where I find that which is next of kin to me, in friends, or trees, or hills, or seas, or beside a flower, when I turn back more than once to look into its face.

The world goes on year after year.  We can use its forces, and shape and mould them, and perfect this thing or that, but we cannot make new forces; we only use the tools we find to carve the wood we find.  There is nothing new; we discover and combine and use.  Here is the wild fruit,—­the same fruit at heart as that with which the gardener wins his prize.  The world is the same world.  You find a diamond, but the diamond was there a thousand years ago; you did not make it by finding it.  We grow spiritually, until we grasp some new great truth of God; but it was always true, and waited for us until we came.  What is there new and strange in the world except ourselves!  Our thoughts are our own; God gives our life to us moment by moment, but He gives it to be our own.

    “Ye on your harps must lean to hear
    A secret chord that mine will bear.”