UNDER THE TREES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2401, 8 March 1900, Page 55

UNDER THE TREES.

Out in tlie streets the hot autumn sun is beating on the pavement, and crowds are passing to and fro intent on their Saturday marketing. The wind is whirling up cyclones of dust. In the auction room is the sharp ring of the bell and the strident voice of the auctioneer as the wreckage of households, the pillage of South Island plantain trees and orange groves passes into he hands of new owners. Trams and cabs, country carts and bicycles clatter and whirl along. At the shop counter and in the officer — everywliere — there is buying and selling, loss and gain, speculation everywhere, and talk of mines and shares, of fortunes made and fortunes lost. All the thoughts that can be snared from the ceaseless toil and daily care are given to the war. Crowds gather round the newspaper offices and read of a great battle raging. Away in the kopje and veldt and riverbed the slaughter goes on — bullets are whistling, shells bursting, and men lying torn and bleeding, and &ome of them silent for ever.

Here in this bit of woodland, peace, perfect peace. The human tide of life in the town is shut away out of sight. Branches intertwining and creepers clinging to them close us in from the sea and its ships, the station and rushing train, the streets and their care-worn throng, the rumour of battle, murdei and sudden death — from all human life, and from all its toil and commotion. The winds just wave the leaves overhead, and bend lightly the summer

grasses. It hardly seems inanimate, thfc nature around us, but whispering some language that we cannot translate, cannot understand ; we just catch something oil its meaning far, far off as an untrained person might the purport of fine musicA critic of the day has said that we are losing the love of nature which was felfc by Wordsworth and Shelley and Tennyson ; but, in reality, that love is too deeprooted in our soul ever to be lost. We only get tired of one way of expressing' it — it is, "The primal sympathy, that having been must always be." The more we think of its power over heart and brain and soul, the more we find it unfathomable. Is it the voice of our own past ages, countless unrecorded ages, calling us back again to the old " inanimate life ' oi tree and plant, of which we were part long before the higher animal type was developed? One thing we are sure of — wa have strange affinities with all those primitive states of existence from which we have emerged.

If we look only a'little way back on our own short span of years we know how we are haunted by tne half-forgotten memories and visions of our childhood. We know-, too, what a subtle fascination children's thoughts and free spontaneous actions have for the grown man or woman. Then, passing lower in the scale, we find travellers and settlers who have come from highly civilised society of Europe to. live amongst any fine race of savages, sometimes so charmed with primitive life and human nature that they prefer it to civilisation, as Stevenson did in Samoa. And going yet lower down, what is it binds us so to the dumb companionship of the dog and horse? They cannot share our thoughts, or know our griefs and pleasures, and yet in niany of our desolate or mirthful days their sympathy r : eems to surpass that of men and women. But deeper and deeper still, hidden aAvay and often forgotten, is tha love that draws us to these twisted trunks and veined leaves — this common sunJight and this earth of which our frame is compounded. Everywhere — and not within human beings alone — moves " the breath divine/ that stirred the plant world long before the slow " ascent of man." Bjornsen makes his heroine enraptured with the romance of Darwinism, that links us with each living thing, shrub and fish, bird and animal. Druiumond has shown us the spiritual significance of science. Poets, without science, have felt the kinship of man with trees and flowers. Bjornsen himself before he took to theorising gave us the lovely woodland '" talk " of the trets in the Norwegian fortsi. in the idyll of Sinnove Solbaldcen. Hans Andersen gives human emotions to the garden flowers, and Heine describes even the strange forms of rocks, so that they seem grim satiric gnomes, not senseless heaps of earth.

But if it were all ascent in this v. onclerful series of transformations, why do ~we in this wild wood hear the voice of the Great Creator calling us more plainly than down there in the street, and in those human haunts where harassing anxieties, passions, ambitions, and troubles aie tearing men's hearts and brains? A wise old proverb tells us that in very change there is not only gain but some loss. In some moods wheii'Ve look back we see only the loss, and forget the gains ; overlook the merits of what we have, and see the advantages of what we have lost. So when Aye come here to this haunt of tree and fern and grass, we are blind to their cankers and their struggles. For even these forest creatures wage unrelenting war : and the strong strangle the weak and eat out their vital strength, and slowly suck out the juices of their life. It was after toiling on his road in Samoa one day that Stevenson sat down and wrote his wonderful description of the fierce and deadly battle that he saw going on among those lovely forest shapes, whose whisper was the sound of peace and whose waving motion the emblem of hai^piness. Yet it is not a mockery, that harmony which reaches us, drowning the undertones oi, battle and destruction. Only the ear oi those who have passed into a higher plane of existence can hear it above the dis^ cords : and hear it best, not amongst their own kind, but among lower forms. It is the world's? great hymn of praise that we often lose while ire 'are straining to hear the separate notes closer to. us.