not eager for action but able to give themselves up to the pure joy of
sound, then it is possible to give them a beautiful piece of writing
in praise of Nature, such as the following, taken from "The Divine
Adventure," by Fiona Macleod:


Then he remembered the ancient wisdom of the Gael and came
out of the Forest Chapel and went into the woods. He put
his lip to the earth, and lifted a green leaf to his brow,
and held a branch to his ear; and because he was no longer
heavy with the sweet clay of mortality, though yet of human
clan, he heard that which we do not hear, and saw that which
we do not see, and knew that which we do not know. All the
green life was his. In that new world he saw the lives of
trees, now pale green, now of woodsmoke blue, now of amethyst;
the gray lives of stone; breaths of the grass and reed,
creatures of the air, delicate and wild as fawns, or
swift and fierce and terrible tigers of that undiscovered
wilderness, with birds almost invisible but for their
luminous wings, and opalescent crests.


The value of this particular passage is the mystery pervading the
whole picture, which forms so beautiful an antidote to the eternal
explaining of things. I think it of the highest importance for the
children to realize that the best and most beautiful things cannot be
expressed in everyday language and that they must content themselves
with a flash here and there of the beauty which may come later. One
does not enhance the beauty of the mountain by pulling to pieces some
of the earthy clogs; one does not increase the impression of a vast