I have lived from within and not from without, And again Could I but return to my woods once more, And dwell in their depths as I have dwelt, Kneel in their mosses as I have knelt, Sit where the cool white rivers run, Away from the world and half hid from the sun, Hear winds in the wood of my storm-torn shore, To tread where only the red man trod, To say no word, but listen to God! Glad to the heart with listening-- It seems to me that I then could sing, And sing as never sung man before. There was within him indeed something of the recluse and the hermit. No one of the period, not even Muir or Burroughs, approached Nature with more of worship. He would live with her and make her central in every point of his life. In his later years he built him a cabin on the heights above San Francisco Bay with a tremendous outlook of sea and mountain and sky, and lived there the rest of his life. I know a grassy slope above the sea, The utmost limit of the westmost land. In savage, gnarl'd, and antique majesty The great trees belt about the place, and stand In guard, with mailed limb and lifted hand, Against the cold approaching civic pride. The foamy brooklets seaward leap; the bland Still air is fresh with touch of wood and tide, And peace, eternal peace, possesses, wild and wide. He became more and more solitary, more and more of a mystic as the years went on. Even from the first, as Rossetti pointed out, there is an almost oriental pantheism in him. It came perhaps from his Indian training. "Some curious specimens," Rossetti observed, "might be culled of the fervid interfusion of external nature and the human soul in his descriptive passages. The great factors of the natural world--the sea, the mountains, the sun, moon, and stars--become personalities, animated with an intense life and dominant possession."