This childish manifestation of an overpowering passion changed later, in form, of course, but not essentially much in spirit. Forests, mountains, desolate places, especially perhaps open spaces like the prairies or the desert, but even, too, the simple fields, the lanes, and little hills, offered an actual sense of companionship no human intercourse could possibly provide. In times of trouble, as equally in times of joy, it was to Nature I ever turned instinctively. In those moments of deepest feeling when individuals must necessarily be alone, yet stand at the same time in most urgent need of understanding companionship, it was Nature and Nature only that could comfort me. When the cable came, suddenly announcing my father’s death, I ran straight into the woods.... This call sounded above all other calls, music coming so far behind it as to seem an “also ran.” Even in those few, rare times of later life, when I fancied myself in love, this spell would operate--a sound of rain, a certain touch of colour in the sky, the scent of a wood-fire smoke, the lovely cry of some singing wind against the walls or window--and the human appeal would fade in me, or, at least, its transitory character become pitifully revealed. The strange sense of a oneness with Nature was an imperious and royal spell that over-mastered all other spells, nor can the hint of comedy lessen its reality. Its religious origin appears, perhaps, in the fact that sometimes, during its fullest manifestation, a desire stirred in me to leave a practical, utilitarian world I loathed and become--a monk! Another effect, in troubled later years especially, was noticeable; its dwarfing effect upon the events, whatever they might be, of daily life. So intense, so flooding, was the elation of joy Nature brought, that after such moments even the gravest worldly matters, as well as the people concerned in these, seemed trivial and insignificant. Nature introduced a vaster scale of perspective against which a truer proportion appeared. There lay in the experience some cosmic touch of glory that, by contrast, left all else commonplace and unimportant. The great gods of wind and fire and earth and water swept by on flaming stars, and the ordinary life of the little planet seemed very small, man with his tiny passions and few years of struggle and vain longings, almost futile. One’s own troubles, seen in this new perspective, disappeared, while, at the same time, the heart filled with an immense understanding love and charity towards all the world--which, alas, also soon disappeared.