Under the Trees and ElsewhereMabie, Hamilton Wright
History
Under the Trees and Elsewhere
Mabie, Hamilton Wright
Essays; Natural history -- Outdoor books
the chart of this world of the imagination which we were given to
studying on long winter evenings, and of which only a few copies exist.
These charts are among the few things not to be had for money; if they
fall into alien hands they are incomprehensible. It is true of them,
as of the books which describe the Forest of Arden, that they have a
kind of second meaning, only to be discerned by those whose eyes detect
the deeper things of life. It is another peculiarity of these charts
that while science has indirectly done not a little for their
completeness, the work of preparing them has fallen entirely into the
hands of the poets; not, of course, the writers of verse alone, but
those who have had the vision of the great world as it lies in the
imagination, and who have heard that deep and incommunicable music
which sings at the heart of it.
Rosalind spread this chart on the table, and we drew our chairs around
it, noting now one and now another of the famous places of which all
men have heard, but which to most men are mere figments of dreams.
Here, for instance, in a certain latitude plainly marked on the margin,
is that calm sweet land of the Phaeacians where reigns Alcinoues the
great-souled king, and the white-armed Nausicaae sings after her bath on
the river's brink:
Without the palace court and near the gate
A spacious garden of four acres lay;
A hedge inclosed it round, and lofty trees
Flourished in generous growth within--the pear
And the pomegranate, and the apple tree
With its fair fruitage, and the luscious fig,
And olive always green. The fruit they bear
Falls not, nor ever fails in winter time
Nor summer, but is yielded all the year.
The ever-blowing west wind causes some
To swell and some to ripen; pear succeeds
To pear; to apple, apple, grape to grape,
Fig ripens after fig.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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