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Oakhurst and Mother Shipton, who was actually relaxing into amiability. "Is this yer a d d picnic?" said Uncle Billy, with inward scorn, as he surveyed the sylvan group, the glancing firelight, and the tethered animals in the foreground. Suddenly an idea mingled with the alcoholic fumes that disturbed his brain.
Straight off, we were in the country. It was most lovely and pleasant in those sylvan solitudes in the early cool morning in the first freshness of autumn.
A moment later another girl, a few years older, entered the room and sat at the left of the other, speaking to her a gentle "good morning." By her voice I was startled: it was without doubt the one of which the first girl's had reminded me. Here was the lady of the sylvan incident sitting bodily before me, "in her habit as she lived." Evidently enough the two were sisters.
Then Michal said not another word, but followed the witch, who led her so surely through the sylvan labyrinth that she actually stopped at a place in the midst of the thickest thicket, drew a knife from out of the trunk of a tree, and showed it to Michal. "Look! This knife I stuck into that tree in the broad daylight, as I passed by this way, and now I have found it again in darkest night."
At the far end was a stage, still set with painted, sylvan scenery, and seated there, alone, above the confusion and the strife, with a calmness, a detachment almost disconcerting, was a stout man with long hair and a loose black tie. He was smoking a cigar and reading a newspaper which he presently flung down, taking up another from a pile on the table beside him.
Onward onward, it saith, and where beauty leads, there it follows. Whether it be the tinkle of a lone sheep bell o'er some quiet landscape, or the glimmer of beauty in sylvan places, or the show of soul in some passing eye, the heart knows and makes answer, following. It is when the feet weary and hope seems vain that the heartaches and the longings arise.
These and several others, like "There Was a Bonnie Lass," could be made into an album of songs that would delight a whole suite of generations. A number of his songs are published: they include a "John Anderson, My Jo," that has no particular right to live; a ballad, "Molly," with a touch of art tucked into it; the beautiful "Sylvan Slumbers," and the quaint and fascinating "Dutch Garden."
The partially cultivated country it is which chiefly has inspired, and will continue to inspire, the strains of poets, such as compose the mass of any literature. Our woods are sylvan, and their inhabitants woodmen and rustics, that is, selvaggia, and the inhabitants are salvages.
Hence in classical art the sylvan deities are depicted in human shape, their woodland character being denoted by a branch or some equally obvious symbol. But this change of shape does not affect the essential character of the tree-spirit. The powers which he exercised as a tree-soul incorporate in a tree, he still continues to wield as a god of trees. This I shall now attempt to prove in detail.
Magnificent lawns that extend like sheets of vivid green, with here and there a sprinkling of fine trees, heaping up rich piles of foliage, and then the forests with the hare, the deer, and the rabbit, bounding away to the covert, or the pheasant suddenly bursting upon the wing the artificial stream, the brook taught to wind in natural meanderings, or expand into the glassy lake, with the yellow leaf sleeping upon its bright waters, and occasionally a rustic temple or sylvan statue grown green and dark with age, give an air of sanctity and picturesque beauty to English scenery that is unknown in the United States.
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