How often I
have looked at oaks since, and yet have never been able to get the same
effect from them! Like an old author printed in another type, the words
are the same, but the sentiment is different. The brooks have ceased to
run. There is no music now at the old hatch where we used to sit in
danger of our lives, happy as kings, on the narrow bar over the deep
water. The barred pike that used to come up in such numbers are no more
among the flags. The perch used to drift down the stream, and then bring
up again. The sun shone there for a very long time, and the water rippled
and sang, and it always seemed to me that I could feel the rippling and
the singing and the sparkling back through the centuries. The brook is
dead, for when man goes nature ends. I dare say there is water there
still, but it is not the brook; the brook is gone like John Brown's soul.
There used to be clouds over the fields, white clouds in blue summer
skies. I have lived a good deal on clouds; they have been meat to me
often; they bring something to the spirit which even the trees do not. I
see clouds now sometimes when the iron grip of hell permits for a minute
or two; they are very different clouds, and speak differently. I long for
some of the old clouds that had no memories. There were nights in those
times over those fields, not darkness, but Night, full of glowing suns
and glowing richness of life that sprang up to meet them. The nights are
there still; they are everywhere, nothing local in the night; but it is
not the Night to me seen through the window.
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