music.  The voices of the birds which love the deeper shades of the forest are sadder than those of the open fields:  these are the nuns that have taken themselves away from the world and tell their griefs to the infinite listening Silences of the wilderness,—­for the one deep inner silence that Nature breaks with her fitful superficial sounds becomes multiplied as the image of a star in ruffled waters.  Strange!  The woods at first convey the impression of profound repose, and yet, if you watch their ways with open ear, you find the life which is in them is restless and nervous as that of a woman:  the little twigs are crossing and twining and separating like slender fingers that cannot be still; the stray leaf is to be flattened into its place like a truant curl; the limbs sway and twist, impatient of their constrained attitude; and the rounded masses of foliage swell upward and subside from time to time with long soft sighs, and, it may be, the falling of a few rain-drops which had lain hidden among the deeper shadows.  I pray you, notice, in the sweet summer days which will soon see you among the mountains, this inward tranquillity that belongs to the heart of the woodland, with this nervousness, for I do not know what else to call it, of outer movement.  One would say, that Nature, like untrained persons, could not sit still without nestling about or doing something with her limbs or features, and that high breeding was only to be looked for in trim gardens, where the soul of the trees is ill at ease perhaps, but their manners are unexceptionable, and a rustling branch or leaf falling out of season is an indecorum.  The real forest is hardly still except in the Indian summer; then there is death in the house, and they are waiting for the sharp shrunken months to come with white raiment for the summer’s burial.

There were many hemlocks in this neighborhood, the grandest and most solemn of all the forest-trees in the mountain regions.  Up to a certain period of growth they are eminently beautiful, their boughs disposed in the most graceful pagoda-like series of close terraces, thick and dark with green crystalline leaflets.  In spring the tender shoots come out of a paler green, finger-like, as if they were pointing to the violets at their feet.  But when the trees have grown old, and their rough boles measure a yard through their diameter, they are no longer beautiful, but they have a sad solemnity all their own, too full of meaning to require the heart’s comment to be framed in words.  Below, all their earthward-looking branches are sapless and shattered, splintered by the weight of many winters’ snows; above, they are still green and full of life, but their summits overtop all the deciduous trees around them, and in their companionship with heaven they are alone.  On these the lightning loves to fall.  One such Mr. Bernard saw,—­or rather, what had been one such; for the bolt had torn the tree like an explosion from within, and the ground was strewed all around the broken stump with flakes of rough bark and strips and chips of shivered wood, into which the old tree had been rent by the bursting rocket from the thunder-cloud.