over forces that threaten his destruction.  The world is full of identities, each unmoved by the tremendous scale of its environment.  Hence a new kind of neighbourship is possible, wider and more catholic than the neighbourship between man and man.  Kinship, not in kindred, but in universal life, becomes possible.  There is no sense of loneliness in a country life after that discovery is made.  The emptiest field is as populous as the thronged city.  The Academy of God’s art opens every spring upon the gemmed hillside.  The building of a new metropolis as wonderful as London is going on beneath the thatch where the bees toil.  All that constitutes human magnificence is seen to be but a part, and not a large part either, of a yet wider magnificence of effort and achievement; for of the flowers of the field we can say, ’Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’

The fact is that civilised man moves in a much too narrow range of affinities.  He has forgotten the rock from which he was hewn, and the hole of the pit from which he was dug.  He has reduced the keyboard of his sympathies by whole octaves.  The habit of shutting up his body within walls, has produced the corresponding habit of shutting up his mind within walls.  Hence Nature, which should be an object of delight to him, becomes a cause of terror or repugnance.  Solitude, which is one of the most agreeable sensations of the natural man, is one of the most painful and alarming sensations of the civilised man.  The civilised man needs to be born again that he may enter the kingdom of Nature; for to enter either the kingdom of grace or of Nature the same process is necessary—­we must become as little children.  Thoreau has described this experience in terms which might apply equally to the religious mystic or the Nature-lover.  He tells us that for a brief period after he came to live in the woods he felt lonesome, and ’doubted if the near neighbourhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life.  To be alone was something unpleasant.  But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery.  In the midst of a gentle rain, while those thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sight and sound about my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighbourhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since.  Every little pine-needle expanded and swelled with sympathy, and befriended me.  I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes that we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.’  This experience marked the rebirth of Thoreau, as truly as a new and delightful sensitiveness to a spiritual world marked the re-birth of Bunyan.  The whole secret of re-birth lies in the recovery of lost affinities.