"Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas,
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade,
Here at the fountain's sliding foot,
Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root,
Casting the body's vest aside,
My soul into the boughs does glide:
There, like a bird, it sits and sings,
Then whets and combs its silver wings,
And, till prepared for longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light."
Every line of this extract is worthy of close study—not only for its intrinsic beauty, but for its evidence of the working of the immanent ideas, and the vivid sense of kinship with tree life. The two lines
"Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade,"
are justly famous. But more significant are the three less known ones:
"Casting the body's vest aside
My soul into the boughs does glide:
There like a bird it sits and sings."
Did Wordsworth, or Tennyson, or Shelley, ever give token of a more vivid sense of kinship with the life of the tree? Is it not palpable that the same essential form of intuitive experience is struggling in each and all of these poets to find some fitting expression? For Marvell, as for Wordsworth,
"The soft eye-music of slow-waving boughs"
seemed to fluctuate with an interior life and to call for joyous sympathy.
Or, finally, study these passages from Walt Whitman, the sturdy Westerner; his feeling for the mystic impulses from tree life is exceptional, if not in its intensity, at any rate in his determination to give it utterance. If trees do not talk, he says, they certainly manage it "as well as most speaking, writing, poetry, sermons—or rather they do a great deal better. I should say indeed that those old dryad reminiscences are quite as true as any, and profounder than most, reminiscences we get." Farther on, speaking of evening lights and shades on foliage grass, he says, "In the revealings of such light, such exceptional hour, such mood, one does not wonder at the old story fables (indeed, why fables?) of people falling into love-sickness with trees, seiz'd ecstatic with the mystic realism of the resistless silent strength in them—strength which, after all, is perhaps the last, completest, highest beauty." In another place, he says, "I hold on boughs or slender trees caressingly there in the sun and shade, wrestle with their inmost stalwartness—and know the virtue thereof passes from them into me. (Or maybe we interchange—maybe the trees are more aware of it all than I ever thought.)" And once again, speaking of a yellow poplar tree, "How strong, vital, enduring! How dumbly eloquent! What suggestions of imperturbability and being, as against the human trait of seeming. Then the qualities, almost emotional, palpably artistic, heroic, of a tree; so innocent and harmless, yet so savage. It is, yet says nothing. How it rebukes by its tough and equable serenity all weathers." All this is unconventional! So much the better! The identity of underlying sentiment comes out the more clearly. Trees are not only alive (and yet how much that fact alone contains!) but they have a character, an individuality of their own; they can speak directly to the heart and soul of man, and man can sympathise with them.
As for the animal world in the widest sense, it is plain that its study, from the mystical point of view, forms a department to itself. Granted that the transition from the mineral to the organism is gradual, and that from the vegetable to the animal still more gradual, the broad fact remains that, when we reach the higher forms of the realm of living matter, we definitely recognise many of the characteristics which are found in the human soul—will, emotion, impulse, even intellectual activities. Not only primitive man, but those also who are often far advanced in mental development, attribute souls to animals, and find it difficult to believe otherwise—as witness the totemistic systems followed by theories of metempsychosis. And Darwinism, far from destroying these old ideas, has simply furnished a scientific basis for a new totemism.