The Heart of the Woods There are certain moods in which my feet turn, as by instinct, to the woods.

I set out upon the winding road with a zest of anticipation whose edge no repetition of the after-experience ever dulls; I loiter at the shaded turn, watched often by the bright, quick eye of the squirrel peering over the old stone wall, and sometimes uttering a chattering protest against my invasion of his hereditary privacy.

Here and there along the way of my familiar pilgrimage a great tree stands at the roadside and spreads its far-reaching shadow over the traveller; and these are the places where I always throw myself on the ground and wait for the spirit of the hour and the scene to take possession of me.
One needs preparation for the sanctities and solemnities of the woods, and in the slow progress which I always make hitherward the world slips away with the village that sinks behind the hill at the first turn and reminds me no longer by sight or sound that life is fretting its channels there and everywhere with its world-old pathos and onward movement, caught on the sudden by unseen currents and swept into wild eddies, or flung over a precipice in a mist of tears.

As I go on I feel a return of emotions which I am sure have their root in my earliest ancestry, a freshening of sense which tells me that I am nearing again those scenes which the unworn perceptions of primitive men first fronted.

The conscious, self-directed intellectual movement within me seems somehow to cease, and something deeper, older, fuller of mystery, takes its place; the instincts assert themselves, and I am dimly conscious of an elder world through which I once walked--and yet not I, but some one whose memory lies back of my memory, as the farthest, faintest hills fade into infinity on the boundaries of the world.