Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls,
That they might answer him.

shout

And they would

Across the watery vale, and shout again,
Responsive to his call, with quivering peals,
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud,
Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild

Of mirth and jocund din! And, when it chanced
That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill,
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,

Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received
Into the bosom of the steady lake."

The wonderful experience, described in these lines with the inimitable simplicity of nature itself, marks an epoch in a child's life; it is as if a door were suddenly left ajar into some world unseen before. "Never shall I forget that inward occurrence, till now narrated to no mortal," says Richter, "wherein I witnessed the birth of my self-consciousness, of which I can still give the time and place. One fore

noon I was standing, a very young child, in the outer door, and looking leftward at the stack of the fuel-wood, when all at once the internal vision, I am a me' (Ich bin ein Ich), came like a flash from heaven before me, and in gleaming light ever afterward continued." The incommunicable world of childhood, through which we have all walked, but which lies hidden from us now by a golden mist was it not the poetic prelude of life, wherein the deepest things were seen at times in clear vision, and the sublimest mysteries appealed to us with a strange familiarity! To imaginative childhood, is not the cycle of the changing seasons what it was to the German boy in the narrow and straitened country parsonage, an idylyear? And is there not for every child of kindred soul "an idyl-kingdom and pastoral world in a little hamlet and parsonage "?

66

Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls"