" "The shadows are here." The
spirits of the dead and the never born are out and at large. These or
others like them were the folk that Abt Vogler encountered as he played
upon his instrument--"presences plain in the place."
One of the most striking chapters in that very remarkable book of Mr.
Fielding Hall's, _The Soul of a People_, is that in which he describes
the nats, the little dainty spirits that haunt the trees of Burmah. But
it is not only the Eastern trees that are haunted, and Sharp is always
seeing tree-spirits, and nature-spirits of every kind, and talking with
them. Now and again he will give you a natural explanation of them, but
that always jars and sounds prosaic. In fact, we do not want it; we
prefer the "delicate throbbing things" themselves, to any facts you can
give us instead of them, for to those who have heard and seen beyond the
veil, they are far more real than any of your mere facts. Here we think
of Mr. Yeats again with his cry, "Come into the world again wild bees,
wild bees." But he hardly needed to cry upon them, for the wild bees
were buzzing in every page he wrote.
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