Where the forest murmurs

PHARAIS: A Romance of the Isles. THE MOUNTAIN LOVERS: A Romance. THE SIN-EATER, and other Tales. THE WASHER OF THE FORD. REISSUE SHORTER TALES, with others. I. Spiritual Tales....

A famous writer of the eighteenth century declared that to a civilised mind the mountain solitude was naturally abhorrent. To be impressed was unavoidable, he allowed; to love b...

But the grasses proper, alone: the green grass itself--what a delight to think of these, even if the meaning of the title of this paper be inclusive of them and them only. What...

Few sounds are heard by that mountain-tarn. The travelling cloud lets fall no echo of its fierce frost-crashing shards. Dawn and noon and dusk are quiet-footed as mist. The star...

One cannot say, here is snow at its loveliest, here is ice in a unique beauty. Frozen lochs by moonlight, frozen fens under the pale azure of cloudless noons, dark winding river...

It is the skylark, however, more than any other bird which so often upsets rules and calculations. Even people who do not observe the ways of birds must be struck by the numbers...

is not exempt from the common tradition of uncanniness. He, too, is classed with the dreaded ‘Seven Whistlers’: and from Cornwall to Iceland he is often vituperated as one of th...

Something of that emotion as of ancestral memories, as of an awakened past, of an unloosening of the imagination, may well come to any imaginative nature encountering suddenly a...

The other name I heard as a child, and it long puzzled me. _Beuban-an-Athar-Uaibhreach:_ literally, the malformed one of the Haughty Father. Now why should the bat be called _be...

Perhaps in sheer beauty of pictorial isolation clouds are most lovely when viewed above sea horizons, from shores of islands, or promontories, or remote headlands. In the South...

But whatever hold upon the imagination the winter dusk may have, however subtle a spell there may be in the gloamings of autumn, surely the coming of dusk has at no other time t...

I heard a singular fragment of owl-folklore once on the island of Arran. The narrator said the white owl had seven distinct hoots, but all I need recall here is that the seventh...

Besides ‘Watling Street,’ our Anglo-Saxon forbears had _Iringes Weg_ or _Wec_ and _Bil-Idun’s Weg_; Iringe and Bil-Idun having been famous descendants of the Waetla already allu...

Yes, it is nigh upon twenty hundred years that we must go back. It was in the last month of the last year of the seven years’ silence and peace. When would that be, you ask? Sur...

A Gaelic poet has called them the Lords of Water, saying (though under different names, from the Gaelic mythology) that Alcyone controls the seas and the tides, that Electra is...

Well, the Season of the Rainy Hyades has come. The Water-Pourer, the Whale and swift Dolphin, Pisces (‘Leaders of the Celestial Host’ and ‘the Diadem of November’), Hydra the Wa...

Those who have studied the mythology and folklore of the Pleiades will remember how universally the numeral seven is associated with their varying nomenclature. But there was, a...

To be far north of the Highland Line and among the mountains, when winter has not only whitened the hill-moors but dusted the green roofs of every strath and corrie, may not hav...

To-day, sitting in my old garden amid many roses, and looking westward across a waveless, a moveless sea, now of faint apple-green and fainter mauve lost in a vast luminous spac...