CHAPTER VI.NATURE.
Want of sympathy in nature.
The next day broke calm and fair. The robins sang remorselessly in the apple-tree, and were answered by bobolink, oriole, and a whole tribe of ignorant little bits of feathered happiness that danced among the leaves. Golden-glorious unclosed those purple eyelids of the east, and regally came up the sun; and the treacherous sea broke into a thousand smiles, laughing and dancing with every ripple, as unconsciously as if no form dear to human hearts had gone down beneath it. Oh, treacherous, deceiving beauty of outward things! beauty, wherein throbs not one answering nerve to human pain!
The sea.
And ever and anon came on the still air the soft, eternal pulsations of the distant sea,—sound mournfullest, most mysterious, of all the harpings of nature. It was the sea,—the deep, eternal sea,—the treacherous, soft, dreadful, inexplicable sea.
The sunrise.
The next morning showed as brilliant a getting-up of gold and purple as ever belonged to the toilet of a morning. There was to be seen from Asphyxia’s bedroom window a brave sight, if there had been any eyes to enjoy it,—a range of rocky cliffs with little pin-feathers of black pine upon them, and behind them the sky all aflame with bars of massy light,—orange and crimson and burning gold,—and long bright rays, darting hither and thither, touched now the window of a farmhouse, which seemed to kindle and flash back a morning salutation; now they hit a tall, scarlet maple, now they pierced between clumps of pine, making their black edges flame with gold; and over all, in the brightening sky, stood the morning star, like a great, tremulous tear of light, just ready to fall on the darkened world.
October in New England.
Nature in New England is, for the most part, a sharp, determined matron of the Miss Asphyxia school. She is shrewd, keen, relentless, energetic. She runs through the seasons a merciless express-train, on which you may jump if you can, at her hours, but which knocks you down remorselessly if you come in her way, and leaves you hopelessly behind if you are late. Only for a few brief weeks in the autumn does this grim, belligerent female condescendto be charming; but when she does set about it, the veriest Circe of enchanted isles could not do it better. Airs more dreamy, more hazy, more full of purple light and lustre, never lay over Cyprus or Capri, than those which each October overshadow the granite rocks and prickly chestnuts of New England. The trees seem to run no longer sap, but some strange liquid glow; the colors of the flowers flame up, from the cold, pallid delicacy of spring, into royal tints wrought of the very fire of the sun, and the hues of evening clouds. The humblest weed, which we trod under our foot, unnoticed, in summer, changes with the first frost into some colored marvel, and lifts itself up into a study for a painter, just as the touch of death or adversity strikes out in a rough nature traits of nobleness and delicacy before wholly undreamed of.
Gems.
Gems, in fact, are a species of mineral flowers; they are the blossoms of the dark, hard mine; and what they want in perfume, they make up in durability.
Meditations of the oak.
I sometimes think that leaves are the thoughts of trees, and that if we onlyknew it, we should find their life’s experience recorded in them. Our oak—what a crop of meditations and remembrances must he have thrown forth, leafing out century after century! Awhile he spake and thought only of red deer and Indians; of the trillium that opened its white triangle in his shade; of the scented arbutus, fair as the pink ocean shell, weaving her fragrant mats in the moss at his feet; of feathery ferns, casting their silent shadows on the checkerberry leaves, and all those sweet, wild, nameless, half-mossy things that live in the gloom of forests, and are only desecrated when brought to scientific light, laid out, and stretched on a botanic bier. Sweet old forest days! when blue jay, and yellow-hammer, and bobolink made his leaves merry, and summer was a long opera of such music as Mozart dimly dreamed. But then came human kind bustling beneath; wondering, fussing, exploring, measuring, treading down flowers, cutting down trees, scaring bobolinks, and Andover, as men say, began to be settled.
The brook in winter.
Let us stop the old chaise and get out a minute to look at this brook,—one of our last summer’s pets. What is he doing this winter? Let us at least say “How do you do?” to him. Ah, here he is! and he and Jack Frost together have been turning the little gap in the old stone wall, through which he leaped down to the road, into a little grotto of Antiparos. Some old rough rails and boards that droppedover it are sheathed in plates of transparent silver. The trunks of the black alders are mailed with crystal; and the witch-hazel and yellow osiers fringing its sedgy borders are likewise shining through their glossy covering. Around every stem that rises from the water is a glittering ring of ice. The tags of the alder and the red berries of last summer’s wild roses glitter now like a lady’s pendant. As for the brook, he is wide-awake and joyful; and where the roof of sheet ice breaks away, you can see his yellow-brown waters rattling and gurgling among the stones as briskly as they did last July. Down he springs! over the glossy-coated stone wall, throwing new sparkles into the fairy grotto around him; and widening daily from melting snows, and such other godsends, he goes chattering off under yonder mossy stone bridge, and we lose sight of him. It might be fancy, but it seemed that our watery friend tipped us a cheery wink as he passed, saying, “Fine weather, sir and madam; nice times these; and in April you’ll find us all right; the flowers are making up their finery for the next season; there’s to be a splendid display in a month or two.”
Trees in winter.
Neither are trees, as seen in winter, destitute of their own peculiar beauty. If it be a gorgeous study in summer-time to watch the play of their abundant foliage, we still may thank winter for laying bare before us the grand and beautiful anatomy of the tree, with allits interlacing network of boughs, knotted on each twig with the buds of next year’s promise. The fleecy and rosy clouds look all the more beautiful through the dark lace veil of yonder magnificent elms; and the down-drooping drapery of yonder willow hath its own grace of outline as it sweeps the bare snows. And the comical old apple-trees, why, in summer they look like so many plump, green cushions, one as much like another as possible; but under the revealing light of winter every characteristic twist and jerk stands disclosed.
One might moralize on this,—how affliction, which strips us of all ornaments and accessories, and brings us down to the permanent and solid wood of our nature, develops such wide differences in people who before seemed not much distinct.
Winter clouds.
The cloud lights of a wintry sky have a clear purity and brilliancy that no other months can rival. The rose tints, and the shading of rose tint into gold, the flossy, filmy accumulation of illuminated vapor that drifts across the sky in a January afternoon, are beauties far exceeding those of summer.
Natural and moral elevation.
There is always something of elevation and purity that seems to come over onefrom being in an elevated region. One feels morally as well as physically above the world, and from that clearer air able to look down on it calmly, with disengaged freedom.
The summit of Vesuvius.
Around the foot of Vesuvius lie fair villages and villas garlanded with roses and flushing with grapes whose juice gains warmth from the breathing of its subterraneous fires, while just above them rises a region more awful than can be created by the action of any common causes of sterility. There, immense tracts sloping gradually upward show a desolation so peculiar, so utterly unlike every common solitude of nature, that one enters upon it with the shudder we give at that which is wholly unnatural. On all sides are gigantic serpent convolutions of black lava, their immense folds rolled into every conceivable contortion, as if, in their fiery agonies, they had struggled, and wreathed and knotted together, and then grown cold and black with the imperishable signs of those terrific convulsions upon them. Not a blade of grass, not a flower, not even the hardiest lichen, springs up to relieve the utter deathliness of the scene. The eye wanders from one black, shapeless mass to another, and there is ever the same suggestion of hideous monster life—of goblin convulsions and strange fiend-like agonies in some age gone by. One’s very footsteps have an unnatural, metallic clink, and one’s garments brushing over the rough surface are torn and fretted by itssharp, remorseless touch, as if its very nature were so pitiless and acrid that the slightest contact revealed it.
The morning star.
Calmly the rosy hue of dawn was stealing into the room. The morning star stood, with its solemn, holy eye of light, looking down on the man of sin, from out the brightening sky. Oh, with what freshness, what solemnity and beauty, is each new day born; as if to say to insensate man, “Behold! thou hast one more chance!Strivefor immortal glory!”
A Southern thunder-shower.
The day had been sultry, and it was now an hour or two past midnight, when a thunder-storm, which had long been gathering and muttering in the distant sky, began to develop its forces.
A low shivering sigh crept through the woods, and swayed in weird whistlings the tops of the pines; and sharp arrows of lightning came glittering down among the darkness of the branches, as if sent from the bow of some warlike angel. An army of heavy clouds swept in a moment across the moon; then came a broad, dazzling, blinding sheet of flame, concentrating itself on thetop of a tall pine near where Dred was standing, and in a moment shivered all its branches to the ground as a child strips the leaves from a twig....
The storm, which howled around him, bent the forest like a reed, and large trees, uprooted from the spongy and tremulous soil, fell crashing with a tremendous noise; but, as if he had been a dark spirit of the tempest, he shouted and exulted....
Gradually the storm passed by; the big drops dashed less and less frequently; a softer breeze passed through the forest, with a patter like the clapping of a thousand little wings; and the moon occasionally looked over the silvery battlements of the great clouds.
Nature’s lesson on love.
“Love is a mighty good ting, anyhow,” said Tiff. “Lord bress you, Miss Nina, it makes eberyting go kind o’ easy. Sometimes when I’m studding upon dese yer tings, I says to myself, ’pears like de trees in de wood, dey loves each oder. Dey stands kind o’ lockin’ arms so, and dey kind o’ nod der heads, and whispers so! ’Pears like de grapevines and de birds, and all dem ar tings, dey lives comfortable togeder, like dey was peaceable and liked each oder. Now, folks is apt to get a-stewin’ an’ a-frettin’ round, an’ turnin’ up der noses at dis yer ting, an’ dat ar; but ’pears like de Lord’s works takes eberyting mighty easy. Dey jest kind o’ lives along peaceable. I tink it’s mighty ’structive!”
Winter, North and South.
In New England, Nature is an up-and-down, smart, decisive house-mother, that has her times and seasons, and brings up her ends of life with a positive jerk. She will have no shilly-shally. When her time comes, she clears off the gardens and forests thoroughly and once for all, and they are clean. Then she freezes the ground solid as iron, and then she covers all up with a nice, pure winding-sheet of snow, and seals matters up as a good housewife does her jelly-tumblers under white paper covers. There you are, fast and cleanly. If you have not got ready for it, so much the worse for you! If your tender roots are not taken up, your cellar banked, your doors listed, she can’t help it; it’s your own lookout, not hers.
But Nature down here is an easy, demoralized, indulgent old grandmother, who has no particular time for anything, and does everything when she happens to feel like it. “Is it winter, or isn’t it?” is the question likely often to occur in the settling month of December, when everybody up North has put away summer clothes, and put all their establishments under winter orders.
The oleander.
This bright morning we looked from the roof of our veranda, and our neighbor’s oleander-trees were glowing like a great crimson cloud; and we said, “There! the oleandershave come back!” No Northern ideas can give the glory of these trees as they raise their heads in this their native land, and seem to be covered with great crimson roses. The poor stunted bushes of Northern greenhouses are as much like it as our stunted virtues and poor, frost-nipped enjoyments shall be like the bloom and radiance of God’s Paradise hereafter.
Moss.
If you want to see a new and peculiar beauty, watch a golden sunset through a grove draperied with gray moss. The swaying, filmy bands turn golden and rose-colored, and the long, swaying avenues are like a scene in fairy-land.
The right side and the wrong.
Every place, like a bit of tapestry, has its right side and its wrong side; and both are true and real,—the wrong side with its rags and tags, and seams and knots, and thrums of worsted, and the right side with its pretty picture.
Beauty in nature.
“Turn off my eyes from beholding vanity,” says a good man, when he sees a display of graceful ornament. What, then, must he think of the Almighty Being, all whose useful work is so overlaid with ornament? There is not a fly’s leg, not an insect’s wing, which is not polished and decorated to an extent that weshould think positive extravagance in finishing up a child’s dress. And can we suppose that this Being can take delight in dwellings and modes of life and forms of worship where everything is reduced to cold, naked utility? I think not. The instinct to adorn and beautify is from Him; it likens us to Him, and if rightly understood, instead of being a siren to beguile our hearts away, it will be the closest affiliating band.
Flowers.
There is a strange, unsatisfying pleasure about flowers, which, like all earthly pleasures, is akin to pain. What can you do with them?—you want to do something, but what? Take them all up and carry them with you? You cannot do that. Get down and look at them? What, keep a whole caravan waiting for your observation? That will never do. Well, then, pick and carry them along with you. That is what, in despair of any better resource, I did.... It seemed almost sacrilegious to tear away such fanciful creations, that looked as if they were votive offerings on an altar, or, more likely, living existences, whose only conscious life was a continual exhalation of joy and praise.
These flowers seemed to me to be the Earth’s raptures and aspirations,—her better moments—her lucid intervals. Like everything else in our existence, they are mysterious.
In what mood of mind were they conceived by the great Artist? Of what feelings of His arethey the expression,—springing up out of the dust, in the gigantic, waste, and desolate regions, where one would think the sense of His almightiness might overpower the soul? Born in the track of the glacier and the avalanche, they seem to say to us that this Almighty Being is very pitiful, and of tender compassion; that, in His infinite soul, there is an exquisite gentleness and love of the beautiful, and that, if we would be blessed, His will to bless is infinite.
Mountain air.
I look at the strange, old, cloudy mountains, the Eiger, the Wetterhorn, the Schreckhorn. A kind of hazy ether floats around them—an indescribable aerial halo—which no painter ever represents. Who can paint the air,—that vivid blue in which these sharp peaks cut their glittering images?
The mysterious in nature.
I like best these snow-pure glaciers seen through these black pines; there is something mysterious about them when you thus catch glimpses, and see not the earthly base on which they rest. I recollect the same fact in seeing the cataract of Niagara through trees, where merely the dizzying fall of water was visible, with its foam, and spray, and rainbow; it produced an idea of something supernatural....
Every prospect loses by being made definite. As long as we only see a thing by glimpses, and imagine that there is a deal more that we donotsee, the mind is kept in a constant excitement and play; but come to a point where you can fairly and squarely take in the whole, and there your mind falls listless. It is the greatest proof, to me, of the infinite nature of our minds, that we almost instantly undervalue what we have thoroughly attained.... I remember once, after finishing a very circumstantial treatise on the nature of heaven, being oppressed with a similar sensation of satiety,—that which hath not entered the heart of man to conceive must not be mapped out,—hence the wisdom of the dim, indefinite imagery of the Scriptures; they give you no hard outline, no definite limit; occasionally they part as do the clouds around these mountains, giving you flashes and gleams of something supernatural and splendid, but never fully unveiling.
Cloud landscapes.
It is odd, though, to look at those cloud-caperings; quite as interesting, in its way, as to read new systems of transcendental philosophy, and perhaps quite as profitable. Yonder is a great white-headed cloud, slowly unrolling himself in the bosom of a black pine forest. Across the other side of the road a huge granite cliff has picked up a bit of gauzy silver, which he is winding around his scraggy neck. And now, here comes a cascade, right over our heads; a cascade, not of water, but of cloud; for the poor little brook that makes it faints away before it gets down to us; it falls like a shimmer of moonlight, or a shower of powdered silver,while a tremulous rainbow appears at uncertain intervals, like a half-seen spirit.
A cascade.
The cascade here, as in mountains generally, is a never-failing source of life and variety. Water, joyous, buoyant son of Nature, is calling to you, leaping, sparkling, mocking at you between bushes, and singing as he goes down the dells. A thousand little pictures he makes among the rocks as he goes.
Phases of nature.
There are phases in nature which correspond to every phase of human thought and emotion; and this stern, cloudy scenery [in the Alps] answers to the melancholy fatalism of Greek tragedy, or the kindred mournfulness of the book of Job.
Sublimity in nature.
Coming down I mentally compared Mont Blanc and Niagara, as one should compare two grand pictures in different styles of the same master. Both are of that class of things which mark eras in a mind’s history, and open a new door which no man can shut. Of the two, I think Niagara is the more impressive, perhaps because those aerial elements of foam and spray give that vague and dreamy indefiniteness of outline which seems essential in the sublime. For this reason, while Niagara is equally impressive in the distance, it does not lose on the nearest approach,—it is always mysterious, and therefore stimulating. Those varying spray-wreaths,rising like Ossian’s ghosts from its abyss; those shimmering rainbows, through whose veil you look; those dizzying falls of water that seem like clouds poured from the hollow of God’s hand; and that mystic undertone of sound that seems to pervade the whole being as the voice of the Almighty,—all these bewilder and enchant the discriminating and prosaic part of us, and bring us into that cloudy region of ecstasy where the soul comes nearest to Him whom no eye has seen or can see. I have sometimes asked myself if, in the countless ages of the future, the heirs of God shall ever be endowed by Him with a creative power, by which they shall bring into being things like these? In this infancy of his existence, man creates pictures, statues, cathedrals; but when he is made “ruler over many things,” will his Father intrust to him the building and adorning of worlds? the ruling of the glorious, dazzling forces of nature?
Mountain brooks.
Everybody knows, even in our sober New England, that mountain brooks are a frisky, indiscreet set, rattling, chattering, and capering, in defiance of all law and order, tumbling over precipices and picking themselves up at the bottom, no whit wiser or more disposed to be tranquil than they were at the top; in fact, seeming to grow more mad and frolicsome with every leap. Well, that is just the way brooks do here in the Alps.
Alpine air.
The whole air seemed to be surcharged with tints, ranging between the palest rose and the deepest violet—tints never without blue, and never without red, but varying in the degree of the two. It is this prismatic hue, diffused over every object, which gives one of the most noticeable characteristics of the Alpine landscape.
Color-blending.
I have seen sometimes, in spring, set against a deep-blue sky, an array of greens, from lightest yellow to deepest blue of the pines, tipped and glittering with the afternoon sun, yet so swathed in some invisible, harmonizing medium, that the strong contrasts of color jarred upon no sense. All seemed to be bound by the invisible cestus of some celestial Venus. Yet what painter would dare attempt the same?
Nature’s anguish.
Mountains are nature’s testimonials of anguish. They are the sharp cry of a groaning and travailing creation. Nature’s stern agony writes itself on these furrowed brows of gloomy stone. These reft and splintered crags stand, the dreary images of patient sorrow, existing verdureless and stern because exist they must. In them, hearts that have ceased to rejoice, and have learned to suffer, find kindred, and here an earth worn with countless cycles of sorrow utters to the stars voices of speechless despair.
Pines.
I always love pines, to all generations. I welcome this solemn old brotherhood, which stand gray-bearded, like monks, old, dark, solemn, sighing a certain mournful sound—like abenedicitethrough the leaves.
New England spring.
But at last—at last—spring did come at Poganuc! This marvel and mystery of the new creationdidfinally take place there every year, in spite of every appearance to the contrary. Long after the bluebird that had sung the first promise had gone back into his own celestial ether, the promise that he sang was fulfilled.
Like those sweet, foreseeing spirits, that on high, bare tree-tops of human thought, pour forth songs of hope in advance of their age and time, our bluebird was gifted with a sure spirit of prophecy; and, though the winds were angry and loud, though snows lay piled and deep for long weeks after, though ice and frost and hail armed themselves in embattled forces, yet the sun behind them all kept shining and shining, every day longer and longer, every day drawing nearer and nearer, till the snows passed away like a bad dream, and the brooks woke up and began to laugh and gurgle, and the ice went out of the ponds. Then the pussy-willows threw out their soft catkins, and the ferns came up withtheir woolly hoods on, like prudent old house-mothers, looking to see if it was yet time to unveil their tender greens, and the white blossoms of the shad-blow and the tremulous tags of the birches and alders shook themselves gayly out in the woods. Then, under brown, rustling leaf-banks, came the white, waxy shells of the trailing arbutus with its pink buds, fair as a winter’s dawn on snow; the blue and white hepaticas opened their eyes, and cold, sweet, white violets starred the moist edges of water-courses, and great blue violets opened large eyes in the shadows, and the white and crimson trilliums unfurled under the flickering lace-work shadows of the yet leafless woods; the red columbine waved its bells from the rocks, and great tufts of golden cowslips fringed the borders of the brooks. Then came in flocks the delicate wind-flower family; anemones, starry white, and the crowfoot, with its pink outer shell, and the spotted adder’s tongue, with its waving yellow bells of blossom. Then, too, the honest, great, green leaves of the old skunk-cabbage, most refreshing to the eye in its hardy, succulent greenness, though an abomination to the nose of the ill-informed who should be tempted to gather them. In a few weeks, the woods, late so frozen,—hopelessly buried in snow-drifts,—were full of a thousand beauties and delicacies of life and motion, and flowers bloomed on every hand.
Autumn.
The bright days of summer were a short-lived joy at Poganuc. One hardly had time to say “How beautiful!” before it was past. By September came the frosty nights that turned the hills into rainbow colors, and ushered in Autumn, with her gorgeous robes of golden-rod and purple asters. There was still the best of sport for the children, however; for the frost ripened the shagbark walnuts and opened the chestnut burrs, and the glossy brown chestnuts dropped down among the rustling yellow leaves and the beds of fringed blue gentian.... Here and there groups of pines and tall hemlocks, with their heavy background of solemn green, threw out the flamboyant tracery of the forest in startling distinctness. Here and there, as they passed a bit of low land, the swamp maple seemed really to burn like crimson flame, and the clumps of black alder, with their vivid scarlet berries, exalted the effect of color to the very highest and most daring result. No artist ever has ventured to put on canvas the exact copy of the picture that Nature paints for us every year in the autumn months. There are things the Almighty Artist can do that no earthly imitator can more than hopelessly admire.
Bird-talk.
Who shall interpret what is meant by the sweet jargon of robin and oriole and bobolink, with their endless reiterations? Something wiser, perhaps, than we dream of in our lower life here.
New England winter.
By and by the sun took to getting up later and later, setting a dreadfully bad example, it is to be confessed. It would be seven o’clock and after before he would show his red face above the bed-clothes of clouds away off in the southeast; and when hedidmanage to get up, he was so far off and so chilly in his demeanor that people seemed scarcely a bit the better for him; and by half-past four in the afternoon he was down in bed again, tucked up for the night, never caring what became of the world. And so the clouds were full of snow, as if a thousand white feather-beds had been ripped up over the world; and all the frisky winds came out of their dens, and great frolics they had, blowing and roaring and careering in the clouds,—now bellowing down between the mountains, as if they meant to tear the world to pieces, then piping high and shrill, first round one corner of the farmhouse, and then round the other, rattling the windows, bouncing against the doors, and then with one united chorus rumbling, tumbling down the great chimney, as if they had a mind to upset it. Oh, what a frisky, rough, jolly, unmannerly set of winds they were! By and by the snow drifted higher than the fences, and nothing was to be seen around the farmhouse but smooth, waving hills and hollows of snow; and then came the rain and sleet, andfroze them over with a slippery, shining crust, that looked as if the earth was dressed for the winter in a silver coat of mail.
Summer rain.
There had been a patter of rain the night before, which had kept the leaves awake talking to each other till nearly morning, but by dawn the small winds had blown brisk little puffs, and had whisked the heavens clean and bright with their tiny wings, as you have seen Susan clear away the cobwebs in your mamma’s parlor; and so now there were left only a thousand blinking, burning water-drops, hanging like convex mirrors at the end of each leaf, and Miss Katy admired herself in each one.
Influence of surroundings.
The mutual acquaintance that comes to companions in this solitude and face-to-face communion with nature is deeper and more radical than can come when surrounded by the factitious circumstances of society. When the whole artificial world is withdrawn, and far out of sight, when we are surrounded with the pure and beautiful mysteries of nature, the very best and most genuine part of us comes to the surface, we know each other by the communion of our very highest faculties.
Summer studies.
Why shouldst thou study in the month of JuneIn dusky books of Greek and Hebrew lore,When the great Teacher of all glorious thingsPasses in hourly light before thy door?There is a brighter book unrolling now;Fair are its leaves as is the tree of heaven,All veined and dewed and gemmed with wondrous signs,To which a healing, mystic power is given.A thousand voices to its study call,From the fair hill-top, from the water-fall,Where the bird singeth, and the yellow bee,And the breeze talketh from the airy tree.Now is that glorious resurrection timeWhen all earth’s buried beauties have new birth!Behold the yearly miracle complete,—God hath created a new heaven and earth!Hast thou notimefor all this wondrous show,—No thought to spare? Wilt thou forever beWith thy last year’s dry flower-stalk and dead leaves,And no new shoot or blossom on thy tree?See how the pines push off their last year’s leaves,And stretch beyond them with exultant bound:The grass and flowers, with living power, o’ergrowTheir last year’s remnants on the greening ground.Wilt thou, then, all thy wintry feelings keep,The old dead routine of the book-writ lore,Nor deem that God can teach, by one bright hour,What life hath never taught to thee before?Cease, cease tothink, and be content tobe;Swing safe at anchor in fair Nature’s bay;Reason no more, but o’er thy quiet soulLet God’s sweet teachings ripple their soft way.Call not such hours an idle waste of time,—Land that lies fallow gains a quiet power;It treasures, from the brooding of God’s wings,Strength to unfold the future tree and flower.And when the summer’s glorious show is past,Its miracles no longer charm thy sight,The treasured riches of those thoughtful hoursShall make thy wintry musings warm and bright.
Why shouldst thou study in the month of JuneIn dusky books of Greek and Hebrew lore,When the great Teacher of all glorious thingsPasses in hourly light before thy door?There is a brighter book unrolling now;Fair are its leaves as is the tree of heaven,All veined and dewed and gemmed with wondrous signs,To which a healing, mystic power is given.A thousand voices to its study call,From the fair hill-top, from the water-fall,Where the bird singeth, and the yellow bee,And the breeze talketh from the airy tree.Now is that glorious resurrection timeWhen all earth’s buried beauties have new birth!Behold the yearly miracle complete,—God hath created a new heaven and earth!Hast thou notimefor all this wondrous show,—No thought to spare? Wilt thou forever beWith thy last year’s dry flower-stalk and dead leaves,And no new shoot or blossom on thy tree?See how the pines push off their last year’s leaves,And stretch beyond them with exultant bound:The grass and flowers, with living power, o’ergrowTheir last year’s remnants on the greening ground.Wilt thou, then, all thy wintry feelings keep,The old dead routine of the book-writ lore,Nor deem that God can teach, by one bright hour,What life hath never taught to thee before?Cease, cease tothink, and be content tobe;Swing safe at anchor in fair Nature’s bay;Reason no more, but o’er thy quiet soulLet God’s sweet teachings ripple their soft way.Call not such hours an idle waste of time,—Land that lies fallow gains a quiet power;It treasures, from the brooding of God’s wings,Strength to unfold the future tree and flower.And when the summer’s glorious show is past,Its miracles no longer charm thy sight,The treasured riches of those thoughtful hoursShall make thy wintry musings warm and bright.
Why shouldst thou study in the month of JuneIn dusky books of Greek and Hebrew lore,When the great Teacher of all glorious thingsPasses in hourly light before thy door?
Why shouldst thou study in the month of June
In dusky books of Greek and Hebrew lore,
When the great Teacher of all glorious things
Passes in hourly light before thy door?
There is a brighter book unrolling now;Fair are its leaves as is the tree of heaven,All veined and dewed and gemmed with wondrous signs,To which a healing, mystic power is given.
There is a brighter book unrolling now;
Fair are its leaves as is the tree of heaven,
All veined and dewed and gemmed with wondrous signs,
To which a healing, mystic power is given.
A thousand voices to its study call,From the fair hill-top, from the water-fall,Where the bird singeth, and the yellow bee,And the breeze talketh from the airy tree.
A thousand voices to its study call,
From the fair hill-top, from the water-fall,
Where the bird singeth, and the yellow bee,
And the breeze talketh from the airy tree.
Now is that glorious resurrection timeWhen all earth’s buried beauties have new birth!Behold the yearly miracle complete,—God hath created a new heaven and earth!
Now is that glorious resurrection time
When all earth’s buried beauties have new birth!
Behold the yearly miracle complete,—
God hath created a new heaven and earth!
Hast thou notimefor all this wondrous show,—No thought to spare? Wilt thou forever beWith thy last year’s dry flower-stalk and dead leaves,And no new shoot or blossom on thy tree?
Hast thou notimefor all this wondrous show,—
No thought to spare? Wilt thou forever be
With thy last year’s dry flower-stalk and dead leaves,
And no new shoot or blossom on thy tree?
See how the pines push off their last year’s leaves,And stretch beyond them with exultant bound:The grass and flowers, with living power, o’ergrowTheir last year’s remnants on the greening ground.
See how the pines push off their last year’s leaves,
And stretch beyond them with exultant bound:
The grass and flowers, with living power, o’ergrow
Their last year’s remnants on the greening ground.
Wilt thou, then, all thy wintry feelings keep,The old dead routine of the book-writ lore,Nor deem that God can teach, by one bright hour,What life hath never taught to thee before?
Wilt thou, then, all thy wintry feelings keep,
The old dead routine of the book-writ lore,
Nor deem that God can teach, by one bright hour,
What life hath never taught to thee before?
Cease, cease tothink, and be content tobe;Swing safe at anchor in fair Nature’s bay;Reason no more, but o’er thy quiet soulLet God’s sweet teachings ripple their soft way.
Cease, cease tothink, and be content tobe;
Swing safe at anchor in fair Nature’s bay;
Reason no more, but o’er thy quiet soul
Let God’s sweet teachings ripple their soft way.
Call not such hours an idle waste of time,—Land that lies fallow gains a quiet power;It treasures, from the brooding of God’s wings,Strength to unfold the future tree and flower.
Call not such hours an idle waste of time,—
Land that lies fallow gains a quiet power;
It treasures, from the brooding of God’s wings,
Strength to unfold the future tree and flower.
And when the summer’s glorious show is past,Its miracles no longer charm thy sight,The treasured riches of those thoughtful hoursShall make thy wintry musings warm and bright.
And when the summer’s glorious show is past,
Its miracles no longer charm thy sight,
The treasured riches of those thoughtful hours
Shall make thy wintry musings warm and bright.