photographThe field-gate that leads to the lower meadows
The field-gate that leads to the lower meadows
The air was sharp-set; a delicate rime frosted roof and road; the sea lay hazy and still like a great pearl. Then as the sky stirred with flush upon flush of warm rosy light, it passed from misty pearl to opal with heart of flame, from opal to gleaming sapphire. The earth called, the fields called, the river called—that pied piper to whose music a man cannot stop his ears. It was with me as with the Canterbury pilgrims:—
"So priketh hem nature in hir corages;Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages."
Half an hour later I was away by the early trainthat carries the branch mails and a few workmen, and was delivered at the little wayside station with the letters. The kind air went singing past as I swung along the reverberating road between the high tree-crowned banks which we call hedges in merry Devon, with all the world to myself and the Brethren. A great blackbird flew out with a loud "chook, chook," and the red of the haw on his yellow bill. A robin trilled from a low rose-bush; two wrens searched diligently on a fallen tree for breakfast, quite unconcerned when I rested a moment beside them; and a shrewmouse slipped across the road followed directly by its mate. March violets bloomed under the sheltered hedge with here and there a pale primrose; a frosted bramble spray still held its autumn tints clinging to the semblance of the past; and great branches of snowy blackthorn broke the barren hedgeway as if spring made a mock of winter's snows.
Light of heart and foot with the new wine of the year I sped on again, stray daffodils lighting the wayside, until I heard the voice of the stream and reached the field gate which leads to the lower meadows. There before me lay spring's pageant; green pennons waving, dainty maids curtseying, and a host of joyous yellow trumpeters proclaiming 'Victory' to an awakened earth. They range in serried ranks right down tothe river, so that a man must walk warily to reach the water's edge where they stand gazing down at themselves in fairest semblance like their most tragic progenitor, and, rising from the bright grass in their thousands, stretch away until they melt in a golden cloud at the far end of the misty mead. Through the field gate and across the road I see them, starring the steep earth bank that leads to the upper copse, gleaming like pale flames against the dark tree-boles. There they have but frail tenure; here, in the meadows, they reign supreme.
photographA host of joyous yellow trumpeters
A host of joyous yellow trumpeters
At the upper end of the field the river provides yet closer sanctuary for these children of the spring. Held in its embracing arms lies an island long and narrow, some thirty feet by twelve, a veritable untrod Eldorado, glorious in gold from end to end, a fringe of reeds by the water's edge, and save for that—daffodils. A great oak stands at the meadow's neck, an oak with gnarled and wandering roots where a man may rest, for it is bare of daffodils save for a group of three, and a solitary one apart growing close to the old tree's side. I sat down by my lonely little sister, blue sky overhead, green grass at my feet decked, like the pastures of the Blessèd, in glorious sheen; a sea of triumphant, golden heads tossing blithely backas the wind swept down to play with them at his pleasure.
It was all mine to have and to hold without severing a single slender stem or harbouring a thought of covetousness; mine, as the whole earth was mine, to appropriate to myself without the burden and bane of worldly possession. "Thou sayest that I am—a King," said the Lord before Pilate, and "My kingdom is not of this world." We who are made kings after His likeness possess all things, not after this world's fashion but in proportion to our poverty; and when we cease to toil and spin, are arrayed as the lilies, in a glory transcending Solomon's. Bride Poverty—she who climbed the Cross with Christ—stretches out eager hands to free us from our chains, but we flee from her, and lay up treasure against her importunity, while Amytas on his seaweed bed weeps tears of pure pity for crave-mouth Cæsar of great possessions.
Presently another of spring's lovers cried across the water "Cuckoo, cuckoo," and the voice of the stream sang joyously in unison. It is free from burden, this merry little river, and neither weir nor mill bars its quick way to the sea as it completes the eternal circle, lavishing gifts of coolness and refreshment on the children of the meadows.
It has its birth on the great lone moor, cradledin a wonderful peat-smelling bog, with a many-hued coverlet of soft mosses—pale gold, orange, emerald, tawny, olive and white, with the red stain of sun-dew and tufted cotton-grass. Under the old grey rocks which watch it rise, yellow-eyed tormantil stars the turf, and bids "Godspeed" to the little child of earth and sky. Thus the journey begins; and with ever-increasing strength the stream carves a way through the dear brown peat, wears a fresh wrinkle on the patient stones, and patters merrily under a clapper bridge which spanned its breadth when the mistletoe reigned and Bottor, the grim rock idol, exacted the toll of human life that made him great. On and on goes the stream, for it may not stay; leaving of its freshness with the great osmunda that stretches eager roots towards the running water; flowing awhile with a brother stream, to part again east and west as each takes up his separate burden of service—my friend to cherish the lower meadows in their flowery joyance—and so by the great sea-gate back to sky and earth again.
The river of God is full of water. The streets of the City are pure gold. Verily, here also having nothing we possess all things.
The air was keen and still as I walked back in the early evening, and a daffodil light was in the skyas if Heaven mirrored back earth's radiance. Near the station some children flitted past, like little white miller moths homing through the dusk. As I climbed the hill the moon rode high in a golden field—it was daffodils to the last.
Theseagulls from the upper reaches pass down the river in sober steady flight seeking the open sea. I shall miss the swoop and circle of silver wings in the sunlight and the plaintive call which sounds so strangely away from rock and shore, but it is good to know that they have gone from mudbank and murky town back to the free airs of their inheritance, to the shadow of sun-swept cliffs and the curling crest of the wind-beaten waves, to brood again over the great ocean of a world's tears.
My little tree is gemmed with buds, shy, immature, but full of promise. The sparrows busied with nest-building in the neighbouring pipes and gutters use it for a vantage ground, and crowd there in numbers, each little beak sealed with long golden straw or downy feather.
The river is heavy with hay barges, the last fruits of winter's storehouse; the lengthening days slowly and steadily oust the dark; the air is loud with a growing clamour of life: spring is not only proclaimed, but on this Feast she is crowned, and despite thewarring wind the days bring their meed of sunshine. We stand for a moment at the meeting of the ways, the handclasp of Winter and Spring, of Sleep and Wakening, of Life and Death; and there is between them not even the thin line which Rabbi Jochanan on his death-bed beheld as all that divided hell from heaven.
"Sphæra cujus centrum ubique, circumferentia nullibi," was said of Mercury, that messenger of the gods who marshalled reluctant spirits to the Underworld; and for Mercury we may write Life with Death as its great sacrament of brotherhood and release, to be dreaded only as we dread to partake unworthily of great benefits. Like all sacraments it has its rightful time and due solemnities; the horror and sin of suicide lie in the presumption of free will, the forestalling of a gift,—the sin of Eve in Paradise, who took that which might only be given at the hand of the Lord. It has too its physical pains, but they are those of a woman in travail, and we remember them no more for joy that a child-man is born into the world naked and not ashamed: beholding ourselves as we are we shall see also the leaves of the Tree of Life set for the healing of the nations.
We are slowly, very slowly, abandoning our belief in sudden and violent transitions for a surer and fulleracceptance of the doctrine of evolution; but most of us still draw a sharp line of demarcation between this world and the next, and expect a radical change in ourselves and our surroundings, a break in the chain of continuity entirely contrary to the teaching of nature and experience. In the same way we cling to the specious untruth that we can begin over and over again in this world, forgetting that while our sorrow and repentance bring sacramental gifts of grace and strength, God Himself cannot, by His own limitation, rewrite the Past. We are in our sorrow that which we have made ourselves in our sin; our temptations are there as well as the way of escape. We are in the image of God. We create our world, our undying selves, our heaven, or our hell. "Qui creavit te sine te non salvabit te sine te." It is stupendous, magnificent, and most appalling. A man does not change as he crosses the threshold of the larger room. His personality remains the same, although the expression of it may be altered. Here we have material bodies in a material world—there, perhaps, ether bodies in an ether world. There is no indecency in reasonable speculation and curiosity about the life to come. One end of the thread is between our fingers, but we are haunted for the most part by the snap of Atropos' shears.
Socrates faced death with the magnificent calm bred of dignified familiarity. He had built for himself a desired heaven of colour, light, and precious stones—the philosophic formula of those who set the spiritual above the material, and worship truth in the beauty of holiness. He is not troubled by doubts or regrets, for the path of the just lies plain before his face. He forbids mourning and lamentations as out of place, obeys minutely and cheerily the directions of his executioner, and passes with unaffected dignity to the apprehension of that larger truth for which he had constantly prepared himself. His friends may bury him provided they will remember they are not burying Socrates; and that all things may be done decently and in order, a cock must go to Æsculapius.
Long before, in the days of the Captivity, there lived in godless, blood-shedding Nineveh an exiled Jew whose father had fallen from the faith. He was a simple man, child-like and direct; living the careful, kindly life of an orthodox Jew, suffering many persecutions for conscience' sake, and in constant danger of death. He narrates the story of his life and of the blindness which fell on him, with gentle placidity, and checks the exuberance of his more emotional wife with the assurance of untroubled faith. Finally, when his pious expectations are fulfilled, his sight restored, andhis son prosperously established beside him, he breaks into a prayer of rejoicing which reveals the secret of his confident content. He made use of two great faculties: the sense of proportion, which enabled him to apprise life and its accidents justly, and the gift of inseeing, which led Socrates after him, and Blessed John in lonely exile on Patmos, to look through the things temporal to the hidden meanings of eternity.
"Let my soul bless God the great King," he cries; and looks away past the present distress; past the Restoration which was to end in fresh scattering and confusion; past the dream of gold, and porphyry, and marble defaced by the eagles and emblems of the conqueror; until his eyes are held by the Jerusalem of God, "built up with sapphires, and emeralds, and precious stones," with battlements of pure gold, and the cry of 'Alleluia' in her streets.
Many years later, when he was very aged, he called his son to him and gave him as heritage his own simple rule of life, adding but one request: "Keep thou the law and the commandments, and shew thyself merciful and just, that it may go well with thee.... Consider what alms doeth, and how righteousness doth deliver.... And bury me decently, and thy mother with me." Having so said, he went his way quietly and contentedly to the Jerusalem of his heart.
It is the simple note of familiarity that is wanting in us; that by which we link world with world. Once, years ago, I sat by the bedside of a dying man in a wretched garret in the East End. He was entirely ignorant, entirely quiescent, and entirely uninterested. The minister of a neighbouring chapel came to see him and spoke to him at some length of the need for repentance and the joys of heaven. After he had gone my friend lay staring restlessly at the mass of decrepit broken chimney pots which made his horizon. At last he spoke, and there was a new note in his voice:—
"Ee said as 'ow there were golding streets in them parts. I ain't no ways particler wot they're made of, but it'll feel natral like if there's chimleys too."
The sun stretched a sudden finger and painted the chimney pots red and gold against the smoke-dimmed sky, and with his face alight with surprised relief my friend died.
We are one with the earth, one in sin, one in redemption. It is the fringe of the garment of God. "If I may but touch the hem," said a certain woman.
On the great Death-day which shadows the early spring with a shadow of which it may be saidUmbra Dei est Lux, the earth brought gifts of grief, the fruit of the curse, barren thorns, hollow reed, and the wood of the cross; the sea made offering of Tyrian purple;the sky veiled her face in great darkness, while the nation of priests crucified for the last time their Paschal lamb. "I will hear, saith the Lord; I will hear the heavens, and they shall hear the earth, and the earth shall hear the corn and wine and oil, and they shall hear Jezreel, and I will sow her unto me in the earth; and I will have mercy upon her that had not obtained mercy, and I will say unto them which were not my people, 'Thou art my people,' and they shall say 'Thou art my God.'"
photographIn the distance rise the great lone heavenward hills
In the distance rise the great lone heavenward hills
The second Adam stood in the garden with quickening feet, and all the earth pulsed and sang for joy of the new hope and the new life quickening within her, to be hers through the pains of travail, the pangs of dissolution. The Tree of Life bears Bread and Wine—food of the wayfaring man. The day of divisions is past, the day of unity has dawned. One has risen from the dead, and in the Valley of Achor stands wide the Door of Hope—the Sacrament of Death.
Scio Domine, et vere scio ... quia non sum dignus accedere ad tantum mysterium propter nimia peccata mea et infinitas negligentias meas. Sed scio ... quia tu potes me facere dignum.
Scio Domine, et vere scio ... quia non sum dignus accedere ad tantum mysterium propter nimia peccata mea et infinitas negligentias meas. Sed scio ... quia tu potes me facere dignum.
"Anytusand Meletus can kill me, but they cannot hurt me," said Socrates; and Governor Sancho, with all the itch of newly-acquired authority, could not make the young weaver of steel-heads for lances sleep in prison. In the Vision of Er the souls passed straight forward under the throne of necessity, and out into the plains of forgetfulness, where they must severally drink of the river of unmindfulness whose waters cannot be held in any vessel. The throne, the plain, and the river are still here, but in the distance rise the great lone heavenward hills, and the wise among us no longer ask of the gods Lethe, but rather remembrance. Necessity can set me helpless on my back, but she cannot keep me there; nor can four walls limit my vision. I pass out from under her throne into the garden of God a free man, to my ultimate beatitude or my exceeding shame. All day long this world lies open to me; ay, and other worlds also, if I will but have it so; and when night comes I pass into the kingdom and power of the dark.
I lie through the long hours and watch my bridge,which is set with lights across the gloom; watch the traffic which is for me but so many passing lamps telling their tale by varying height and brightness. I hear under my window the sprint of over-tired horses; the rattle of uncertain wheels as the street-sellers hasten south; the jangle of cab bells as the theatre-goers take their homeward way; the gruff altercation of weary men, the unmelodious song and clamorous laugh of women whose merriment is wearier still. Then comes a time of stillness when the light in the sky waxes and wanes, when the cloud-drifts obscure the stars, and I gaze out into blackness set with watching eyes. No sound comes from without but the voice of the night-wind and the cry of the hour. The clock on the mantelpiece ticks imperatively, for a check has fallen on the familiarity which breeds a disregard of common things, and a reason has to be sought for each sound which claims a hearing. The pause is wonderful while it lasts, but it is not for long. The working world awakes, the poorer brethren take up the burden of service; the dawn lights the sky; remembrance cries an end to forgetting.
Sometimes in the country on a night in early summer you may shut the cottage door to step out into an immense darkness which palls heaven and earth. Going forward into the embrace of the great gloom,you are as a babe swaddled by the hands of night into helpless quiescence. Your feet tread an unseen path, your hands grasp at a void, or shrink from the contact they cannot realise; your eyes are holden; your voice would die in your throat did you seek to rend the veil of that impenetrable silence.
Shut in by the intangible dark, we are brought up against those worlds within worlds blotted out by our concrete daily life. The working of the great microcosm at which we peer dimly through the little window of science; the wonderful, breathing earth; the pulsing, throbbing sap; the growing fragrance shut in the calyx of to-morrow's flower; the heartbeat of a sleeping world that we dream that we know; and around, above, and interpenetrating all, the world of dreams, of angels and of spirits.
It was this world which Jacob saw on the first night of his exile, and again when he wrestled in Peniel until the break of day. It was this world which Elisha saw with open eyes; which Job knew when darkness fell on him; which Ezekiel gazed into from his place among the captives; which Daniel beheld as he stood alone by the great river, the river Hiddekel.
For the moment we have left behind the realm of question and explanation, of power over matter and the exercise of bodily faculties; and passed into darknessalight with visions we cannot see, into silence alive with voices we cannot hear. Like helpless men we set our all on the one thing left us, and lift up our hearts, knowing that we are but a mere speck among a myriad worlds, yet greater than the sum of them; having our roots in the dark places of the earth, but our branches in the sweet airs of heaven.
It is the material counterpart of the 'Night of the Soul.' We have left our house and set forth in the darkness which paralyses those faculties that make us men in the world of men. But surely the great mystics, with all their insight and heavenly love, fell short when they sought freedom in complete separateness from creation instead of in perfect unity with it. The Greeks knew better when they flung Ariadne's crown among the stars, and wrote Demeter's grief on a barren earth, and Persephone's joy in the fruitful field. For the earth is gathered up in man; he is the whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. Standing in the image of God, and clothed in the garment of God, he lifts up priestly hands and presents the sacrifice of redeemed earth before the throne of the All-Father. "Dust and ashes and a house of devils," he cries; and there comes back for answer, "Rex concupiscet decorem tuam."
The Angel of Death has broad wings of silence andmystery with which he shadows the valley where we need fear no evil, and where the voice which speaks to us is as the "voice of doves, tabering upon their breasts." It is a place of healing and preparation, of peace and refreshing after the sharply-defined outlines of a garish day. Walking there we learn to use those natural faculties of the soul which are hampered by the familiarity of bodily progress, to apprehend the truths which we have intellectually accepted. It is the place of secrets where the humility which embraces all attainable knowledge cries "I know not"; and while we proclaim from the housetops that which we have learnt, the manner of our learning lies hid for each one of us in the sanctuary of our souls.
The Egyptians, in their ancient wisdom, set in the desert a great androsphinx, image of mystery and silence, staring from under level brows across the arid sands of the sea-way. The Greeks borrowed and debased the image, turning the inscrutable into a semi-woman who asked a foolish riddle, and hurled herself down in petulant pride when Œdipus answered aright. So we, marring the office of silence, question its mystery; thwart ourselves with riddles of our own suggesting; and turn away, leaving our offering but half consumed on the altar of the unknown god. It was not the theftof fire that brought the vengeance of heaven upon Prometheus, but the mocking sacrifice. Orpheus lost Eurydice because he must see her face before the appointed time. Persephone ate of the pomegranate and hungered in gloom for the day of light which should have been endless.
The universe is full of miracle and mystery; the darkness and silence are set for a sign we dare not despise. The pall of night lifts, leaving us engulphed in the light of immensity under a tossing heaven of stars. The dawn breaks, but it does not surprise us, for we have watched from the valley and seen the pale twilight. Through the wondrous Sabbath of faithful souls, the long day of rosemary and rue, the light brightens in the East; and we pass on towards it with quiet feet and opening eyes, bearing with us all of the redeemed earth that we have made our own, until we are fulfilled in the sunrise of the great Easter Day, and the peoples come from north and south and east and west to the City which lieth foursquare—the Beatific Vision of God.
Vere Ierusalem est illa civitasCuius pax iugis et summa iucunditas;Ubi non prævenit rem desiderium,Nec desiderio minus est præmium.
A greatjoy has come to me; one of those unexpected gifts which life loves to bestow after we have learnt to loose our grip of her. I am back in my own place very near my road—the white gate lies within my distant vision; near the lean grey Downs which keep watch and ward between the country and the sea; very near, nay, in the lap of Mother Earth, for as I write I am lying on a green carpet, powdered yellow and white with the sun's own flowers; overhead a great sycamore where the bees toil and sing; and sighing shimmering poplars golden grey against the blue. The day of Persephone has dawned for me, and I, set free like Demeter's child, gladden my eyes with this foretaste of coming radiance, and rest my tired sense with the scent and sound of home. Away down the meadow I hear the early scythe song, and the warm air is fragrant with the fallen grass. It has its own message for me as I lie here, I who have obtained yet one more mercy, and the burden of it is life, not death.
I remember when, taking a grace from my road, I helped to mow Farmer Marler's ten-acre field, richin ripe upstanding grass. The mechanism of the ancient reaper had given way under the strain of the home meadows, and if this crop was to be saved it must be by hand. I have kept the record of those days of joyous labour under a June sky. Men were hard to get in our village; old Dodden, who was over seventy, volunteered his services—he had done yeoman work with the scythe in his youth—and two of the farm hands with their master completed our strength.
photographThe line of the untroubled hills strong and still in the broad sunshine
The line of the untroubled hills strong and still in the broad sunshine
We took our places under a five o'clock morning sky, and the larks cried down to us as we stood knee-deep in the fragrant dew-steeped grass, each man with his gleaming scythe poised ready for its sweeping swing. Old Dodden led by right of age and ripe experience; bent like a sickle, brown and dry as a nut, his face a tracery of innumerable wrinkles, he has never ailed a day, and the cunning of his craft was still with him. At first we worked stiffly, unreadily, but soon the monotonous motion possessed us with its insistent rhythm, and the grass bowed to each sibilant swish and fell in sweet-smelling swathes at our feet. Now and then a startled rabbit scurried through the miniature forest to vanish with white flick of tail in the tangled hedge; here and there a mother lark was discovered sitting motionless, immovable upon her little brood; but save for these infrequent incidentswe paced steadily on with no speech save the cry of the hone on the steel and the swish of the falling swathes. The sun rose high in the heaven and burnt on bent neck and bare and aching arms, the blood beat and drummed in my veins with the unwonted posture and exercise; I worked as a man who sees and hears in a mist. Once, as I paused to whet my scythe, my eye caught the line of the untroubled hills strong and still in the broad sunshine; then to work again in the labouring, fertile valley.
Rest time came, and wiping the sweat from brow and blade we sought the welcome shadow of the hedge and the cool sweet oatmeal water with which the wise reaper quenches his thirst. Farmer Marler hastened off to see with master-eye that all went well elsewhere; the farm men slept tranquilly, stretched at full length, clasped hands for pillow; and old Dodden, sitting with crooked fingers interlaced to check their trembling betrayal of old age, told how in his youth he had "swep" a four-acre field single-handed in three days—an almost impossible feat—and of the first reaping machine in these parts, and how it brought, to his thinking, the ruin of agricultural morals with it. "'Tis again nature," he said, "the Lard gave us the land an' the seed, but Ee said that a man should sweat. Where's the sweat drivin' round wi' two horsescuttin' the straw down an' gatherin' it again, wi' scarce a hand's turn i' the day's work?"
Old Dodden's high-pitched quavering voice rose and fell, mournful as he surveyed the present, vehement as he recorded the heroic past. He spoke of the rural exodus and shook his head mournfully. "We old 'uns were content wi' earth and the open sky like our feythers before us, but wi' the children 'tis first machines to save doin' a hand's turn o' honest work, an' then land an' sky ain't big enough seemin'ly, nor grand enough; it must be town an' a paved street, an' they sweat their lives out atwixt four walls an' call it seein' life—'tis death an' worse comes to the most of 'em. Ay, 'tis better to stay by the land, as the Lard said, till time comes to lie under it." I looked away across the field where the hot air throbbed and quivered, and the fallen grass, robbed already of its freshness, lay prone at the feet of its upstanding fellows. It is quite useless to argue with old Dodden; he only shakes his head and says firmly, "An old man, seventy-five come Martinmass knows more o' life than a young chap, stands ter reason"; besides, his epitome of the town life he knows nothing of was a just one as far as it went; and his own son is the sweeper of a Holborn crossing, and many other things that he should not be; but that is the parson's secret and mine.
We took rank again and swept steadily on through the hot still hours into the evening shadows, until the sinking sun set aGloriato the psalm of another working day. Only a third of the field lay mown, for we were not skilled labourers to cut our acre a day; I saw it again that night under the moonlight and the starlight, wrapped in a shroud of summer's mist.
The women joined us on the third day to begin haymaking, and the air was fragrant of tossed and sun-dried grass. One of them walked apart from the rest, without interest or freedom of movement; her face, sealed and impassive, was aged beyond the vigour of her years. I knew the woman by sight, and her history by hearsay. We have a code of morals here—not indeed peculiar to this place or people—that a wedding is 'respectable' if it precedes childbirth by a bare month, tolerable, and to be recognised, should it succeed the same by less than a year (provided the pair are not living in the same village); but the child that has never been 'fathered' and the wife without a ring are 'anathema,' and such an one was Elizabeth Banks. She went away a maid and came back a year ago with a child and without a name. Her mother was dead, her father and the village would have none of her: the homing instinct is very strong, or she would scarcely have returned, knowing the traditionsof the place. Old Dodden, seeing her, grumbled to me in the rest-time.—"Can't think what the farmer wants wi' Lizzie Banks in 'is field." "She must live," I said, "and by all showing her life is a hard one." "She 'ad the makin' of 'er bed," he went on, obstinately. "What for do she bring her disgrace home, wi' a fatherless brat for all folks to see? We don't want them sort in our village. The Lord's hand is heavy, an' a brat's a curse that cannot be hid."
When tea-time came I crossed the field to look for a missing hone, and saw Elizabeth Banks far from the other women, busied with a bundle under the hedge. I passed close on my search, and lo! the bundle was a little boy. He lay smiling and stretching, fighting the air with his small pink fists, while the wind played with his curls. "A curse that cannot be hid," old Dodden had said. The mother knelt a moment, devouring him with her eyes, then snatched him to her with aching greed and covered him with kisses. I saw the poor, plain face illumined, transfigured, alive with a mother's love, and remembered how the word came once to a Hebrew prophet:—
Say unto your brethren Ammi, and to your sisters Ruhamah.
The evening sky was clouding fast, the sound of rain was in the air; Farmer Marler shook his head as helooked at the grass lying in ordered rows. I was the last to leave, and as I lingered at the gate drinking in the scent of the field and the cool of the coming rain, the first drops fell on my upturned face and kissed the poor dry swathes at my feet, and I was glad.
David, child of the fields and the sheepfolds, his kingship laid aside, sees through the parted curtain of the years the advent of his greater Son, and cries in his psalm of the hilltops, his last prophetic prayer:—
He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass.
Even so He came, and shall still come. Three days ago the field, in its pageant of fresh beauty, with shimmering blades and tossing banners, greeted sun and shower alike with joy for the furtherance of its life and purpose; now, laid low, it hears the young grass whisper the splendour of its coming green; and the poor swathes are glad at the telling, but full of grief for their own apparent failure. Then in great pity comes the rain, the rain of summer, gentle, refreshing, penetrating, and the swathes are comforted, for they know that standing to greet or prostrate to suffer, the consolations of the former and the latter rain are still their own, with tender touch and cool caress. Then, once more parched by the sun, they are borne away to the new service their apparent failure has fitted themfor; and perhaps as they wait in the dark for the unknown that is still to come they hear sometimes the call of the distant rain, and at the sound the dry sap stirs afresh—they are not forgotten and can wait.
photographBelow the low hedge lies pasture bright with buttercups, where the cattle feed
Below the low hedge lies pasture bright with buttercups, where the cattle feed
"Say unto your sisters Ruhamah," cries the prophet.
"He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass," sang the poet of the sheepfolds.
"My ways are not your ways, saith the Lord."
I remember how I went home along the damp sweet-scented lanes through the grey mist of the rain, thinking of the mown field and Elizabeth Banks and many, many more; and that night, when the sky had cleared and the nightingale sang, I looked out at the moon riding at anchor, a silver boat in a still blue sea ablaze with the head-lights of the stars, and the saying of the herdsman of Tekoa came to me—as it has come oftentimes since:—
Seek Him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night; that calleth for the waters of the sea and poureth them out upon the face of earth; the Lord is His name.
Seek Him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night; that calleth for the waters of the sea and poureth them out upon the face of earth; the Lord is His name.
Thisgarden is an epitome of peace; sun and wind, rain, flowers, and birds gather me into the blessedness of their active harmony. The world holds no wish for me, now that I have come home to die with my own people, for verily I think that the sap of grass and trees must run in my veins, so steady is their pull upon my heart-strings. London claimed all my philosophy, but the country gives all, and asks of me only the warm receptivity of a child in its mother's arms.
When I lie in my cool light room on the garden level, I look across the bright grass—il verde smalto—to a great red rose bush in lavish disarray against the dark cypress. Near by, amid a tangle of many-hued corn-flowers I see the promise of coming lilies, the sudden crimson of a solitary pæony; and in lowlier state against the poor parched earth glow the golden cups of the eschscholtzias. Beyond the low hedge lies pasture bright with buttercups, where the cattle feed. Farther off, where the scythe has been busy, are sheep, clean and shorn, with merry, well-grown lambs; and in thefarthest field I can see the great horses moving in slow steady pace as the farmer turns his furrow.
photographThe great horses moving in slow steady pace as the farmer turns his furrow
The great horses moving in slow steady pace as the farmer turns his furrow
The birds are noisy comrades and old friends, from the lark which chants the dew-steeped morning, to the nightingale that breaks the silence of the most wonderful nights. I hear the wisdom of the rooks in the great elms; the lifting lilt of the linnet, and the robin's quaint little summer song. The starlings chatter ceaselessly, their queer strident voices harsh against the melodious gossip of the other birds; the martins shrill softly as they swoop to and fro busied with their nesting under the eaves; thrush and blackbird vie in friendly rivalry like the Meister-singer of old; sometimes I hear the drawling cry of a peacock strayed from the great house, or the laugh of the woodpecker; and at night the hunting note of the owl reaches me as he sweeps by in search of prey.
To-day I am out again; and the great sycamore showers honey and flowers on me as I lie beneath it. Sometimes a bee falls like an over-ripe fruit, and waits awhile to clean his pollen-coated legs ere he flies home to discharge his burden. He is too busy to be friendly, but his great velvety cousin is much more sociable, and stays for a gentle rub between his noisy shimmering wings, and a nap in the hollow of my hand, for he is an idle friendly soul with plenty of time at his own disposaland no responsibilities. Looking across I can watch the martins at work; they have a starling and a sparrow for near neighbours in the wooden gutter. One nest is already complete all but the coping, the other two are a-building: I wonder whether I or they will be first to go south through the mist.
This great tree is a world in itself, and the denizens appear full of curiosity as to the Gulliver who has taken up his abode beneath it. Pale green caterpillars and spiders of all sizes come spinning down to visit me, and have to be persuaded with infinite difficulty to ascend their threads again. There are flies with beautiful iridescent wings, beetles of all shapes, some of them like tiny jewels in the sunlight. Their nomenclature is a sealed book to me; of their life and habits I know nothing; yet this is but a little corner of the cosmos I am leaving, and I feel not so much desire for the beauty to come, as a great longing to open my eyes a little wider during the time which remains to me in this beautiful world of God's making, where each moment tells its own tale of active, progressive life in which there is no undoing. Nature knows naught of the web of Penelope, that acme of anxious pathetic waiting, but goes steadily on in ever widening circle towards the fulfilment of the mystery of God.
There are, I take it, two master-keys to the secretsof the universe, viewedsub specie æternitatis, the Incarnation of God, and the Personality of Man; with these it is true for us as for the pantheistic little man of contemptible speech, that "all things are ours," yea, even unto the third heaven.
photographThere is a place waiting for me under the firs in the quiet churchyard
There is a place waiting for me under the firs in the quiet churchyard
I have lost my voracious appetite for books; their language is less plain than scent and song and the wind in the trees; and for me the clue to the next world lies in the wisdom of earth rather than in the learning of men. "Libera me ab fuscina Hophni," prayed the good Bishop fearful of religious greed. I know too much, not too little; it is realisation that I lack, wherefore I desire these last days to confirm in myself the sustaining goodness of God, the love which is our continuing city, the New Jerusalem whose length, breadth, and height are all one. It is a time of exceeding peace. There is a place waiting for me under the firs in the quiet churchyard; thanks to my poverty I have no worldly anxieties or personal dispositions; and I am rich in friends, many of them unknown to me, who lavishly supply my needs and make it ideal to live on the charity of one's fellow-men. I am most gladly in debt to all the world; and to Earth, my mother, for her great beauty.
I can never remember the time when I did not love her, this mother of mine with her wonderful garmentsand ordered loveliness, her tender care and patient bearing of man's burden. In the earliest days of my lonely childhood I used to lie chin on hand amid the milkmaids, red sorrel, and heavy spear-grass listening to her many voices, and above all to the voice of the little brook which ran through the meadows where I used to play: I think it has run through my whole life also, to lose itself at last, not in the great sea but in the river that maketh glad the City of God. Valley and plain, mountain and fruitful field; the lark's song and the speedwell in the grass; surely a man need not sigh for greater loveliness until he has read something more of this living letter, and knelt before that earth of which he is the only confusion.
It is a grave matter that the word religion holds such sway among us, making the very gap seem to yawn again which the Incarnation once and for ever filled full. We have banished the protecting gods that ruled in river and mountain, tree and grove; we have gainsayed for the most part folk-lore and myth, superstition and fairy-tale, evil only in their abuse. We have done away with mystery, or named it deceit. All this we have done in an enlightened age, but despite this policy of destruction we have left ourselves a belief, the grandest and most simple the world has ever known, which sanctifies the water that is shed by every passingcloud; and gathers up in its great central act vineyard and cornfield, proclaiming them to be that Life of the world without which a man is dead while he liveth. Further, it is a belief whose foundations are the most heavenly mystery of the Trinity, but whose centre is a little Child: it sets a price upon the head of the sparrow, and reckons the riches of this world at their true value; it points to a way of holiness where the fool shall not err, and the sage may find the realisation of his far-seeking; and yet, despite its inclusiveness, it is a belief which cannot save the birds from destruction, the silent mountains from advertisement, or the stream from pollution, in an avowedly Christian land. John Ruskin scolded and fought and did yeoman service, somewhat hindered by his over-good conceit of himself; but it is not the worship of beauty we need so much as the beauty of holiness. Little by little the barrier grows and 'religion' becomes aruleof life, not life itself, although the Bride stands ready to interpret, likened in her loveliness to the chief treasures of her handmaid—Earth. There is more truth in the believing cry, "Come from thy white cliffs, O Pan!" than in the religion that measures a man's life by the letter of the Ten Commandments, and erects itself as judge and ruler over him, instead of throwing open the gate of the gardenwhere God walks with man from morning until morning.
As I write the sun is setting; in the pale radiance of the sky above his glory there dawns the evening star; and earth like a tired child turns her face to the bosom of the night.
Onceagain I have paid a rare visit to my tree to find many things changed since my last sojourn there. The bees are silent, for the honey-laden flowers of the sycamore are gone and in their place hang dainty two-fold keys. The poplar has lost its metallic shimmer, the chestnut its tall white candles; and the sound of the wind in the fully-leaved branches is like the sighing of the sea. The martins' nests are finished, and one is occupied by a shrill-voiced brood; but for the most part the birds' parental cares are over, and the nestlings in bold flight no longer flutter on inefficient wings across the lawn with clamorous, open bill. The robins show promise of their ruddy vests, the slim young thrush is diligently practising maturer notes, and soon Maid June will have fled.
It is such a wonderful world that I cannot find it in my heart to sigh for fresh beauty amid these glories of the Lord on which I look, seeing men as trees walking, in my material impotence which awaits the final anointing. The marigolds with their orange suns, the lilies' white flame, the corncockle's blue crownof many flowers, the honeysuckle's horn of fragrance—I can paraphrase them, name, class, dissect them; and then, save for the purposes of human intercourse, I stand where I stood before, my world bounded by my capacity, the secret of colour and fragrance still kept. It is difficult to believe that the second lesson will not be the sequence of the first, and death prove a "feast of opening eyes" to all these wonders, instead of the heavy-lidded slumber to which we so often liken it. "Earth to earth?" Yes, "dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return," but what of the rest? What of the folded grave clothes, and the Forty Days? If the next state be, as it well might, space of four dimensions, and the first veil which will lift for me be the material one, then the "other" world which is hidden from our grosser material organism will lie open, and declare still further to my widening eyes and unstopped ears the glory and purpose of the manifold garment of God. Knowledge will give place to understanding in that second chamber of the House of Wisdom and Love. Revelation is always measured by capacity: "Open thy mouth wide," and it shall be filled with a satisfaction that in itself is desire.
There is a child here, a happy quiet little creature holding gently to its two months of life. Sometimes they lay it beside me, I the more helpless of the two—perhapsthe more ignorant—and equally dependent for the supply of my smallest need. I feel indecently large as I survey its minute perfections and the tiny balled fist lying in my great palm. The little creature fixes me with the wise wide stare of a soul in advance of its medium of expression; and I, gazing back at the mystery in those eyes, feel the thrill of contact between my worn and sin-stained self and the innocence of a little white child. It is wonderful to watch a woman's rapturous familiarity with these newcomers. A man's love has far more awe in it, and the passionate animal instinct of defence is wanting in him. "A woman shall be saved through the child-bearing," said St Paul; not necessarily her own, but by participation in the great act of motherhood which is the crown and glory of her sex. She is the "prisoner of love," caught in a net of her own weaving; held fast by little hands which rule by impotence, pursued by feet the swifter for their faltering.
It seems incredible that this is what a woman will barter for the right to "live her own life"—surely the most empty of desires. Man—vir, woman—femina, go to make uptheman—homo. There can be no comparison, no rivalry between them; they are the complement of each other, and a little child shall lead them. It is easy to understand that desire to shelterunder the dear mantle of motherhood which has led to one of the abuses of modern Romanism. I met an old peasant couple at Bornhofen who had tramped many weary miles to the famous shrine of Our Lady to plead for their only son. They had a few pence saved for a candle, and afterwards when they told me their tale the old woman heaved a sigh of relief, "Es wird bald gut gehen: Die da, Sie versteht," and I saw her later paying a farewell visit to the great understanding Mother whom she could trust. Superstitious misapprehension if you will, but also the recognition of a divine principle.
It was Behmen, I believe, who cried with the breath of inspiration, "Only when I know God shall I know myself"; and so man remains the last of all the riddles, to be solved it may be only in Heaven's perfection and the light of the Beatific Vision. "Know thyself" is a vain legend, the more so when emphasised by a skull; and so I company with a friend and a stranger, and looking across at the white gate I wonder concerning the quiet pastures and still waters that lie beyond, even as Brother Ambrose wondered long years ago in the monastery by the forest.