Of all the miracles of the green world none surpasses that of the
grass. It has many names, many raiments even, but it is always that
wonderful thing which the poets of all time have delighted in calling
the green hair of earth. ‘Soft green hair of the rocks,’ says a Breton
poet. Another Celtic poet has used the word alike for the mosses which
clothe the talons of old trees and for the forests themselves. No
fantastic hyperbole this: from a great height forests of pine and oak
seem like reaches of sombre grass. To the shrewmouse the tall grasses
of June are green woods, and the slim stems of the reddening sorrels
are groves of pinetrees. I remember having read somewhere of a lovely
name given to the grass by the Arabs of the desert ... ‘the Bride of
Mahomet.’ What lovelier and more gracious thing in the world, in their
eyes, than this soft cool greenness of the oasis, this emerald carpet
below the green shadowy roof of waving palms; and as of all women in
the world there could be but one, according to the old legend, worthy
to be the supreme bride of the Prophet, what poetic name for her so
fitting as this exquisite apparition of the desert, so beautiful, so
evernew in itself, so welcome for its association with sweet waters and
shade and coolness. A Gaelic poet calls the grass the Gift of Christ,
literally slender-greenness of Christ (_uaineachd-caol Chriosde_),
and another has written of how it came to be called Green-Peace--both
from an old tale (one of the many ebbed, forgotten tales of the isles)
that, when God had created the world, Christ said “Surely one thing
yet lacks, My Father: soft greenness for the barren mountain, soft
greenness for rocks and cliffs, soft greenness for stony places and the
wilderness, soft greenness for the airidhs of the poor.” Whereupon God
said “Let thy tenderness be upon these things, O my Son, and thy peace
be upon them, and let the green grass be the colour of peace and of
home”--and thereafter, says the taleteller, the Eternal Father turned
to the Holy Spirit and said of the Son that from that hour He should be
named the Prince of Peace, _Prionnsa na Sioth-cainnt canar ris_.
Grass is as universal as dew, as commonplace as light. That which feels
the seawind in the loneliest Hebrides is brother to that which lies
on Himalaya or is fanned by the hot airs of Asian valleys. That which
covers a grey scarp in Iceland is the same as that on Adam’s Peak in
Ceylon, and that which in myriad is the prairie of the north is in
myriad the pampas of the south; that whose multitude covers the Gaelic
hills is that whose multitude covers the Russian steppes. It is of all
the signature of Nature that which to us is nearest and homeliest. The
green grass after long voyaging, the grass of home-valley or hillside
after long wayfaring, the green grass of the Psalmist to souls athirst
and weary, the grass of El Dorado to the visionary seeking the gold of
the spirit, the grass of the Fortunate Isles, of the Hills of Youth, to
the poets and dreamers of all lands and times ... everywhere and ever
has this omnipresent herb that withereth and yet is continually reborn,
been the eternal symbol of that which passes like a dream, the symbol
of everlasting illusion, and yet, too, is the symbol of resurrection,
of all the old divine illusion essayed anew, of the inexplicable
mystery of life recovered and everlastingly perpetrated.
When we speak of grass we generally mean one thing, the small
slim green herb which carpets the familiar earth. But there are
many grasses, from the smooth close-set herb of our lawns or the
sheep-nibbled downy greenness of mountain-pastures, to the forest-like
groves which sway in the torrid winds of the south. Of these alone
much might be written. I prefer, however, that name I have placed at
the head of this article--taken, if I remember rightly, from a poem by
the Gaelic mountain-poet, Duncan Ban Macintyre--and used in the sense
of the original. In this sense, the Clans of the Grass are not only
the grasses of the pasture, the sand-dune, the windy down, not only
the sorrel-red meadow-grass or the delicate quaking-grass, but all
the humbler greengrowth which covers the face of the earth. In this
company are the bee-loved clover, the trailing vetch, the yellow-sea
clover and the sea-pink; the vast tribe of the charlock or wild
mustard which on showery days sometimes lights up field or hillmeadow
with yellow flame so translucent that one thinks a sudden radiant
sunflood burns and abides there. In it too are all the slim peoples
of the reed and rush, by streams and pools and lochans: of the yellow
iris by the sea-loch and the tall flag by the mountain-tarn: the grey
thistle, the sweet-gale, and all the tribe of the bog-cotton or canna
(_ceann-bàn-a-mhonaidh_, the white head of the hillside, as we call it
in Gaelic), those lovers of the wilderness and boggy places. With these
is the bindweed that with the salt bent holds the loose shores. With
these are all the shadow-loving clans of the fern, from the bracken,
whose April-green lightens the glens and whose autumnal bronze and dull
gold make the hillsides so resplendent, to the stonewort on the dykes,
the lady-fern in the birch-woods, the maidenhair by springs and falls,
the hart’s-tongue in caverns, the Royal fern whose broad fronds are the
pride of heather-waste and morass. The mosses, too, are from this vast
clan of the earth-set, from the velvet-soft edging of the oak-roots or
the wandering greenness of the swamp to the ashy tresses which hang on
spruce or hemlock or the grey fringes of the rocks by northern seas.
And with them are the lichens, that beautiful secret company who love
the shadow-side of trees, and make stones like flowers, and transmute
the barrenness of rock and boulder with dyes of pale gold and blazing
orange, and umber rich as the brown hearts of tarns, and pearl-grey
delicate as a cushat’s breast, and saffron as yellow-green as the
sunset-light after the clearing of rains. To all these, indeed, should
be added the greater grasses which we know as wheat and oats, as rye
and maize. Thus do we come to ‘the waving hair of the ever-wheeling
earth,’ and behold the unresting Mother as in a vision, but with the
winds of space for ever blowing her waving tresses in a green gladness,
or in a shimmer of summer-gold, or in the bronze splendour of the
autumnal passage.
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 variety, here, moreover. The
first spring-grass, how welcome it is. What lovely delicacy of green.
It is difficult anywhere to match it. Perhaps the first greening of
the sallow, that lovely hair hung over ponds and streams or where
sloping lawns catch the wandering airs of the south: or the pale
green-flame of the awakening larch: or the tips of bursting hawthorn
in the hedgerows--perhaps, these are nearest to it in hue. But with
noonlight it may become almost the pale-yellow of sheltered primroses,
or yellow-green as the cowslip before its faint gold is minted, and
in the mellowing afternoon it may often be seen as illuminated (as
with hidden delicate flame) as the pale-emerald candelabra of the
hellebore. How different is the luxuriant grass in hollows and
combes and along watered meadows in June, often dark as pine-green
or as sunlit jade, and in shadowy places or in twilight sometimes
as lustrously sombre-green as the obsidian, that precious stone of
the Caucasus now no longer a rarity among us. How swiftly, too, that
changes after the heats of midsummer, often being threaded with grey
light before the dog-days are spent. Moreover, at any season there is a
difference between down-grass and mountain-grass, between sea-grass and
valley-grass, between moor-grass and wood-grass. It may be slight, and
not in kind but only in shadowy dissemblances of texture and hue; still
one may note the difference. More obvious, of course, is the difference
between, say, April-grass and the same grass when May or June suffuses
it with the red glow of the seeding sorrel, or between the sea-grass
that has had the salt wind upon it since its birth, the bent as it
is commonly called, and its brother among the scarps and cliff-edges
of the hills, so marvellously soft and hairlike for all that it is
not long since the snows have lifted or since sleet and hail have
harried the worn faces of boulder and crag. Or, again, between even
the most delicate wantonness of the seeding hay, fragrant with white
clover and purple vetch, and the light aerial breathfulness, frail
as thistledown, of the quaking-grass. How it loves the wood’s-edge,
this last, or sheltered places by the hedgerows, the dream-hollows of
sloping pastures, meadow-edges where the cow-parsley whitens like foam
and the meadowsweet floats creamwhite and the white campions hang in
clotted froth over the long surge of daisies: or, where, like sloops
of the nautilus on tropic seas, curved blossoms of the white wild-rose
motionlessly suspend or idly drift, hardly less frail less wantonly
errant than the white bloomy dust of the dandelion.
_Caran-cheann-air-chrith_, ‘little friend of the quaking-grass,’ is
one of the Gaelic names of the wagtail, perhaps given to it because
of a like tremulous movement, as though invisible wings of gossamer
shook ever in a secret wind. Or given to it, perhaps, because of a
legend which puts the common grass, the quaking-grass, the wagtail,
the cuckoo, the aspen, and the lichen in one traditional company. In
the Garden of Gethsemane, so runs the Gaelic folk-tale as I heard it
as a child, all Nature suddenly knew the Sorrow of Christ. The dew
whispered it: it was communicated in the dusk: in pale gold and shaken
silver it stole from moon and star into the green darkness of cypress
and cedar. The grass-blades put all their green lips into one breath,
and sighed _Peace, Brother!_ Christ smiled in His sorrow, and said,
_Peace to you for ever._ But here and there among the grasses, as
here and there among the trees, and as here and there among the husht
birds, were those who doubted, saying, ‘It is but a man who lies here.
His sorrow is not our sorrow.’ Christ looked at them, and they were
shaken with the grief of all grief and the sorrow of all sorrow. And
that is why to this day the quaking-grass and the aspen are forever
a-tremble, and why the wagtail has no rest but quivers along the earth
like a dancing shadow. But to those mosses of Gethsemane which did not
give out the sympathy of their kin among the roots of cedar and oak,
and to the cuckoo who rang from her nest a low chime of _All’s well!
All’s well!_ Christ’s sorrowful eyes when He rose at dawn could not be
endured. So the cuckoo rose and flew away across the Hill of Calvary,
ringing through the morning twilight the bells of sorrow, and from that
day was homeless and without power anywhere to make a home of her own.
As for the mosses that had refused love, they wandered away to desolate
places and hung out forlorn flags of orange-red and pale-yellow and
faded-silver along the grey encampments of the rocks.
Often I have thought of this when lying in the mountain-grass beside
one of those ancient lichened boulders which strew our hillsides.
The lichen is the least of the grasses--and let us use the term in
its poetic sense--but how lovely a thing it is; almost as lovely in
endless variety of form as the frost-flower. In a sense they are
strangely akin, these two; the frost-flower, which is the breath of
Beauty itself, lasting a briefer hour than the noontide dew, and the
moss-flower which the barren rock sustains through all the changing
seasons.
Who is that Artificer who has subtly and diversely hidden the secret
of rhythm in the lichen of the rock and in the rock’s heart itself; in
the frost-flower, so perfect in beauty that a sunbeam breathes it away;
in the falling star, a snowflake in the abyss, yet with the miraculous
curve in flight which the wave has had, which the bent poplar has had,
which the rainbow has had, since the world began? The grey immemorial
stone and the vanishing meteor are one. Both are the offspring of the
Eternal Passion, and it may be that between the æon of the one and
the less than a minute of the other there shall not, in the divine
reckoning, be more than the throb of a pulse. For who of us can
measure even Time, that the gnat measures as well as we, or the eagle,
or the ancient yew, or the mountain whose granite brows are white with
ages--much less Eternity, wherein Time is but a vanishing pulse?