NATURE.
THE MINISTER’S WOOING.
[Sidenote: 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!
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
OLDTOWN FOLKS.
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 condescend to 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.
THE CHIMNEY CORNER.
[Sidenote: 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.
THE MAYFLOWER.
[Sidenote: Meditations of the oak.]
I sometimes think that leaves are the thoughts of trees, and that if
we only knew 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 dropped
over 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.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 all its
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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
AGNES OF SORRENTO.
[Sidenote: Natural and moral elevation.]
There is always something of elevation and purity that seems to come
over one from 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 its sharp,
remorseless touch, as if its very nature were so pitiless and acrid
that the slightest contact revealed it.
UNCLE TOM’S CABIN.
[Sidenote: 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! _Strive_ for
immortal glory!”
DRED.
[Sidenote: 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 the top 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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!”
PALMETTO LEAVES.
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 oleanders have 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
SUNNY MEMORIES OF FOREIGN LANDS.
[Sidenote: 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 we should 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 are they 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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?
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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
do _not_ see, 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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?
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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?
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 a _benedicite_ through the
leaves.
POGANUC PEOPLE.
[Sidenote: New England spring.]
But at last—at last—spring did come at Poganuc! This marvel and
mystery of the new creation _did_ finally 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 with their 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
LITTLE PUSSY WILLOW.
[Sidenote: 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 he _did_
manage 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, and froze them over with a slippery, shining crust, that
looked as if the earth was dressed for the winter in a silver coat of
mail.
QUEER LITTLE PEOPLE.
[Sidenote: 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.
MY WIFE AND I.
[Sidenote: 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.
RELIGIOUS POEMS.
[Sidenote: Summer studies.]
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.
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 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 no _time_ for 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’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?
Cease, cease to _think_, and be content to _be_;
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.
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.