The Open Fields
One of the sights upon which my eyes rest oftenest and with deepest
content is a broad sweep of meadow slowly climbing the western sky
until it pauses at the edge of a noble piece of woodland. It is a
playground of wind and flowers and waving grasses. There are, indeed,
days when it lies cold and sad under inhospitable skies, but for the
most part the heavens are in league with cloud and sun to protect its
charm against all comers. When the turf is fresh, all the promise of
summer is in its tender green; a little later, and it is sown thick
with daisies and buttercups; and as the breeze plays upon it these
frolicsome flowers, which have known no human tending, seem to chase
each other in endless races over the whole expanse. I have seen them
run breathlessly up the long slope, and then suddenly turn and rush
pell-mell down again. If the wind had only stopped for a moment its
endless gossip with the leaves, I am sure I should have heard the
gleeful shouts, the sportive cries, of these vagrant flowers whose
spell is rewoven over every generation of children, and whose unstudied
beauty and joy recall, with every summer, some of the clews which most
of us have lost in our journey through life. Even as I write, I see
the white and yellow heads tossing to and fro in a mood of free and
buoyant being, which has for me, face to face with the problems of
living, an unspeakable pathos.
What a depth of tender colour fills the arch of heaven as it bends over
this playground of the blooming and beauty-laden forces of nature! The
great summer clouds, shaping their courses to invisible harbours across
the trackless aerial sea, love to drop anchor here and slowly trail
their mighty shadows, vainly groping for something that shall make them
fast. The winds, that have come roaring through the woodlands, subdue
their harsh voices and linger long in their journey across this sunny
expanse. It is true, they sing no lullabies as in the hollow under the
hill where they themselves often fall asleep, but the music to which
they move has a magical cadence of joy in it, and sets our thought to
the dancing mood of the flowers.
Sometimes, on quiet afternoons, when the great world of work has
somehow seemed to drop its burdens into space, and carries nothing but
rest and quietude along its journey under the summer sky, I have seen a
pageant in the open fields that has made me doubt whether a dream had
not taken me unawares. I have seen the first sweet flowers of spring
rise softly out of the grass where they had been hiding and call gently
to each other, as if afraid that a single loud word would dissolve the
charm of sun and warm breeze for which they had waited so long. After
their dreamless sleep of months, these beautiful children of Mother
Earth seemed almost afraid to break the stillness from which they had
come, and strayed about noiselessly, with subdued and lovely mien,
exhaling a perfume as delicate as themselves. Then, with a rush and
shout, the summer flowers suddenly burst upon the scene, overflowing
with life and merriment; in lawless troops they ran hither and thither,
flinging echoes of their laughter over the whole country-side, and soon
overshadowing entirely their older and more sensitive fellows; these,
indeed, soon vanish altogether, as if lonely and out of place under the
broad glare and high colours of mid-summer. And now for weeks together
the game went on without pause or break; the revelry grew fast and
furious, until one suspected that some night the Bacchic throng had
passed that way and left their mood of wild and lawless frolic behind.
At last a softer aspect spread itself over the glowing sky and earth.
The nights grew vocal with the invisible chorus of insect life; there
was a mellow splendour in the moonlight, which touched the distant
hills and wide-spreading waters with a pathetic prophecy of change.
And now, ripe, serene, and rich with the accumulated beauty of the
summer, the autumn flowers appeared. Their movement was like the
stately dances of olden times; youth and its overflow were gone
forever; but in the hour of maturity there remained a noble beauty,
which touched all imaginations and communicated to all visible things a
splendour of which the most radiant hours of early summer had been only
faintly prophetic. In the calm of these golden days the autumn flowers
reigned with a more than regal state, and when the first cold breath of
winter touched them, they fell from their great estate silently and
royally as if their fate were matched to their rank. And now the
fields were bare once more.
From such a dream as this I often awake joyfully to find the drama
still in its first act, and to feel still before me the ever-deepening
interest and ever-widening beauty of the miracle play to which Nature
annually bids us welcome. Across this noble playground, with its sweep
of landscape and its arch of sky, I often wander with no companions but
the flowers, and with no desire for other fellowship. Here, as in more
secluded and quiet places. Nature confides to those who love her some
deep and precious truths never to be put into words, but ever after to
rise at times over the horizon of thought like vagrant ships that come
and go against the distant sea line, or like clouds that pass along the
remotest circle of the sky as it sleeps upon the hills. The essence of
play is the unconscious overflow of life that seeks escape in perfect
self-forgetfulness. There is no effort in it, no whip of the will
driving the unwilling energies to an activity from which they shrink;
one plays as the bird sings and the brook runs and the sun shines--not
with conscious purpose, but from the simple overflow. In this sense
Nature never works, she is always at play. In perfect unconsciousness,
without friction or effort, her mightiest movements are made and her
sublimest tasks accomplished. Throughout the whole range of her
activity one never comes upon any trace of effort, any sign of
weariness; one is always impressed--as Ruskin said long ago of works of
genius--that he is standing in the presence, not of a great effort, but
of a great power; that what has been done is only a single
manifestation of the play of an inexhaustible force. There is
somewhere in the universe an infinite fountain of life and beauty which
overflows and floods all worlds with divine energy and loveliness.
When the tide recedes it pauses but a moment, and then the music of its
returning waves is heard along all shores, and its shining edges move
irresistibly on until they have bathed the roots of the solitary flower
on the highest Alp.
It is this divine method of growth which Nature opposes to our
mechanisms; it is this inexhaustible life, overflowing in
unconsciousness and boundless fulness, that she forever reveals. The
truth which underlies these two great facts needs no application to
human life. Blessed, indeed, are they who live in it, and have caught
from it something of the joy, the health, and the perennial beauty of
Nature.