A Summer Morning
I do not understand how any one who has watched the breaking of a
summer day can question the noblest faiths of man. William Blake, with
that integrity of insight which is often the possession of the true
mystic, declared that when he was asked if he saw anything more in a
sunset than a round disk of fire, he could only answer that he saw an
innumerable company of the heavenly host crying "Holy, Holy, Holy Lord
God Almighty!" The birth of a day is a diviner miracle even than its
death. They were true poets who wrote the old Vedic hymns and sang
those wonderful adorations when the last stars were fading in the
splendour of the dawn. Beside the glory of the sun's announcement all
royal progresses are tawdry and mean; beside the beauty of the dawn,
slowly unveiling the day while the heavens wait in silent worship, all
poetry is idle and empty. It is the divinest of all the visible
processes of Nature, and the sublimest of all her marvellous symbolism.
On such a morning as this, twelve years ago, Amiel wrote in his diary:
"The whole atmosphere has a luminous serenity, a limpid clearness. The
islands are like swans swimming in a golden stream. Peace, splendour,
boundless space! . . . I long to catch the wild bird, happiness, and
tame it. These mornings impress me indescribably. They intoxicate me,
they carry me away. I feel beguiled out of myself, dissolved in
sunbeams, breezes, perfumes, and sudden impulses of joy. And yet all
the time I pine for I know not what intangible Eden." In these few
words this master of poetic meditation suggests without expressing the
indescribable impression which a summer carries into every sensitive
nature.
Last night the world was sorrowful, worn, and dulled; but lo! the new
day has but touched it and all the invisible choirs are heard again;
the old hope returns like a tide, and out of the unseen depths a new
life breaks soundless upon the unseen shores and sends its hidden
currents into every dried and empty channel and pool. The worn old
world has been created anew, and God has spoken again the word out of
which all living things grow. In the silence and peace and freshness
of this morning hour one feels the inspiration of nature as a direct
and personal gift; the inbreathing, which has renewed the beauty and
fertility about him, renews his spirit also. He responds to the fresh
and invigorating atmosphere with a soul sensitive with sudden return of
zest to every beautiful sight and sound. No longer an alien in this
world which has never known human care and regret, he enters by right
of citizenship into all its privileges of unwatched freedom and
unclouded serenity. One is not absorbed by the glory of the morning,
but set free by it. There are times when Nature permits no rivalry;
she claims every thought and gives herself to us only as we give
ourselves to her. She effaces us and takes complete possession of our
souls. Not so, however, does she usurp the throne of our own personal
life in those early hours when the sun, the master artist, whose touch
has coloured every leaf and tinted every flower, demands her adoration.
Then it is, perhaps, that she turns her thoughts from all lesser
companionships and, rapt in universal worship, suffers us to pass and
repass as unnoticed as the idlers in the cathedral by those who kneel
at the chancel rail.
I confess I never find myself quite unmoved in this sacred hour,
announced only by the stars veiling their faces and the birds breaking
the silence with their tumultuous song. The universal faith becomes
mine also, and from the common worship I am not debarred. My thought
rises whither the mists, parted from the unseen censers, are rising: I
feel within me the revival of aspirations and faiths that were fast
overclouding; the stir of old hopes is in my heart; the thrill of old
purposes is in my soul. Once more Nature is serving me in an hour of
need; serving me not by drawing me to herself, but by setting me free
from a world that was beginning to master and make me its slave.
Now all that insensibly growing servitude slips from me; once more I am
free and my own. The inexhaustible life that is behind all visible
things, constantly flowing in upon us when we keep the channels open,
recreates whatever was noblest and truest in me. With Nature, I
believe; and believing, I also share in the universal worship.
Emerson somewhere says, writing about the most difficult of Plato's
dialogues, that one must often wait long for the hour when one is
strong enough to grapple with and master it, but sooner or later the
fitting morning will come. It is the morning which gives us faith in
the most arduous achievements, and invigorates us to undertake them.
In the morning all things are possible because the heavens and the
earth are so visibly united in the fellowship of common life; the one
pouring down a measureless and penetrating tide of vitality, the other
eagerly, worshipfully receptive. Nature has no more inspiring truth
for us than this constant and complete enfolding of our life by a
higher and vaster life, this unbroken play of a diviner purpose and
force through us. Nothing is lost, nothing really dies; all things are
conserved by an energy which transforms, reorganises, and perpetuates
in new and finer forms all visible things. The silence of winter
counterfeits the repose of death, but it is not even a pause of life;
invisibly to us the great movement goes on in the earth under our feet.
While we watch by our household fires, the unseen architects are
planning the summer, and the sublime march of the stars is noiselessly
bringing back the bloom and the perfume that seem to have vanished
forever. Every morning restores something we thought lost, recalls
some charm that seemed to have escaped.
In all noble natures there is an ineradicable idealism which constantly
interprets life in its higher aspects. In the dust of the road the
mountains sometimes disappear from our vision, but we know that they
still loom in undiminished majesty against the horizon; the gods
sometimes hide themselves, but there is something within which affirms
that we shall again look on their serene faces, calm amid our
turbulence and unchanging amid our vicissitudes. It is this heavenly
inheritance of insight and faith which makes Nature so divinely
significant to us, and matches all its forms and phenomena with
spiritual realities not to be taken from us by time or change or by
that mysterious angel of the last great transformation which we call
death. The morning is always breaking over the low horizon lines of
some sea or continent; voices of birds are always "carolling against
the gates of day;" and so, through unbroken light and song, our life is
solemnly and sublimely moved onward to the dawn in which all the faint
stars of our hope shall melt into the eternal day.