A Summer Noon
The stir of the morning has given place to a silence broken only by the
shrill whir of the locust. The distant shore lines that ran clear and
white against the low background of green have become dim and
indistinct; all things are touched by a soft haze which changes the
sentiment of the landscape from movement to repose, from swift and
multitudinous activity to the hush of sleep. The intense blue of the
morning sky is dimmed and the great masses of trees are motionless.
The distant harvest fields where the rhythmic lines of the mowers have
moved alert and harmonious through the morning hours are deserted. On
earth silence and rest, and in the great arch of the sky a sea of light
so full and splendid that it seems almost to dim the fiery effluence of
the sun itself. In such an hour one stretches himself under the trees,
and in a moment the spell is on him, and he cares neither to think nor
act; he rejoices to lose himself in the universal repose with which
Nature refreshes herself. The heat of the day is at its height, but
for an hour the burden slips from the shoulders of care, and the rest
comes in which the gains of work are garnered.
The whir of the locust high overhead, by some earlier association,
always recalls that matchless singer, some of whose notes Nature has
never regained in all these later years. The whir of the cicada and
the white light on the remote country road are real to us today, though
one went silent and the other faded out of Sicilian skies two thousand
years and more ago, because both are preserved in the verse of
Theocritus. The poet was something more than a mere observer of
Nature, and the beautiful repose of his art more than the native grace
and ease of one to whom life meant nothing more strenuous than a dream
of a blue sea and fair sky. He had known the din of the crowded street
as well as the silence of the country road, the forms and shows of a
royal court as well as the simplicity and sincerity of tangled vines
and gnarled olives on the hillside. He had seen, with those eyes which
overlooked nothing, the pomps and vanities of power, the fret and fever
of ambition, the impotence and barrenness of much of that activity in
which multitudes of men spend their lives under the delusion that mere
stir and bustle mean progress and achievement. Out of Syracuse, with
its petty court about a petty tyrant, Theocritus had come back to the
sea and the sky and the hardy pastoral life with a joy which touches
some of his lines with penetrating tenderness. Better a thousand times
for him and for us the long, tranquil days under the pine and the olive
than a great position under Hiero's hand and the weary intrigue and
activity which made the melancholy semblance of a successful life for
men less wise and genuine. The lines which the hand of Theocritus has
left on the past are few and marvellously delicate, but they seem to
gain distinctness from the remorseless years that have almost
obliterated the features of the age in which he lived. It is better to
see clearly one or two things in life than to move confused and blinded
in the dust of an impotent activity; it is better to hear one or two
notes sung in the overshadowing trees than to spend one's years amid a
murmur in which nothing is distinctly audible. Theocritus, shunning
courts and cities, sought to assuage the pain of life at the heart of
Nature, and did not seek in vain. He gave himself calmly and sincerely
to the sweet and natural life which surrounded him, and in his tranquil
self-surrender he gained, unsuspecting, the immortality denied his
eager and restless cotemporaries [Transcriber's note: contemporaries?].
Life is so vast, so unspeakably rich, that to have reported accurately
one swift glimpse, or to have preserved the melody of one rarely heard
note, is to have mastered a part of the secret of the Immortals.
Struggle and anguish have their place in every genuine life, but they
are the stages through which it advances to a strength which is full of
repose. The bursting of the calyx announces the flower; but the beauty
of the perfect blossoming obliterated the very memory of its earlier
growth. The climb upward is often a long anguish, but the dust and
weariness are forgotten when once the eye rests on the vast outlook.
"On every height there lies repose" is the sublime declaration of one
who had looked into most things deeper than his fellows, and had
learned much of the profounder processes of life. Emerson long ago
noted that even in action the forms of the Greek heroes are always in
repose; the crudity of passion, the distorting agony of half-mastered
purpose, are lost in a self-forgetfulness which borrows from Olympus
something of the repose of the gods. The sublime calm which imparts to
great works of art a hint of eternity is born of complete mastery of
life; all the stages of evolution have been accomplished, the whole
movement of growth has been fulfilled, before the hand of art sets the
seal of perfection on the thing that is done. Shadow and light, heat
and cold, tempest and quiet days, have all wrought together before the
blooming of the flower which in its perfect grace and beauty gives no
hint of its troubled growth. As the consummation of all toil and
struggle and anguish, there comes at last that deep repose, born not of
idleness and indifference, but of the harmony of all the elements in
their last and finest form.
In the unbroken silence of the noon-tide such thoughts come unbidden
and almost unnoticed to one who surrenders himself to the hour and the
scene. Nature has her tempests, but her harvests are gathered amid the
calm of days that often seem filled with the peace of heaven, and the
mighty and irresistible movement of her life goes on in unbroken
silence. The deepest thoughts are always tranquillising, the greatest
minds are always full of calm, the richest lives have always at heart
an unshaken repose.