Eventide
When the shadows lengthen and the landscape becomes indistinct, the
common life of men seems to touch the life of Nature most closely and
sympathetically. The work of the day is accomplished; the sense of
things to be done loses its painful tension; the mind, freed from the
cares which engrossed it, opens unconsciously to the sights and sounds
of the quiet hour. The fields are given over to silence and the
gathering darkness; the roads cease to be thoroughfares of toil; and
over all things the peace of night settles like an unspoken
benediction. To the most preoccupied there comes a consciousness that
the world has changed, and that, while the old framework remains
intact, a strange and transforming beauty has touched and spiritualised
it. At eventide one feels the soul of Nature as at no other hour. Her
labours have ceased, her birds are silent; she, too, rests, and in
ceasing to do for us she gives us herself. One by one the silvery
points of light break out of the darkness overhead, and the faithful
stars look down on the little earth they have watched over these
countless years. The very names they bear recall the vanished races
who waited for their appearing and counted them friends. Now that the
lamps are lighted and the work of the day is done, is it strange that
the venerable mother, whose lullabies have soothed so many generations
into sleep, should herself appeal to us in some intimate and personal
way?
With the fading out of shore and sea and forest line something deeper
and more spiritual rises in the soul as the mists rise on the lowlands
and over the surface of the waters. We surrender ourselves to it
silently, reverently, and a change no less subtle and penetrating is
wrought in us. Our personal ambitions, the sharply defined aims of our
working hours, the very limitations of our individuality, are gone; we
lose ourselves in the larger life of which we are part. After the fret
of the day we surrender ourselves to universal life as the bather, worn
and spent, gives himself to the sea. There is no loss of personal
force, but for an hour the individual activity is blended with the
universal movement and the peace and quiet of infinity calm and restore
the soul. Meditation comes with eventide as naturally as action with
the morning; our soul opens to the soul of Nature, and we discover anew
that we are one. In the noblest passage in Latin poetry Lucretius
invokes the universal spirit of Nature, and identifies it with the
creative force which impels the stars and summons the flowers to strew
themselves in the path of the sun. There is nothing so refreshing, so
reinvigorating, as fresh contact with the fountain whence all visible
life flows, as a renewed sense of oneness with the mighty appearance of
things in which we live. Now that all outlines are softened, all
distinctive features are lost. Nature loses its materialism, and
becomes to our thought the vast, silent, unbroken flow of force which
the later science has substituted for an earlier and cruder conception.
And this invisible stream leads us back, as our thoughts unconsciously
follow it, to One whose thought it is and whose mind shares with our
mind something of the unsearchable mystery of its purpose and nature.
Some one has said that a man is great rather by reason of his
unconscious thought than by reason of his deliberate and self-directed
thinking. Released from meditation on definite and special themes, the
thought of a great man instinctively returns to the mystery of life.
No poet creates a Hamlet unless he has brooded long and almost
unconsciously on the deeper things that make up the inner life; such a
figure, forever externalising the profounder and more obscure phases of
being, is born of secret and habitual contact with the deepest
experiences and the most fundamental problems. The mind of a
Shakespeare must often, forsaking the busy world of actuality, meditate
in the twilight which seems to release the soul of things seen, and,
veiling the actual, reveal the realities of existence.
Revery becomes of the highest importance when it substitutes for
definite thinking that deep and silent meditation in which alone the
soul comes to know itself and pierces the wonderful movement of things
about it to its source and principle. One of Amiel's magical phrases
is that in which he describes revery as the Sunday of the soul. Toil
over, care banished, the world forgotten, one communes with that which
is eternal. In the long course of centuries the forests are as
short-lived as the flowers; all visible forms are but momentary
expressions of the creative force. In the work of the greatest mind
all spoken and written thoughts are but partial and passing utterances
of a life of whose volume and movement they afford only
half-comprehended hints. After a Shakespeare has written thirty
immortal plays he must still feel that what was deepest in him is
unuttered. There is that below all expression of life which remains
forever unspoken and unspeakable; it is ours, but we cannot share it
with others; we drop our plummets into its depths in vain. It is
deeper than our thought, and it is only at rare moments, when we
surrender ourselves to ourselves, that the sense of what it contains
and means fills us with a sudden and overpowering consciousness of
immortality. Out of this deeper life all great thoughts rise into
consciousness, losing much by imprisonment in any form of speech, but
still bringing with them indubitable evidence of their more than royal
birth. From time to time, like the elder race of prophets, they enter
into our speech and renew the fading sense of the divinity of life, and
so, through individual souls, the deeper truths are retold from
generation to generation.
As one meditates in this evening hour, the darkness has gathered over
the world and folded it out of sight. The few faint stars have become
a shining host, and the immeasurable heavens have substituted for the
near and familiar beauty of the earth their own sublime and awful
commingling of unsearchable darkness and unquenchable light. So in
every human life the near and the familiar is overarched by infinity
and eternity.