"Die Natur ist die Bewegung."
Who are these who follow us softly over the moor in the autumn eve? Their
wings brush and rustle in the fir-boughs, and they whisper before us and
behind, as if they called gently to each other, like birds flocking
homeward to their nests.
The woodpecker on the pine-stems knows them, and laughs aloud for joy as
they pass. The rooks above the pasture know them, and wheel round and
tumble in their play. The brown leaves on the oak trees know them, and
flutter faintly, and beckon as they pass. And in the chattering of the
dry leaves there is a meaning, and a cry of weary things which long for
rest.
"Take us home, take us home, you soft air-mothers, now our fathers the
sunbeams are grown dull. Our green summer beauty is all draggled, and
our faces are grown wan and wan; and the buds, the children whom we
nourished, thrust us off, ungrateful, from our seats. Waft us down, you
soft air-mothers, upon your wings to the quiet earth, that we may go to
our home, as all things go, and become air and sunlight once again."
And the bold young fir-seeds know them, and rattle impatient in their
cones. "Blow stronger, blow fiercer, slow air-mothers, and shake us from
our prisons of dead wood, that we may fly and spin away north-eastward,
each on his horny wing. Help us but to touch the moorland yonder, and we
will take good care of ourselves henceforth; we will dive like arrows
through the heather, and drive our sharp beaks into the soil, and rise
again as green trees toward the sunlight, and spread out lusty boughs."
They never think, bold fools, of what is coming, to bring them low in the
midst of their pride; of the reckless axe which will fell them, and the
saw which will shape them into logs; and the trains which will roar and
rattle over them, as they lie buried in the gravel of the way, till they
are ground and rotted into powder, and dug up and flung upon the fire,
that they too may return home, like all things, and become air and
sunlight once again.
And the air-mothers hear their prayers, and do their bidding: but
faintly; for they themselves are tired and sad.
Tired and sad are the air-mothers, and their garments rent and wan. Look
at them as they stream over the black forest, before the dim
south-western sun; long lines and wreaths of melancholy grey, stained
with dull yellow or dead dun. They have come far across the seas, and
done many a wild deed upon their way; and now that they have reached the
land, like shipwrecked sailors, they will lie down and weep till they can
weep no more.
Ah, how different were those soft air-mothers when, invisible to mortal
eyes, they started on their long sky-journey, five thousand miles across
the sea! Out of the blazing caldron which lies between the two New
Worlds, they leapt up when the great sun called them, in whirls and
spouts of clear hot steam; and rushed of their own passion to the
northward, while the whirling earth-ball whirled them east. So north-
eastward they rushed aloft, across the gay West Indian isles, leaving
below the glitter of the flying-fish, and the sidelong eyes of cruel
sharks; above the cane-fields and the plaintain-gardens, and the cocoa-
groves which fringe the shores; above the rocks which throbbed with
earthquakes, and the peaks of old volcanoes, cinder-strewn; while, far
beneath, the ghosts of their dead sisters hurried home upon the north-
east breeze.
Wild deeds they did as they rushed onward, and struggled and fought among
themselves, up and down, and round and backward, in the fury of their
blind hot youth. They heeded not the tree as they snapped it, nor the
ship as they whelmed it in the waves; nor the cry of the sinking sailor,
nor the need of his little ones on shore; hasty and selfish even as
children, and, like children, tamed by their own rage. For they tired
themselves by struggling with each other, and by tearing the heavy water
into waves; and their wings grew clogged with sea-spray, and soaked more
and more with steam. But at last the sea grew cold beneath them, and
their clear steam shrank to mist; and they saw themselves and each other
wrapped in dull rain-laden clouds. They then drew their white
cloud-garments round them, and veiled themselves for very shame; and
said, "We have been wild and wayward: and, alas! our pure bright youth is
gone. But we will do one good deed yet ere we die, and so we shall not
have lived in vain. We will glide onward to the land, and weep there;
and refresh all things with soft warm rain; and make the grass grow, the
buds burst; quench the thirst of man and beast, and wash the soiled world
clean."
So they are wandering past us, the air-mothers, to weep the leaves into
their graves; to weep the seeds into their seed-beds, and weep the soil
into the plains; to get the rich earth ready for the winter, and then
creep northward to the ice-world, and there die.
Weary, and still more weary, slowly, and more slowly still, they will
journey on far northward, across fast-chilling seas. For a doom is laid
upon them, never to be still again, till they rest at the North Pole
itself, the still axle of the spinning world; and sink in death around
it, and become white snow-clad ghosts.
But will they live again, those chilled air-mothers? Yes, they must live
again. For all things move for ever; and not even ghosts can rest. So
the corpses of their sisters, piling on them from above, press them
outward, press them southward toward the sun once more; across the floes
and round the icebergs, weeping tears of snow and sleet, while men hate
their wild harsh voices, and shrink before their bitter breath. They
know not that the cold bleak snow-storms, as they hurtle from the black
north-east, bear back the ghosts of the soft air-mothers, as penitents,
to their father, the great sun.
But as they fly southwards, warm life thrills them, and they drop their
loads of sleet and snow; and meet their young live sisters from the
south, and greet them with flash and thunder-peal. And, please God,
before many weeks are over, as we run Westward Ho, we shall overtake the
ghosts of these air-mothers, hurrying back toward their father, the great
sun. Fresh and bright under the fresh bright heaven, they will race with
us toward our home, to gain new heat, new life, new power, and set forth
about their work once more. Men call them the south-west wind, those air-
mothers; and their ghosts the north-east trade; and value them, and
rightly, because they bear the traders out and home across the sea. But
wise men, and little children, should look on them with more seeing eyes;
and say, "May not these winds be living creatures? They, too, are
thoughts of God, to whom all live."
For is not our life like their life? Do we not come and go as they? Out
of God's boundless bosom, the fount of life, we came; through selfish,
stormy youth, and contrite tears--just not too late; through manhood not
altogether useless; through slow and chill old age, we return from Whence
we came; to the Bosom of God once more--to go forth again, it may be,
with fresh knowledge, and fresh powers, to nobler work. Amen.
* * * * *
Such was the prophecy which I learnt, or seemed to learn, from the south-
western wind off the Atlantic, on a certain delectable evening. And it
was fulfilled at night, as far as the gentle air-mothers could fulfil it,
for foolish man.
"There was a roaring in the woods all night;
The rain came heavily and fell in floods;
But now the sun is rising calm and bright,
The birds are singing in the distant woods;
Over his own sweet voice the stock-dove broods,
The jay makes answer as the magpie chatters,
And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters"
But was I a gloomy and distempered man, if, upon such a morn as that, I
stood on the little bridge across a certain brook, and watched the water
run, with something of a sigh? Or if, when the schoolboy beside me
lamented that the floods would surely be out, and his day's fishing
spoiled, I said to him--"Ah, my boy, that is a little matter. Look at
what you are seeing now, and understand what barbarism and waste mean.
Look at all that beautiful water which God has sent us hither off the
Atlantic, without trouble or expense to us. Thousands, and tens of
thousands, of gallons will run under this bridge to-day; and what shall
we do with it? Nothing. And yet: think only of the mills which that
water would have turned. Think how it might have kept up health and
cleanliness in poor creatures packed away in the back streets of the
nearest town, or even in London itself. Think even how country folk, in
many parts of England, in three months' time, may be crying out for rain,
and afraid of short crops, and fever, and scarlatina, and cattle-plague,
for want of the very water which we are now letting run back, wasted,
into the sea from whence it came. And yet we call ourselves a civilised
people."
It is not wise, I know, to preach to boys. And yet, sometimes, a man
must speak his heart; even, like Midas' slave, to the reeds by the river
side. And I had so often, fishing up and down full many a stream,
whispered my story to those same river-reeds; and told them that my Lord
the Sovereign Demos had, like old Midas, asses' ears in spite of all his
gold, that I thought I might for once tell it the boy likewise, in hope
that he might help his generation to mend that which my own generation
does not seem like to mend.
I might have said more to him: but did not. For it is not well to
destroy too early the child's illusion, that people must be wise because
they are grown up, and have votes, and rule--or think they rule--the
world. The child will find out how true that is soon enough for himself.
If the truth be forced on him by the hot words of those with whom he
lives, it is apt to breed in him that contempt, stormful and therefore
barren, which makes revolutions; and not that pity, calm and therefore
helpful, which makes reforms.