[Illustration]
Ah! now I am seated as I love to be, the June blue over me, and the
sweet, warm, new-made hay underneath. On the shadow side of a great
haycock, here have I selected my seat, plunging down and feeling the
soft cushion give, until it has attained consistency enough to resist
me. I have been busy, very busy, all this week, and the week before
that, and indeed several weeks back. And I have earned, and mean
to indulge in, a quiet long afternoon, and perhaps evening, in the
hay-field. I have a book with me, but I do not pledge myself to read
much. I have not come out here to read; not to do much, indeed, but
just to sit and muse, nay, chiefly to enjoy the feeling of being able
to rest. To feel that there is, or shall be, so far as I can choose, no
call for the remainder of this day upon anxious heart and weary brain;
no parish troubles; no sick, whose silent cry in the distance forbids
the pastor to sit still; no sermon, no article, to think out or to
write; no letters to pour into that insatiable post-office,--the true
sieve of the Danaids; not even any gardening to do or to superintend;
no, nothing necessary but to sit on the side of a haycock “in the
leafy month of June.” We may go on and on in the round of every day’s
business, on and on, unpausing, till we drop: the mere energy of
spinning may keep us up, though perhaps on a weak and tottering peg;
and work begets work; and busy day will chase busy day like the sails
of a windmill; and we hardly dare stop, because we foreknow how we
shall then have a long bill to pay, all the arrears of those fatigues
and that weariness that we bade stand aside as we laboured on; and
we know that if we once stop to give them a hearing, it will be hard
work to set the heavy machinery going again. For myself, I often feel
that to go on working, is to be able to work; to pause is to collapse,
and to feel incapable. Still, in fact, we make life go farther by
careful trading, than by spending all our capital at once. And both
for purposes of devotional retirement and of necessary recreation, it
is well sometimes just “to sport our oak” (to speak in Oxford phrase)
upon the noisy and importunate throng of things clamorous to be done,
and yet which, if discharged, would but give place to as many more. I
could dizzy my brain with thoughts of business that I might do, and
want to do. But for some weeks I have worked on and worked on, hoping
to satisfy all claims; waiting for a pause, which never would come;
and now I will no longer wait for it, but make it. Away! crowding
calls, for this afternoon, for all the rest of this day. The wrestling,
restless, toiling, moiling, weary world is quite shut out from me
behind this mighty chain of haycocks. I hear the sharpening of scythes,
and their long sweep in the bending swathes; once or twice in the
afternoon a cuckoo sails with broad wing over me, and voice which
stammers now near the end of his monotonous but prized oration; there
is a scattered rain of larks’ songs falling all around; and, on a hedge
near by, the short plaintive cadence of the yellow-hammer’s few notes.
[Illustration]
Grass is always beautiful,--thus I am led to think as, leaning on one
arm, I inspect the material of my couch. Beautiful after the winter
lethargy, and when it grows lush and green, vividly green, and taller
and taller under the showers, at the roots of the pines that step
forward here and there from the shrubberies into the lawn. Beautiful
again, when the scythe and mowing-machine have destroyed _this_
beauty, and substituted that of the smooth, well-kept velvet sward.
Beautiful, growing in the meadows, and deepening for hay; a sweet
close under-growth of white or dull pink clover; of orange-flowered
trefoil; of purple self-heal; of bright yellow-rattle; of small red
orchis; of orchis pale lilac specked with dark; and, more desultory and
thinner, above these the tall grass and flower-stalks: “all grass of
silky feather”; bright rose ragged-robin; white ox-eye daisy; brimstone
toad-flax; tall buttercups; pale pink centaury; numberless varieties
of fringed flowers, all yellow; and bobbing myriads of the ribwort
plantain, to which we are all, when children, very Henry VIII.’s; tall
slight sorrel; tougher dock. Beautiful, when the scythe has laid all
this in broad, lowly lines upon the whole face of the field; and the
mowers advance yet steadily upon the long yielding ranks. Beautiful
when the green has turned grey, and the brighter colours of the flowers
are dull, the clover not yet brown, only faded, the yellow tassels
showing, as they droop, the paler under-wing of the closing flower,
the buttercups spoiled of their square varnished petals, and showing
only the green spiked ball, the miniature head of Gog or Magog’s mace.
Beautiful to lie in the grey mounds of the soft, fragrant, new-made
hay, dying, if this be to die, so graciously, and sweetly, and
blessingly; lovely in life, and sweet in death. Beautiful when even
this bloom-grey has gone, and we shake out from their close-pressed
sleep the loose masses of the yellow hay, and brown leaves and flowers,
all, however, still fragrant, and full of hints in Winter days, of the
warm Summer. Beautiful when the last cart is carried, and the rick is
being thatched, and a pale bright under-growth has given to the dry hot
field, in the parched Summer-time, something of a faint imitation of
the early green of Spring.
So I lean, listless, idle, and examine my couch. Much I find to examine
in it; besides the embalmed flowers, there is a small zoological
garden--brown ants climbing up the pole of an upright grass-stem;
leopard-spotted lady-birds; alligator grasshoppers; woolly-bear
caterpillars; bird-of-paradise butterflies. I am left alone with these,
and so can be quite quiet; for I am in the rear of the haymakers.
“All in a row
Advancing broad, or wheeling round the field,
While, as they rake the green-appearing ground,
And drive the dusky wave along the mead,
The russet haycock rises thick behind.”
And my couch is one of these same pale hills that they have done with.
My wife is away with the children: I shall not therefore run the
risk of being buried, with shouts, under the piled heaps of the hay.
My servant has gone out for a walk: I thus escape the apprehension of
seeing her advance into my field steering among the haycocks, and, with
hand shading her eyes, looking about all over its wide glare for me. I
can lean on this arm until it is tired, then change to the other, then
lie on my back and watch the fleecy blue, with handkerchief spread for
fear of insects; then turn over again, and resume my inspection of the
grass. I am thus particular in description, because I would fain carry
my hay-field into hot London. A few distinct details may help out many
a memory; and the clerk really in the baking, staring London street
may yet, if his imagination be my ally, lean back among the yielding
warm-breathed hay to muse with me upon the grass and its teachings.
[Illustration]
For it is, after all, impossible to be absolutely doing nothing. The
mind, that busy alchemist, works on and works on in the worn laboratory
of the body, and transmutes gold into earth, or earth into gold, as the
case may be, in its peculiar crucible. And so, since I cannot but muse
on the hay into which I am closely peering, I may as well also jot my
musings down.
* * * * *
Flesh, and grass: how natural the now common-place connection between
the short-lived beauty of the two! It is one of those commonplaces,
however, which new thoughts could not easily better. The hay-fields,
with their life and glee, and loveliness of flowers just now, and now
these faded mounds! The generations of men in the gaiety or toil of the
world, and then the churchyard with its “shadowed swells”! Half a year
for the one growth, and sometimes less, sometimes more, for the other;
but all lying in the bending swathes at last. Take the extreme case:
“All the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine
years.”
Was flesh like grass then? What! a thousand years akin to the life of a
few months? Yes, closely akin; banded together by the last words of the
life of both; for how ends the short history of the longest liver of
mortal men?
“----_and he died._”
Yea, the growth, the ripening was longer in progress, but the scythe
came at last:
“The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry?
All flesh is grass,--and all the goodliness thereof is as the
flower of the field;
The grass withereth, the flower fadeth.”
And again:
“Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble.
He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down:
He fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.”
And again:
“As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so
he flourisheth.
For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone;
And the place thereof shall know it no more.”
And again:
“In the morning they are like grass which groweth up;
In the morning it flourisheth and groweth up;
In the evening it is cut down, and withereth.”
Oh, faded couch on which I lean, here are witnesses enough of the
highest authority of all, to establish a brotherhood between us! I look
at these hands which can write and work, I look at these limbs which
can rise and go, I consider the brain which can busily toil:--and from
these I turn to regard the dry heap that once was living grass;--and
I think how slack, and void of energy, and lifeless will these also
lie, in the long swathes which ever and ever fall before the advancing
mower, Death.
“‘Consider well,’ the voice replied,
‘His face, that two hours since hath died;
Wilt thou find passion, pain, or pride?’”
No; each lies in that especial long line of mown grass that we call his
generation:
“Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now
perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any
thing that is done under the sun.”
Flesh, and grass: are they not akin? These ever-succeeding
generations;--how the grass still grows after every mowing.
“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh”;
--there is not a word of abiding at all, says Archbishop Leighton.
But, however, there is a notice of constant succession, and the grass
grows as fast as it is mown. Load after load is added to the store
of Eternity; but the mower Death knows no pause. Ever and ever the
tall grass and the sweet flowers bend before that industrious scythe.
Where is the glad growth of fifty years ago; and where the life that
preceded that; and so on, back to Adam? In long fallen ranks they lie,
generation parallel with generation, all across the wide field of the
world’s history. Flowers, and plain grass, and wholesome fodder, and
prickly thistles, and poison weeds, they bowed at the edge of the
scythe; so far they are equal:
“There is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to
the good and to the clean, and to the unclean; to him that
sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not; as is the good,
so is the sinner; and he that sweareth, as he that feareth an
oath. This is an evil among all things that are done under the
sun, that there is one event unto all.”
Yes, all lie in the swathes, and are equal there; the almost bitter
saying of the wise man, to whom sin had made even wisdom sadness, is
so far true. True while we consider the field after the scythe; true
while we look on Death, but not applying any longer when we imagine the
Resurrection. A very Life shall revive, or a very Death shall wither,
each stalk of the myriads that lie waiting in the field, each in the
place where it fell.
* * * * *
I cannot help being also reminded by this history of mowing and
growing, of the special field of each human life, with its ever
springing, ever falling hopes and dreams. One day it is a carpet of
brightness and glory; the next, the withered lines lie on the bare
field. Yet look closer, and you will find already the tender green
of a new growth appearing to clothe the scarred meadow. A constant
succession, ever mown and still growing; every year and often in
the year a fresh attire, however the heart, when that common-place
desolation was new to it, refused in dismay to believe in the
possibility of any further crops. Fond thing! even while it thus
protested, _the grass had already begun to grow_; and it was in vain
to try in sullenness or self-respect to check the smiling flowers that
_would_ crowd up over the ruin. Many a one of us can say, of some past
sorrow, that,
“When less keen it seemed to grow,
I was not pleased--I wished to go
Mourning adown this vale of woe,
For all my life uncomforted.”
It could not be, except in the case of a hypochondriac. In healthy
lands the growth cannot be checked.
“I thought that I should never more
Feel any pleasure near me glow”:
and again:
“I grudged myself the lightsome air,
That makes men cheerful unaware;
When comfort came, I did not care
To take it in, to feel it stir.”
After that devastating flood you did not care to take in the dove with
the olive-leaf; you had rather sit moodily alone. Very well for a time,
but “will you nill you,” the second crop begins to cover the scars. And
soon you can tranquilly and thankfully say,
“But I have learned, though this I had,
’Tis sometimes natural to be glad,
And no man can be always sad,
Unless he wills to have it so.”
For it is an ordinance of God that the grass shall keep on growing.
* * * * *
But, of course, especially, and above all, the analogy before indicated
is that which connects this brief life of ours with the grass of the
field. We are, above all, alike in our _frailty and evanescence_.
“All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the
flower of grass.
The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away.”
How exquisitely Archbishop Leighton comments upon this text! An idea
so anciently true as almost to have become, in our ordinary speech,
common-place, blossoms into new beauty under his holy thought. So,
however, do what seem to ordinary thinkers bare rods in the teaching
of the Bible, yet bloom and bear fruit abundantly in the shrine of
a congenial heart. “All flesh is as grass.” Yes, he expands it, and
“grass hath its root in the earth, and is fed by the moisture of it
for awhile; but, besides that, it is under the hazard of such weather
as favours it not, or of the scythe that cuts it down, give it all
the forbearance that may be, let it be free from both those, yet how
quickly will it wither of itself! Set aside those many accidents, the
smallest of which is able to destroy our natural life, the diseases of
our own bodies and outward violences, and casualties that cut down many
in their greenness, in the flower of their youth, the utmost term is
not long; in the course of nature it will wither. Our life indeed is
a lighted torch, either blown out by some stroke or some wind; or, if
spared, yet within awhile it burns away, and will die out of itself.”
A new idea is here given us as to the mowing. This poet makes the
scythe to be the sweeping of disease or accident or violence that
every day prostrate their thousands; accidents or violence represent
the mowing; and there is, beside these, the withering too. As though a
field of deep grass should be left unmown; yet how soon then would its
life and light and laughter depart, and a skeleton array of thin, sere,
shivering yellow stalks meet the October winds. Even if unmown, we must
wither, and either will at times seem saddest to us, until we remember
that this field is but the field of Time, and that the eternal God is
ordering all.
But Leighton proceeds to develope another exquisite thought, which to
many would lie hidden and unperceived in the short and simple word of
God--“All flesh is as grass, _and all the glory of man as the flower of
grass_.” On the hint of this latter member of the sentence he speaks:
“There is indeed a great deal of seeming difference betwixt the outward
conditions of life amongst men. Shall the rich and honourable and
beautiful and healthful go in together, under the same name, with the
baser and unhappier part, the poor, wretched sort of the world, who
seem to be born for nothing but sufferings and miseries? At least,
hath the wise no advantage beyond the fools? Is all grass? Make you
no distinction? No; _all is grass_, or if you will have some other
name, be it so; once this is true, that all flesh is grass; and if
that glory which shines so much in your eyes must have a difference,
then this is all it can have--it is but the flower of that same grass;
somewhat above the common grass in gayness, a little comelier and
better apparelled than it, but partaker of its frail and fading nature;
it hath no privilege nor immunity that way; yea, of the two, is the
less durable, and usually shorter lived; at the best, it decays with
it--_The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away_.”
Yes, grass and its flower--loveliness, might, wisdom: Helen of Troy
shared the fate of the meanest weed; Julius Cæsar and Napoleon lie
with the rank and file; Solomon in his glorious wisdom is at last now
equalled with those lilies of the field, that grass which to-day is,
and to-morrow is cast into the oven. We in the lower rank, we mere
grass of the field, look at and admire the glory above us, the flower
of the grass, the choice gifts of intellect, of power, of beauty:
but even as we gaze, and before the scythe can come, or the sun can
wither it, we miss it--“The flower thereof fadeth, and the grace of the
fashion of it perisheth”:
“The wind passeth over it, and it is gone.
And the place thereof shall know it no more.”
“The instances are not few, of those who have on a sudden fallen from
the top of honour into the foulest disgraces, not by degrees coming
down the stair they went up, but tumbled down headlong. And the most
vigorous beauty and strength of body, how doth a few days’ sickness,
or, if it escape that, a few years’ time, blast that flower!”
And, sadder still, we must feel it to be, the ornaments of the mind are
as short-lived; and we watch, with the keenest regret, great intellects
quenched by decay or death, and minds that are the most stored with
knowledge and learning cut off in a day.
“Yea, those higher advantages which have somewhat both of truer and
more lasting beauty in them, the endowments of wit, and learning, and
eloquence, yea, and of moral goodness and virtue, yet they cannot rise
above this world, they are still, in all their glory, but the _flower
of grass_; their root is in the earth. When men have endured the toil
of study night and day, it is but a small parcel of knowledge they can
attend to, and they are forced to lie down in the dust in the midst of
their pursuit of it; that head that lodges most sciences shall within
a while be disfurnished of them all; and the tongue that speaks most
languages be silenced.”
[Illustration]
Yes, and again I look at the jumble of common grass and flower of
grass, and bright blossoms all withered, in which I am reclining,
and think how our bright days and our commonplace days, our
ordinary life and our pageants, fade into dulness even as we live
on, and are all swept down at last, as it seems to a superficial
thinker, into one common oblivion by Death. “What is become of all
the pompous solemnities of kings and princes at their births and
marriages, coronations and triumphs? They are now as a dream.” And
so with our first flushes of success, our earliest tastes of fame,
our new ecstasies of love, our wonders and admirations when life was
young--where are they very soon? Lying in the mown ranks, void of their
living movement and vivid lustre; numbered with the heap of every-day
events and emotions; still distinguished from these, still marked as
flowers, but the glory of them dried out under the air of use and the
sun of experience. Precious they are still, and dear, but the dreams of
youth are not to Age what Youth imagined them; the hay is valuable and
sweet, but it is not that field which the least air could stir into a
sea of silky light and shade, and a tossing of myriad colours. It was
the Flower of grass, and it cannot be, on earth, but that “_the grass
withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away_.”
“Would we consider this, in the midst of those varieties that toss our
light minds to and fro, it would give us wiser thoughts, and ballast
our hearts; make them more solid and stedfast in those spiritual
endeavours which concern a durable condition, a being that abides for
ever; in comparison of which the longest term of natural life is less
than a moment, and the happiest estate is but a heap of miseries. Were
all of us more constantly prosperous than any one of us is, yet that
one thing were enough to cry down the price we put upon this life, that
it continues not. As he answered to one who had a mind to flatter him
in the midst of a pompous triumph, by saying, What is wanting here?
_Continuance_, said he.”
Yes, this is the moral of it all, “_we have no abiding city_.” What
then? “_But we seek one to come._” And St. Peter, if he talk, it might
seem mournfully, of the fading and dying growth from all earth’s
sowings, is not really trying to sadden, but rather to cheer us. For he
has been telling but just now of incorruptible seed; and he sums up the
teaching of the fading grass and its withering glory, with these words
of quietness and confidence,
“But the Word of the Lord endureth for ever.”
And this is always the distinction between the Worldling’s or the
Sentimentalist’s cry of the vanity of human life and of its glory of
hopes and loves and ambitions; and the Inspired declarations of this
vanity. In the former it is but a wind which comes with a blight and
passes away with a wail. In the latter, some better thing is ever held
before us, to which our heart’s yearning tendrils, gently disentangled
from their withering support, may safely cling: and if the vanities and
emptiness of Time are clearly set before us, we are offered instead the
realities and the fulness of Eternity.
“The world passeth away, and the lust thereof”;
yes; but
“He that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.”
I have mused away my afternoon, and the sun is near the hills, and
this day is falling beneath the scythe, and will soon lie behind me
in the swathe, as I advance upon the yet unmown field or strip of my
life. There are in this flowers, and nettles, and thistles, no doubt,
and much common undistinguishable grass. Ah, may it, in the end, be
found to be, upon the whole, good and useful hay! Yes; but here the
life of man outruns the analogy, for the days that are passed are not
done with: they remain dried and stored, either to rise and revive
their flowers in far more than their pristine beauty; or to be burnt
as rubbish and waste. Nothing that God wrought of good or beautiful
in us here, but will, fresher and fairer than at first, remain with
us hereafter. And there is One for whose sake even the nettles and
thistles that mixed with the useful grass and fair flowers, shall have
vanished from those hearts that loved Him, and be counted as though
they had never been.
Let me lie back for a little while, as the sun sets, and a cool air
fans me, to quiet my heart with this happy trust and confidence.
[Illustration]