[Illustration]
There is always, I think, much more of sadness in the anticipation of
Winter days than we find that they at all deserved when they are once
fairly at home with us. The anticipation, the _transition_, is sad from
Autumn profusion to Winter bareness. The month that severs the two is
a month somewhat tinged with melancholy, and clad in a weeping robe of
fogs and mists. There is a certain chill and gloom in wandering about
the shrouded face of the so-lately rich Autumn fields,--
“When a blanket wraps the day,
When the rotten woodland drips,
And the leaf is stamped in clay,”--
there is something sad in passing through the sodden lanes, thickly
carpeted with flat damp leaves, and strewn with the bright sienna
chesnuts; here the gleaming nut, and there the three-fold shattered
husk, brown-green, with cream-white lining.
You may find a sort of pleasing melancholy, of tender romance, in
watching the first tints of Autumn stealing over the Summer, from the
very first, when
“The long-smouldering fire within the trees
Begins to blaze through vents,”
until,--tree by tree, wood by wood, landscape by landscape,--they stand
in their glory--
“The death-flushed trees, that, in the falling year,
As the Assyrian monarch, clothe themselves
In their most gorgeous pageantry to die.”
Then the first frosts, and the calm clear mornings, and the grey fresh
blue of the evenings, with their sprinkling of intensely piercingly
glittering stars. And then the deep spell upon the trees is broken, and
we stand and watch while, now in a shower and now singly,
“The calm leaves float
Each to his rest beneath their parent shade,”
and the year seems just passing away like a beautiful dissolving view.
There is also something to keep you up, something of excitement and
stir, and glow, in the brave October days, when a great wind comes
roaring and booming over the land, and you see the tall ash trees toss
up their wild arms in dismay, and a deep roar gathers in the elms, and
a far hissing in the pines, and from that beech avenue,
“The flying gold of the ruined woodlands
Drives through the air.”
You can walk out, and press your hat on to your head, and button
your coat, and labour up the rising downs, yielding no foot to the
blustering screaming wind; and a glow and exhilaration tingles in your
veins as you march on, with pace no whit slackened for all its vehement
opposition.
But November has come; and the calm quiet hectic of September and the
hale vigour of October have now passed away. The rain has sodden and
struck down leaf after leaf, heaping the roadside, until you might
count the leaves left upon the trees that edge the lanes. A sense of
bareness and desolation oppresses you, and an aspect of dreariness and
moist death has overspread the landscape. You walk into the garden:
the dahlias are blackened with the frosts of October; the pinched
geraniums, verbenas, heliotropes, lie wrecked on the beds; the few
straggling chrysanthemums and scattered Michaelmas daisies--these are
not enough to cheer you; for even these are drooping in the universal
damp, and strung with trembling glittering diamonds of sorrowful tears.
The dark sodden walnut-leaves thickly carpet the side paths, and the
most cheerful thing in them is here and there the black wet walnut
lying, with just a warm hint of the clean bright yellow shell within,
betrayed through a torn fibrous gap. Day after day the fog sleeps over
the land, and you see your breath in the morning in the cold damp
air. You are brought face to face--earth stripped of its poetry and
romance--face to face with Winter days.
[Illustration]
And their approach seems gloomy. The light, and warmth, and the glory
of the year have gone; but, as yet, the memory of them has not all
quite departed. There are still the gleeful leaves lying, poor dead
things, in the lanes; there are yet the unburied flowers, black on the
garden-beds; the air is tepid; the trees are not entirely bare; the
state is one of transition.
“The year’s in the wane,
There is nothing adorning,
The night has no eve,
And the day has no morning;--
Cold Winter gives warning.”
Yes, the approach of Winter days seems gloomy. We have more in our
thought the chill drear outside of Winter, than his warm comfortable
core, glowing as the heart of a burst pomegranate.
But November has now ended, and December has come. The early days of
this month seem stragglers from that which has just gone out, and the
same chill warm gloom prevails. There is a muggy closeness in the
air; everything feels damp to the touch, and an oppressive scent of
decay dwells in the gardens and the fields. You seem to see low fevers
brooding over the lanes and alleys of the city, and you apprehend that
“green Yule,” which “makes a fat kirkyard.” Your spirits, if your
health be such as that they are a little dependent on the weather,
seem drooping and languid and foggy too. And in this mood it is that
you determine after lunch to call for a friend, and take a walk for a
mile or two, with thick boots and trousers turned up, because of the
drenched roads and the sticky fields. And you warm into a better mood
with the walk and the talk, and make the mile or two five or six miles;
indeed the sun is setting, and a deepening dusk in the sky shows a
pale star here and there, while you are yet a mile from home. A sort
of clearness and freshness seems to have come into the air since you
started homewards; and you notice as you walk on, the frosty glitter
in the stars, and you perceive that the road is actually growing rough
and hard under your feet, and the road-side puddles are gathering a
lace-work at their edge.
“By the breath of God frost is given:
And the breadth of the waters is straitened.”
And so either “the hoary frost of heaven” falls upon the earth, making
a white feather of every straw, and a crisp fairy forest of the lawn,
and a fernery of the windows, and hanging gardens of the spider’s
webs, and a wondrous dreamland of the asparagus bed, a mist of white
feather-foliage, with a lovely scattering of red fruit glowing among
it here and there; or a black frost descends on the lands and waters,
holding them with a gripe that grows closer, closer, and stiffens with
more iron rigidity every day, until
“The waters are hid as with a stone,
And the face of the deep is frozen.”
And the blood tingles in the veins, and life and health come back with
sudden rush, and you leave who will to stay by the fire, while you
start forth with swinging skates to do the next best thing to flying;
having dined hastily at midday, so as to have a long evening.
[Illustration]
And one night you go to bed, leaving a yellow dun sky sleeping over
the hard fields. At a little before seven you rise, and drawing aside
the blind with something of a shiver and a yawn, rub your eyes with
amaze. In the half dark you seem to look out from your dim-lit room
upon one large Twelfthcake, with a dark figure here and there for an
ornament. And when you put out your candle, and draw up the blind,
on how strange a sight do you look! How changed the appearance of
everything since last night! What a heavy fall of snow there has been;
and how sudden, and how silent! Against the slate sky a few dark
flakes steal down, or a small drift dances, changing into a pearl-white
as they sink lower, and are seen against the black bare trees, or the
full evergreens. You are fascinated; you _must_ stand at the window
and watch. That araucaria--how _can_ its long dark arms hold such a
piled sheer height of snow? How deep and dazzling it lies upon the
window sill! what a broad sheet upon the roof of that barn! how of the
thinnest twigs of the nut trees and the acacias each sustains his piled
inch and-a-half in the complete stillness! how the laurels bend down
under great heavy loads of snow; and the erect holly shows a prickly
dark gleam, and a burning berry here and there! All the sad traces of
the dead Summer are buried, and the bustling birds chirp and huddle
upon the anew foliaged branches, raining down a miniature snow-storm
as they fidget about the trees. All the sodden leaves, and the black
flower-stalks, and the bare fields are hidden now, and Autumn and
Summer are buried; and the Winter days are come in earnest. Ah, yes,
the sadness was more in the transition, and now that that is over and
the change made, did you not discover that--
“Some beauty still was found; for, when the fogs had passed away,
The wide lands came glittering forward in a fresh and strange array;
Naked trees had got snow foliage, soft, and feathery, and bright,
And the earth looked dressed for heaven, in its spiritual white.
“Black and cold as iron armour lay the frozen lakes and streams;
Round about the fenny plashes shone the long and pointed gleams
Of the tall reeds, ice-encrusted; the old hollies, jewel-spread,
Warmed the white, marmoreal chillness with an ardency of red:
“Upon desolate morasses, stood the heron like a ghost,
Beneath the gliding shadows of the wild fowls’ noisy host;
And the bittern clamoured harshly from his nest among the sedge,
Where the indistinct, dull moss had blurred the rugged water’s
edge.”
But, O writer, your pen has wandered; and this mere description of
God’s snow and frost is mere secular writing. Dear Reader, let me
contradict you, and plead--“_It is not so_.” A careful loving observer
of God’s works, attains also the privilege of becoming a reader of
a second volume of God’s word. And if you would have for what I say
authority from the sacred volume, take it down and turn to the 104th
Psalm. You will find in that, God’s works abundantly brought in and
interwoven with God’s word, still further, as I may say, embellishing
and beautifying it; and illuminating the text with initial letters
and little gems of illustration. Here is a bird’s nest, you will
find, swung securely in the long flat arm of a cedar; here a breadth
of bright green grass, with cattle feeding upon it; here a tinkling
spring, trickling down the hill side, whilst, as it sleeps in the
valley, the beasts of the field gather about it, and the wild asses
quench their thirst. The birds chirp and sing among the branches, the
murmuring rain descends from the chambers of God upon the grateful
hills and the satisfied earth; the tender grapes appear, and the
“olive-hoary capes,” and the wide waving fields of the deep golden
grain. The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats, and the conies
stud the rocks here and there. There are moonlight scenes, and sunsets,
and an Eastern night, with its great luminous stars, and the deep roar
of the lion creeping under the shadow of those tall silent palms.
There is a field with labourers at work, coming out from their homes as
the sun rises, and the beasts of prey slink back to theirs.
And there are sea pieces too: we turn from the land to the hoary
wrinkled ocean, with its ships, and its monsters, and its innumerable
population, all gathering their meat from God. And in other psalms,
and in many another part of the Bible, we find God’s word studded with
illustrations from God’s works. In the 147th Psalm, for instance, there
is something to our present purpose:
“He sendeth forth His commandment upon earth:
His word runneth very swiftly.
He giveth snow like wool: He scattereth the hoarfrost like ashes.
He casteth forth His ice like morsels: who can stand before His
cold?”
Further, who will not recall our Saviour’s teaching, so interwoven with
pictures from the wonders of beauty and design which, the clue having
been once given, reveal God to us through Nature. “_Consider the lilies
of the field, how they grow._” “_Behold the fowls of the air._” Then
the corn-field, the vineyard, the fig-tree, the fall of the sparrows,
the red evening and morning sky,--through all these Christ teaches us.
And St. Paul, forthshadowing the resurrection body, what does he but
use the image of the seed sown in the plough-lands, and rising again
with the new and glorious body which God gives it, as it pleaseth Him?
Religion, in truth, is too much thought of as “a star that dwells
apart,” and is not one with our common life; not as the daisy by our
hedgerows, or the rose in our gardens, as well as the light in our sky.
It should not be a mere Sunday garb, to be wrapped up and put away in
a drawer till Sunday comes again; if we understand and use it aright,
it is our holiday dress, and our every-day dress too; and no need to
fear lest we should shabby it, or wear it out. The world may look on it
as an artificial restraint, a thing _to be put on_, and not our common
apparel; as a light which has to be lit after a great deal of fuss in
striking the match; or a moon only useful in the night of sorrow. But
we should learn to make it a light ever at hand, and ever in use; there
needs not that we should have to make a disturbance in order to procure
it at any moment:--
“But close to us it gleams,
Its soothing lustre streams
Around our Home’s green walls, and on our Churchway path.”
Only thoughts on Nature should really lead on to thoughts of God; else
we do but look at the type, but are not reading the book. And I must
here own to something of deeper meaning underlying these stray jottings
on Winter days. For it struck me that, taking the reader’s arm, and
walking out for a short stroll into the frosty air through the vista of
November, I might show, perchance, from one or two points of view, the
cheeriness and the calm, and the deep heart of peace, that underlies
all even of the sadnesses that God sends. There is a bitter kernel to
all the sorrows that we bring on ourselves--the kernel of remorse and
unavailing regret. But there is a sweet kernel, believe me, to all the
bitter-cased walnuts which fall, naturally, straight down from God’s
trees. There is use, yea, also, beauty, in His dying fields and His
shrouded earth; in His November, and in His Winter days.
Let me gather a thought here and there that seem to come up, like
Christmas roses, from the bare beds of Winter days.
[Illustration]
The life of man has its November time; a time of sheer, literal,
moist decay; no romantic flush of Autumn woods, freaking them with a
thousand fancies and poetic hues, and crowning death with an intense,
fascinating, dreamy glory. The wild abundant Spring blossoms are over
long ago; the achievements of Summer, sobered though they were, have
passed away, and the tinge of pleasant dreamy melancholy that touched
their first decay has died out; and the heart sinks as we look around
us.
“That time of life thou dost in him behold,
When yellow leaves, or few or none, do hang
Upon the boughs that shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”
The ageing man looks back upon his past life, and on all the works
that his hands have wrought, and on the labour that he has laboured
to do; and behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit, and there
was no profit under the sun. What we meant to be, and what we are!
The bright, soaring, heaven-adorned bubbles that gleamed about us,
and the little mess of soapsuds that are sinking into the ground here
and there! The crowd, the rush of emerald vivid buds that our boyhood
knew; and now the bare, poor black twigs and branches, that drip
above the yellow stained heaps below! Hopes, ambition, dreams, love,
friendships, aspirations, yearnings, plans, resolves, scattered and
lying about the lanes of our life, or here and there heaped in a mass
at some well-remembered turn or corner, dead, and sodden, and desolate
exceedingly.
“Oh! ’tis sad to lie and reckon
All the days of faded youth,
All the vows that we believed in,
All the words we spoke in truth.”
Well, and what then? Can there be a December to follow upon and
beautify those sad chilly hours? I think so. Sometimes it is just when
the leaves are all fallen, and the flowers all dead, and the fruits
only represented by a straggler lying here and there, and when the
bare boughs are strung with trembling tears that gleam with a dull
light in the heavy enfolding mist; sometimes it is even then that a
wondrous work is wrought. A pinching frost comes with, as it seems, the
finishing stroke, and the last sere leaf circles down, and even the
fading chrysanthemums blacken, and the little robin lies dead on the
iron border. A dim sky overglooms all, and you go your sad way from the
scene as night deepens over it. But God wakens you some morning, and
bids you look out of the dim-lit room in which your heart was shut;
and lo! a strange transformation! His consolations, and His teaching
of the deep meaning of things, have descended thick and abundant from
heaven, and even earth’s dull ruins and desolations are glorified and
transfigured by the beauty of that heavenly snow. You are content now
that the earthly foliage should have made way for and given place to
that unearthly glory which reclothes earth’s bare boughs; you can think
calmly, quietly, without any anguish, of those desolate leaves, and
stained flowers, and cold robin, that all sleep undisturbedly under the
snow. God’s snow, I think--the snow which He sends down upon hearts
desolate and deserted,
“That once were gay, and felt the Spring.”
God’s quiet snow, I think, that succeeds all the Spring and Summer
excitements, and ecstasies, and heats of life, is just that _peace of
God which passeth all understanding_ sent down to keep our heart and
mind, that its life be not destroyed nor its aspirations all cut off,
but that it may be folded over warm and safe until the Resurrection,
that Spring time, better than earth’s Springs, which do but reform
perishable buds and leaves; a Spring which shall know no November,
no Winter days; a Spring which shall no doubt revive and recover
every feeling, and thought, and love, and aspiration which was really
God-given and beautiful, and shall make those blighted hopes bright
with the blossom of unearthly beauty, and shall bend the bare boughs of
those unquiet inexpressible yearnings low towards Him with the abundant
fruit of satisfaction.
“Brighter, fairer far than living,
With no trace of change or stain,
Robed in everlasting beauty,
Shall we see them once again.”
I think the contemplation a little way off, of any sorrow or
bereavement, bears out what I have said concerning the _anticipation_
of Winter being really the worst and most cheerless time--a time when
only the chill, and the death, and the dreariness is in our thoughts,
and we do not suspect the strange beauties that will accompany it, nor
the warm glow that is hidden in its heart. We only see the trouble
coming, and we know not, until the time of need is even with us, of
the consolation, and the support, and the spiritual loveliness that
are coming too; coming with the silent step of the snow, or the unseen
breath of the frost, to adorn thoughts, and feelings, and character
with a fringe and foliage of heavenly beauty; coming with a glow of
consolation, like Christmas in the heart of Winter--the warm fire of
God’s love, which can keep out earth’s sharpest and most piercing cold.
So that when the Winter has really come, and we look out on the soft
snow of God’s peace, and creep closer to the fire of God’s love, we
find that even the sharpest Winter days are not so terrible as November
painted them; and, revolving and realising their beauty and their use,
we can enter into his feelings who said, “It is good for me that I have
been afflicted”; and say Amen with quiet grateful hearts to those once
inexplicable words, “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be
comforted.”
* * * * *
The thought of Winter days seems to lead us at once, by analogy, to the
Winter of Death drawing near any one of us, old men and maidens, young
men and children. And indeed this time, seen from the misty avenues of
November, is apt to seem chill and cold to the mind and heart. Still,
I am sure that death, since the Saviour died, is not a time of real
unlovely or uncomforted gloom to the obedient and faithful child of
God. Oh no! when that Winter has indeed come, such a one then perceives
and realises its Christmas heart of warm comfort, and its unearthly
frost work of strange sweet thoughts and teachings. To such a one, if
gloomy, it is only gloomy by anticipation, and while the traces of
earth’s Summers yet linger, and the tears and regrets of earth are yet
glittering on the empty trees, bare lands, and faded flowers; only
gloomy until God has quite weaned us, first by His chastenings and then
by His consolations.
How sad it is that, in our common ideas, and representations,
and modes of speech, Death, even the good man’s death--should be
overshadowed with such dismal gloom! I remember a curious proof of
this, if proof were needed.
In a small illustrated edition of Longfellow’s poems, the artist
has chosen for illustration those sweet verses, “The Reaper and the
Flowers.” You know them, of course, my reader, by heart. You remember
these graceful lines:--
“He gazed at the flowers with tearful eyes,
He kissed their drooping leaves;
It was for the Lord of Paradise
He bound them in his sheaves.
“‘My Lord hath need of these flow’rets gay,’
The Reaper said, and smiled;
‘Dear tokens of the earth are they,
Where He was once a Child.’”
And how do you think the artist has represented that gentle
Angel-Reaper? Actually as a hideous Skeleton with a lank scythe! So
ingrained is that ghastly and loathsome idea of death in the common
thought of men. Then think of all the impenetrable gloom with which we
surround death in this Christian England in this nineteenth century;
of the utter absence of hope or beauty (save for the glorious pæan of
the service) in our obsequies. Listen, as soon as the happy, hopeful
Christian has “fallen asleep,” to the manner in which we tell the news
to the family of our village or town. Drop, drop, like melted lead
falling, for a whole hour sometimes comes that dull monotony of gloom,
TOLL, TOLL, TOLL, till the heart dies down into depression for the day.
[Illustration]
Save that we know that that recurring note comes from the belfry of
the peaceful little church that presides hopefully and holily over
its gathering of sleepers--save for this, would there, I ask, be any
thought but of dreariness in that dull ceaseless repetition of one
desolate tone? Death is, indeed
always a grave and solemn thing, and it were well that a grave and
solemn voice should announce its presence to the clustered or the
scattered homes. But why change solemnity into despair? Why fill the
air with nought but heavy gloom for a whole hour or half-hour? I would
not say, in the words of Poe:--
“Avaunt! to-night my heart is light, no dirge will I upraise,
But waft the angel on her flight with a pæan of old days!
Let _no_ bell toll! lest her sweet soul, amid its hallowed mirth,
Should catch the note as it doth float up from the weeping earth.”
For there _must_ be sadness here, if there be joy where the spirit
has gone. Only let not the dark cloud be debarred from any the least
silver lining. Something gentle, tender, and sweet, in accordance, so
far as earth’s lamenting can accord, with the glory and rapture of the
released one, would surely be better for the living than that slow
prolonged numbering the beads of their own sorrow. _I_ would have the
bells rung, as for a wedding; only with a minute’s interval between
each note. So the joy and the sorrow would each claim its share.
The early Christians used to speak of and commemorate the day of death,
as “τὰ γενέθλια,” the birthday feast of the Dead. What a different way
of putting things from our compassionate mention--not of the surviving,
but of the dead. _Poor so-and-so! How sad!_--this, for the spirit, that
we feel a good hope, is in Paradise! How the having it put before you
in the just view--rather as an entering into true life, than a dying
from it, casts a glow on what most seem to regard as nought but gloom.
A most exquisite instance of such a beautiful putting of such a sharp
Winter day to even a bereaved father and mother, I find in one of
Archbishop Leighton’s heavenly letters. In what a different light must
their loss, surely, have appeared to them, after its perusal.
“Indeed,” he writes, “it was a sharp stroke of a pen, that told me
your pretty Johnny was dead: and I felt it truly more than, to my
remembrance, I did the death of any child in my lifetime. Sweet thing!
and is he so quickly _laid to sleep? Happy he!_ Though we shall have no
more the pleasure of his lisping and laughing, he shall have no more
the pain of crying, nor of being sick, nor of dying: and hath wholly
escaped the trouble of schooling, and all other sufferings of boys,
and the riper and deeper griefs of riper years, this poor life being
all along but a linked chain of many sorrows and many deaths. Tell my
dear sister she is now much more akin to the other world; and this will
quickly be passed to us all. _John is but gone an hour or two sooner to
bed, as children use to do, and we are undressing to follow._”