Not excepting the falling stars--for they are far less sudden--there is
nothing in nature that so outstrips our unready eyes as the familiar
rain. The rods that thinly stripe our landscape, long shafts from the
clouds, if we had but agility to make the arrowy downward journey with
them by the glancing of our eyes, would be infinitely separate, units, an
innumerable flight of single things, and the simple movement of intricate
points.
The long stroke of the raindrop, which is the drop and its path at once,
being our impression of a shower, shows us how certainly our impression
is the effect of the lagging, and not of the haste, of our senses. What
we are apt to call our quick impression is rather our sensibly tardy,
unprepared, surprised, outrun, lightly bewildered sense of things that
flash and fall, wink, and are overpast and renewed, while the gentle eyes
of man hesitate and mingle the beginning with the close. These inexpert
eyes, delicately baffled, detain for an instant the image that puzzles
them, and so dally with the bright progress of a meteor, and part slowly
from the slender course of the already fallen raindrop, whose moments are
not theirs. There seems to be such a difference of instants as invests
all swift movement with mystery in man's eyes, and causes the past, a
moment old, to be written, vanishing, upon the skies.
The visible world is etched and engraved with the signs and records of
our halting apprehension; and the pause between the distant woodman's
stroke with the axe and its sound upon our ears is repeated in the
impressions of our clinging sight. The round wheel dazzles it, and the
stroke of the bird's wing shakes it off like a captivity evaded.
Everywhere the natural haste is impatient of these timid senses; and
their perception, outrun by the shower, shaken by the light, denied by
the shadow, eluded by the distance, makes the lingering picture that is
all our art. One of the most constant causes of all the mystery and
beauty of that art is surely not that we see by flashes, but that nature
flashes on our meditative eyes. There is no need for the impressionist
to make haste, nor would haste avail him, for mobile nature doubles upon
him, and plays with his delays the exquisite game of visibility.
Momently visible in a shower, invisible within the earth, the
ministration of water is so manifest in the coming rain-cloud that the
husbandman is allowed to see the rain of his own land, yet unclaimed in
the arms of the rainy wind. It is an eager lien that he binds the shower
withal, and the grasp of his anxiety is on the coming cloud. His sense
of property takes aim and reckons distance and speed, and even as he
shoots a little ahead of the equally uncertain ground-game, he knows
approximately how to hit the cloud of his possession. So much is the
rain bound to the earth that, unable to compel it, man has yet found a
way, by lying in wait, to put his price upon it. The exhaustible cloud
"outweeps its rain," and only the inexhaustible sun seems to repeat and
to enforce his cumulative fires upon every span of ground, innumerable.
The rain is wasted upon the sea, but only by a fantasy can the sun's
waste be made a reproach to the ocean, the desert, or the sealed-up
street. Rossetti's "vain virtues" are the virtues of the rain, falling
unfruitfully.
Baby of the cloud, rain is carried long enough within that troubled
breast to make all the multitude of days unlike each other. Rain, as the
end of the cloud, divides light and withholds it; in its flight warning
away the sun, and in its final fall dismissing shadow. It is a threat
and a reconciliation; it removes mountains compared with which the Alps
are hillocks, and makes a childlike peace between opposed heights and
battlements of heaven.