Here on the bench beside me is a basketful of plants, not garden ones by
any means, but weeds, mere ugly weeds, detested, and detestable, which,
having pulled up, I was about to throw away. And, sitting down for a
moment before doing so, I chanced to turn over two or three of them in
idle mood, and in so doing have been captured unawares, as I have often
been before, by the wonder, the mystery, of those ordinary processes of
nature, which we all of us know so remarkably well, and which we
certainly as a rule take such uncommonly little heed of.
Matthew Arnold has somewhere counselled us to let our minds dwell upon
that great and inexhaustible word “Life,” till we learn to enter into
its meaning. It was a critic’s and a poet’s counsel, but it might still
more appropriately have been a naturalist’s or a botanist’s. Life is
indeed one of the unescapable mysteries, a mystery that expands and
grows as we consider it, even as the hosts of heaven seem to grow and
multiply as they recede before our straining gaze. For, if we even put
aside the more active animal world, and look merely at the comparatively
placid vegetable one, is it possible to think of it for a moment without
being overwhelmed, as it were stunned, by the vastness of its effects;
by the complexity of its untiring energy? To take only one of the
results of that energy. It is the plants of the world, especially those
which we are in the habit of calling its weeds, which constitute its
great restraining forces. The operations of inorganic nature tend for
the most part towards obliteration; towards the rubbing down of
landmarks, towards the effacing of all individuality in the landscape.
Water, tumbling as snow, hardens into ice, and rasps away continually at
the surfaces of the mountains. Rivers scrape off, and carry away with
them, every particle of earth that they meet with on their journey to
the sea. As for the sea, we know that its one object ever since it came
into existence has been, day by day, and at each returning tide, to
encroach upon, and devour more and more of the heritage of its brother
the earth. Seeing that the land we live on occupies only about a third
part of the superficies of the globe, it follows that the whole of what
is now dry land could easily be disposed of below the water; indeed it
has been ascertained that were it thus neatly tucked and tidied away,
the level of the ocean would be only altered by less than a hundred
feet. It is due mainly to the untiring vigour, to the extraordinary
binding power of plants, that this consummation has been averted. Their
office has been to hinder a tendency which, even if it had not ended in
the submergence of the whole earth, would at least have washed and pared
away its irregularities to one deadly monotonous level. Trees and bushes
do much in this direction, but it is the little clinging weeds, which as
gardeners we detest, and would so gladly annihilate: these
crowfoots--why not, by the way, crow_feet_?--with their crowding roots;
these knotgrasses, these clinging bind-weeds,--it is such as they,
backed by sea-spurreys, and bents, and by reeds and rushes innumerable,
that do more to keep the waters of the globe in order, and to maintain
dry land, than man, with all his dykes, dams, embankments, and such like
accumulations, since first he began to strut or to caper over its
surface.
But the journey which lies before one’s thoughts when once they embark
upon this river we call “Life,” is indeed too big for them even
imaginatively to attempt. Our boats are so small, and the river so wide,
that one soon loses sight of shore. Even if, abandoning these perplexing
living things, one falls back upon the mere inorganic forces of the
world, what a prodigious amount of energy here too comes into play!
Nature everywhere eternally building up, and with apparently no blind
hand, but with a most clear, definite, and shaping policy. It is good
for us to escape now and then out of our own hot and fussy little rooms,
into these larger, cooler spaces; yet, if a wholesome, it cannot be said
to be entirely a gratifying experience. For how soon, even in the
simplest of such matters, does one arrive, like the people in the
_Pilgrim’s Progress_ at a place called “Stop”? How soon does thought
practically cease, and one remains dumb and gasping, like some poor dull
beast, in a mere, vacant-eyed daze of wonder? “The mind of man"--it was
one who knew what he was talking about that said it--“is an indifferent
sort of musical instrument, with a certain range of notes, beyond which,
upon both sides, there is an infinitude of silence.”