UPTON,
Oct. 5, 1904.
DEAR HERBERT,--It is autumn now with us, the sweetest season of the
year to a polar bear like myself. Of course, Spring is ravishingly,
enchantingly beautiful, but she brings a languor with her, and there
are the hot months to be lived through, treading close on her heels.
But now the summer is over and done; the long firelit evenings are
coming, and, as if to console one for the loss of summer beauty, the
whole world blazes out into a rich funeral pomp. I walked to-day with a
friend to a place not far away, a great, moated house in a big, ancient
park. We left the town, held on through the wretched gradations of
suburbanity, and then, a few hundred yards from the business-like,
treeless high-road, the coverts came in sight. There is always a dim
mystery about a close-set wood showing its front across the fields. It
always seems to me like a silent battalion guarding some secret thing.
We left the high-road and soon were in the wood--the dripping woodways,
all strewn with ruinous gold, opening to right and left; and soon the
roofs and towers of the big house--Puginesque Gothic, I must tell
you--came in sight. But those early builders of the romantic revival,
though they loved stucco and shallow niches, had somehow a sense of
mass. It pleases me to know that the great Sir Walter himself had a
hand in the building of this very house, planned the barbican and the
water-gate. All round the house lies a broad moat of black water, full
of innumerable carp. The place was breathlessly still; only the sharp
melancholy cries of water-birds and the distant booming of guns broke
the silence. The water was all sprinkled with golden leaves, that made
a close carpet round the sluices; the high elms were powdered with
gold; the chestnuts showed a rustier red. A silent gardener, raking
leaves with ancient leisureliness, was the only sign of life--he might
have been a spirit for all the sound he made; while the big house
blinked across the rich clumps of Michaelmas daisies, and the dark
windows showed a flicker of fire darting upon the walls. Everything
seemed mournful, yet contented, dying serenely and tranquilly, with a
great and noble dignity. I wish I could put into words the sweet
solemnity, the satisfying gravity of the scene; it was like the sight
of a beautiful aged face that testifies to an inner spirit which has
learnt patience, tenderness, and trustfulness from experience, and is
making ready, without fear or anxiety, for the last voyage.
I say gratefully that this is one of the benefits of growing older,
that these beautiful things seem to speak more and more instantly to
the mind. Perhaps the faculty of eager enjoyment is somewhat blunted;
but the appeal, the sweetness, the pathos, the mystery of the world, as
life goes on, fall far oftener and with far more of a magical spell
upon the heart.
We walked for a while by a bridge, where the stream out of the moat ran
hoarsely, choked with drift, in its narrow walls. That melancholy and
sobbing sound seemed only to bring out more forcibly the utter silence
of the tall trees and the sky above them; light wreaths of mist lay
over the moat, and we could see far across the rough pasture, with a
few scattered oaks of immemorial age standing bluff and gnarled among
the grass. The time of fresh spring showers, of sailing clouds, of
basking summer heat, was over--so said the grey, gentle sky--what was
left but to let the sap run backward to its secret home, to rest, to
die? With such sober and stately acquiescence would I await the end,
not grudgingly, not impatiently, but in a kind of solemn glory, with
gratitude and love and trust.
My companion of that day was Vane, one of my colleagues, and we had
discussed a dozen of the small interests and problems that make up our
busy life at this restless place; but a silence fell upon us now. The
curtain of life was for a moment drawn aside, the hangings that wrap us
round, and we looked for an instant into the vast and starlit silences,
the formless, ancient dark, where a thousand years are but as
yesterday, and into which the countless generations of men have
marched, one after another. That is a solemn, but hardly a despairing
thought; for something is being wrought out in the silence, something
of which we may not be conscious, but which is surely there. Could we
but lay that cool and mighty thought closer to our spirits! That
impenetrable mystery ought to give us courage, to let us rest, as it
were, within a mighty arm. Behind and beyond the precisest creed that
great mystery lies; the bewildering question as to how it is possible
for our own atomic life to be so sharply defined and bounded from the
life of the world--why the frail tabernacle in which we move should be
thus intensely our own, and all outside it apart from us.
Yet in days like this calm autumn day one seems to draw a little closer
to the mystery, to take a nearer share in the great and wide
inheritance, to be less of ourselves and more of God.--Ever yours,