Chapter II: Part 2

And so may we think of our dead that fell asleep in Jesus, as waiting upon that blessed threshold, contemplating that ravishing prospect, which is theirs, and may be ours. Nor do we enough thus think of and realise the state of the departed. The poisonous fungi of error have made us shy of the mushroom of truth. “The superstition of ages past has recoiled into the sadduceeism of to-day.” And so we, the dying, compassionate those who have begun to live, and who stand upon the threshold of the yet higher and more perfect life of the resurrection. Let us think of them more nobly, more worthily, more truly. Let us not heap their burial with gloom; let not our souls dwell with their bodies under the sodden clay. They are changed, but they are not lost; they are “still the same, and yet are not what they were; they have passed from the humiliation of the body to the majesty of the spirit. The weakness, and the littleness, and the abasement of life are gone; they are now excellent in strength, full of heavenly light, ardent with love, above fallen humanity, akin to angels.” “Blessed and happy dead!--great and mighty dead! In them the work of the new creation is well-nigh accomplished; what feebly stirs in us, in them is well-nigh full. They have passed within the vail, and there remaineth only one more change for them,--a change full of a foreseen, foretasted bliss. How calm, how pure, how sainted are they now! A few short years ago, and they were almost as weak and poor as we; burdened with the dying body we now bear about; harassed by temptations, often overcome, weeping in bitterness of soul, struggling with faithful, though fearful hearts, towards that dark shadow from which they shrank, as we shrink now.”

We on our threshold and they on theirs; then let us think of them and of ourselves so. We have left the threshold of life, and are nearing the threshold of Death, or rather of the beginning of Life indeed. They behold the prospect at which we guess, and which we burn to see. But because it may be ours one day, we are already sharers with them, and our higher union is rather cemented than interrupted. “The unity of the saints on earth with the Church unseen is the straitest bond of all. Hell has no power over it, sin cannot blight it, schism cannot rend it, death itself can but knit it more strongly. Nothing is changed but the relations of sight: like as when the head of a far-stretching procession, winding through a broken, hollow land, hides itself in some bending vale, it is still all one; all advancing together; they that are farthest onward in the way are conscious of their lengthened following; they that linger with the last are drawn forward as it were by the attraction of the advancing multitude.” Or, in another figure, beautifully has it been said, that when the Sun of Righteousness passed out of sight, the splendour of His hidden shining is reflected by His saints, “till the night starts out full of silver stars.” “In stedfast and silent course” they pass on, some disappearing below the horizon, some resplendent in mid-heaven, some just emerging from the other boundaries. And when the last has arisen, and some are yet sparkling in the blue vault, the Sun shall arise with sudden glory, and they all shall render to Him their light. But until that time, which no man knoweth, neither the angels of heaven, it is awaiting upon the threshold, in mighty musing upon the glory yet to be revealed; and, “until all is fulfilled,” the desire of the Church unseen is stayed with the “white robes” and the sound of the “Bridegroom’s voice.” Let us comfort one another with these words and these thoughts.

And now thus have we mused upon the Threshold, beginning first with the threshold of the life that is expecting death, and then soaring boldly to the threshold of the life that is expecting the Resurrection. We need reminding in this age that there are two sides to _this_ expectation. There is “a certain fearful looking for of judgment and of fiery indignation,” as well as an ardent, and eager, and rapturous anticipation and longing for His coming who cometh quickly, though He seem to tarry. And it is well to ask, when death ends our journey here, upon which threshold shall we prefer to wait, and which musing shall be our choice: the dreadful looking-for of judgment, or the ecstatic longing to hear that Voice which once said, “Follow Me,” speak again to us, even to us, the incredible words--“Well done, thou good and faithful servant: enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.” Choose we, my friends, carefully, prayerfully, deliberately, finally, and at once; for “Behold, _now_ is the accepted time; behold, _now_ is the day of salvation.”

SPRING DAYS.

“Forth in the pleasing Spring
Thy beauty walks, thy tenderness and love.
Wide flush the fields; the softening air is balm;
Echo the mountains round; the forest smiles;
And every sense, and every heart, is joy.”

What a delicious thing is the first real Spring day! A burst into a buttercup-field! What a thing of mad enjoyment for the legs, and eyes, and hands, and mind of the young human animal! What a sweet time to think of, in our sentimental moods, now that we are growing old! And yet, in that time of fresh animal life, there was not reflection enough to allow of deliberate and actual enjoyment of its hilarity and lightness of heart. It welled up bubbling and singing with the gladness of a spring, that yet is glad only because it is glad, and not because it is pure and bright. For it knows not yet of aught that is muddy and foul, shallow and stagnant. It knows not of drought, and deadness, and impurity, and dulness, and death. How knows it, therefore, why it ought to be glad? Sing on, sweet stream, but you must be left to learn, as you roll seawards, into a sober old river, _why_ you used to sing as a bright untroubled stream.

So, I suppose, except for the impetus and rush of early life, in its Spring days, before it has been checked here, and wasted there, and hemmed in, and spread out, and turned away, and thwarted, until its rush, and song, and glee have settled into a quiet, useful soberness, or into a foul stagnant pool that cannot often bear to call to mind those old pure, careless days--except for that first impetus and rush, I suppose it is more an absence of something than a presence of aught, that makes the child’s heart so glad. Anxious thought for soul and body of self and others; disappointment, regret, estrangements, remorse, satiety, failing powers; none of these check the young limbs, and the young lungs, and the young heart, as a sight of the brimming Spring meadow bursts upon the enchanted young eyes, and there is a shout, and a scamper, and a bound; and lo! the little naked legs are deep in green grass, and yellow bobbing buttercups, and starry radiant daisies.

I can’t feel towards the buttercups and daisies exactly as I did in those very early days. It is indeed a very primitive state of things, when these are as gold and silver coins to the young eager grasping hand, that would yet hold more when already by twos, and ones, and threes, the white discs and yellow cups struggle out of the little space that the finger and thumb cannot quite close in. You very soon get to slight these humble flowers; and, losing your easy content, aim higher, even at cowslips, primroses, and here and there an early purple orchis. That is, perhaps, the most simple-hearted and easily-contented time of life, which asks no more for its riches than both hands full of buttercups and daisies, guineas and shillings bright and fresh coined from the mint of Spring.

I remember well a wide meadow shut in with tall hedges, in which, for a Spring or two, while we were young enough to enjoy them, there was, for my two sisters and myself, a very scramble of such coins. Out on some mild April day, when the sun shone brightly, and the air was a growing air, and the paths dry. Out with our governess, we three, for a walk. A fortnight of soft April showers, or warm damp days, keeping us within the garden while the field was being dressed, had prepared for us a surprise. We ran our hoops along the dry paths, until the winner of the race caught sight of that fair meadow. Through the white wicket-gate then, the hoop thrown aside into the yielding grass, and the three pairs of little hands were busy enough soon. At first, the aim was merely to pick what came to hand, and quantity, not quality, was in demand. But, so soon do we begin to undervalue that which is abundant for that which is less easily attained, in a little while we were busy after rarities; mere white daisies were passed over, and those with a “crimson head” were sought; also, I remember, those with a scarlet jewel in the centre of the boss of gold. Cowslips were rare in the fields about us; were anyhow rare at that early time of year. Fancy then our exultation, if we should come upon a pale bent head, the delicate trembling spotted yellow, curving upwards towards the sheath of faint green. The bound towards it; the excitement of feeling the juicy crisp stalk break, and then rushing away with the treasure! I remember such a _find_ now, though I be far on in life beyond that early stage marked by that slight drooping flower.

But of course the daisies and buttercups, even before “whole summer fields were theirs by right,” soon lost their fascination, even in those early simplest days, before the advance of other rarer flowers. We could pass the meadow soon, without bounding into it, on our way round the park wall on a violet expedition. We could scent these out, and would eagerly part the crowding leaves and the binding ivy-nets that hid them. Not much fear lest we should gather enough of them to risk dropping any from an over-filled hand. Still, we mostly went home well content, with a close-clipped neat dark-blue bunch in one hand, with here and there a pure white prize, or a large one merely purple tinged, gleaming out of the dark. These white- and purple-tinged violets, you must know, had become our prizes, being rare, found seldom indeed by the park wall, but oftener on some mighty sandhills, that towered above the road a little way beyond our daisy-field, and seemed to bury the deep-lying road, with its winding carriages and pigmy passengers.

Out for a long walk now, even to that deep chalk-pit, where not _one_ cowslip hung, rare, unique, precious, but _hundreds_, nay _thousands_, bent their pale yellow heads, and scented the air with their sweet faint breath. So juicily they snapped, without that drawback which I deplore in primroses--the long sinew that a hasty picking leaves behind, to the marring of the flower. Baskets we had, trowels in them, to collect some roots for the misused pieces of ground known as our gardens: and woe betide an early orchis, if we came across it. Nearly always, after a long and patient digging, when the final _pull_ came, a long blanched stalk, with no root at the end, would meet our disappointed eyes.

But of course the great thing was to collect unlimited flowers. And really, if you turned me loose into the Bank of England, into that room in which those aggravating fellows shovel about the gold in coal-scuttle scoops, and bade me gather my fill, I am sure the delight would be neither so fresh, so sweet, nor so wholesome, as that entering unchecked upon the rich cowslip-wealth, trembling all over the short turf of the sloping side of the chalk-pit which ended our expedition. Two principal objects had we in collecting these flowers--for as the year goes on, even children seek _use_ as well as _beauty_ in their gettings; first to make cowslip balls, many and large, when we got home; next, to make cowslip tea. There is, or was, a keen delight in the former of these pursuits. The excitement and delight of the first cowslip ball made is feverish and unsettling. The long, tight string upon which are hung the poor flowers with their tails pinched off; the filling that string, the tying it, with here and there a cowslip tumbling out; and then the playing with the sweet-scented soft toy, till the room is littered with its scattered wealth, these are things to remember even now. But, no doubt, the _great_ thing was the cowslip tea--allowed to us that night instead of milk-and-water; and to be drunk in real teacups instead of mugs. The solemn shredding the yellow crown out of its green calyx; seated, all three, at our little low table with the deep rim; the growing heap of prepared flowers; then the piling them into the teapot, the excitement of seeing the boiling water poured upon them; the grave momentous pause while the tea was brewing; and the hearty, but really at last abortive, endeavour to persuade ourselves and each other that we liked the filthy concoction, and found it really a treat. Ah, life has many a cup of cowslip tea in it; delightful in the preparation, exciting in the anticipation, but most disappointing when it comes to the actual partaking!

We must not stop now to run down that green path into the wood--our one wood, nor to see which shall first enter it with a bound; we must not stop, although we know that a little later in the year there were some rare choice treasures there. A firmament of starry wood anemones; and here and there a bent spike of wild hyacinth, not yet ripened into its deep full blue; and here and there a pale green orchis, coming out of its two ribbed leaves, valued because rarer than its purple brother, that but rarely yet towered with its tall rich spike above the clustering milky flowers. And on one bank that we knew, just two or three roots of primroses, the only roots that grew wild for miles about that part, each tendering to us its crowded offering of sweet faint flowers, and deeper yellow buds imbedded in the crisp, crumpled leaves. And then the lords and ladies: _lord_, handsomest--_lady_, rarest: I could pick and unroll them now. They call to mind a glad, bright little address of a child to the flowers, with which I will conclude these reminiscent wanderings among the old wildflower fields of youth:--

“Oh velvet bee, you’re a dusty fellow,
You’ve powdered your legs with gold!
Oh brave marsh marybuds, rich and yellow,
Give me your money to hold!
Oh columbine, open your folded wrapper,
Where two twin turtle-doves dwell!
Oh cuckoopint, toll me the purple clapper
That hangs in your clear green bell!”

Why have I recalled these child remembrances of early Spring days? Why, but to add that those keen delights, those exquisite, though unintellectual and reasonless, appreciations are gone--in this life for ever! Wherefore I say _in this life_, I mean presently to show: suffice it _now_ to say that the Summer and Autumn of human life, dry and dusty, or sorrowful and decaying, have done quite, except for some tender sweet reminiscent hints, with the freshness, and the glee, and the gladness of the old Spring days.

“There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem,
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;--
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.”

These lines of Wordsworth express, very exquisitely, the thought at which I have just been catching. Something goes, as we grow old--a gladness, a suddenness of appreciation of enjoyment is lost; and the dark Summer foliage is not the same with the fresh light green of the young Spring leaves. And when a gush of the old keen relish comes back for a moment, there is regret as well as sweetness in the tears that suddenly dim the eyes.

Spring days, sweet Spring days, my quiet heart and rested eye tell me that there is no fear but that I enjoy you still!

“For, lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of the singing of birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.”

This exquisite poetry has its voice of delight for me, and as I shut my eyes, it brings a change over the bare boughs and the Winter land. I dream of the chill black hedges and trees, flushing first into redness, and then “a million emeralds burst from the ruby buds.” I dream of the birds coming back, one after one, until the poetry of the flowers is all set to music. And I go out into the land to behold, not only to dream of and image, these things. I watch for the delicious green, tasselling the earliest larch (there is one every year a fortnight in advance of the others) in the clump of those trees beside the road on my way home. I look, in a warm patch that I know, for the first primroses, and when I find them mildly and quietly gazing up at me from the moss, and ivy, and broken sticks, and dead leaves, a surprise, although I was expecting them, and a dim reflection of that old child-joy, bring with a rush to my heart again those “Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” And in the garden I wander through the bare shrubberies, varied with bright green box, and gather in my harvest there. The little Queen Elizabeth aconites, gold-crowned in their wide-frilled green collars; these are no more scant, and just breaking with bent head through cracking frosty ground. They have carpeted the brown beds, and are even waxing old and past now. The snowdrops have but left a straggler here and there; and the miniature golden volcano of the crocus has spent its columns of fire. The hazels are draped with slender, drooping catkins; the sweetbriar is letting the soft sweet-breathed leaves here and there out of the clenched hand of the bud. The cherry-tree is preparing to dress itself almost in angels’ clothing, white and glistening, and delicious with all soft recesses of clear grey shadow, seen against the mild blue sky. The long branches of the horse-chestnut trees, laid low upon the lawn, are lighting up all over with the ravishing crumpled emerald that bursts like light out of the brown sticky bud---as sometimes holy heavenly thoughts may come from one whose first look we disliked; or as God’s dear lessons unfold out of the dark sheath of trouble. The fairy almond-tree--of so tender a hue that you might fantastically imagine it a cherry-tree blushing--casts a light scarf over a dark corner of the shrubbery. The laburnum is preparing for the Summer, and is all hung with tiny green festoons. Against the blue sky, on a bare sycamore branch, that stretches out straight from the trunk, a glad-voiced thrush seems thanking God that the Spring days are come. Wedged tight into three branching boughs, near the stem of a box-tree, I find a warm secure nest, filled with five little blue-green eggs. It is still a delight to me to find a nest; a delight, if not now a rapture, an intoxication.

All these I see on one Spring day or another, as I walk into my garden, or out into the changing lanes. All these I see, and all these I love. But I see them, and I love them tenderly and quietly, not with the wonder and the glee of life’s early Spring days. I am sad, partly because I know that a great deal of that old wondering ecstatic thrill has gone.

“The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose,
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.”

It must be so, naturally, if only from the mere fact that things must lose their newness, and so their wonder, to the eye and the heart. Do what you will, you must become accustomed to things. And the scent of a hyacinth or of the may, will cease when familiar to be the wonderful enchanting thing that childhood held it to be. And the _thirtieth_ time that we see, to notice, the first snowdrop bursting through the pale green sheath above the brown bed, is a different thing from the _third_ time. We appreciate delights keenly when we are young, seek the same in later years, but never find them; and then all our life remember the search more or less regretfully. So Wordsworth, the old man, addresses the cuckoo that brought back his young days and his young thoughts by its magic voice:--

“Thou bringest unto me a tale
Of visionary hours.

“Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring!
_Even yet_ thou art to me
No bird, but an invisible thing,
A voice, a mystery:

“To seek thee did I often rove
Through woods and on the green;
And thou wert still a hope, a love;
Still longed for, never seen.

“And I can listen to thee yet;
Can lie upon the plain
And listen, till I do beget
_That golden time again_.”

Ah well, I must get on to my moral. I must not wail like an Autumn wind among the young flowers, and the bright leaves, and the blithe songs of the sweet Spring days, else I shall lay myself open to the reproach of the poet describing one who--

“Words of little weight let fall,
The fancy of the lower mind--
That waxing life must needs leave all
Its best behind.”

It is not true really, that we are leaving behind our best, when we have passed into the Summer, or even into the Autumn days. But there is a degree, a portion of truth in it. There is a sense, no doubt, in which even the Summer does lose a beauty which is the peculiar possession of life’s Spring days.

First then (to divide sermon-wise), what is that we lose, when we lose Spring days? I have hinted at this loss in nearly all that has been written above. We lose the _gladness of inexperience_, the gladness and enjoyment that is not _thoughtful_, nor such as can give a reason for itself, but that is merely _natural_, and welling up irresistibly like a spring. We lose the newness of things--aye, more, far more than this, we lose the _newness of ourselves_, the _freshness of our own heart_. _This_ is (with some in a greater, with some in a less degree) what we discover that we have left behind, when we look back on life’s Spring days. Some of us, with a tender half-regretful watering, keep a hint, a reminiscence, of that old freshness. But many heedlessly suffer the world’s dust to coat it over, and the world’s drought to shrivel it up.

But now, what may we have gained, if there be something lost in our leaving Spring days behind? If we lose a little, let us not fear but that our gain is far larger than our loss. We gain gladness and we gain sadness (I use the word _gain_ advisedly)--the gladness and the sadness of _experience_. A gladness that is part of the depth of a grave river now; profound, if not light-hearted like the little spring. A gladness that, when it comes, is more rational than merely animal; that has a reason to give for itself, and does not exist merely because it exists. A joy that is far more rare, also less ecstatic, but that is higher and deeper, having its birth in the _intellect_, and not simply in the _life_ of the human creature.

To exemplify my meaning. In art, compare the mere admiration without knowledge, with the intelligent appreciation. Turned loose without knowledge into a picture-gallery, how many things you admire, almost everything; and how fresh and uncritical is your admiration! But gain knowledge of art, gain experience; and you straightway lose in _quantity_ what you yet gain in _quality_. You admire fewer pictures, but your admiration of the few is a different thing from that old admiration of the many. It is a higher thing, more intelligent, more subtle, more refined. It is an appreciation now, not merely an ignorant admiration. You are harder to please; in one sense you have lost; but manifestly, on the whole you have gained.

And so with the gladness of manhood. It is a deeper, graver, more fastidious, yet a more reasonable and higher feeling than the gladness of the child. The sparkle, and bubble, and glitter, and singing have gone; but in their stead is a strength, an earnestness, an undercurrent not easily stayed or stemmed or turned aside. The gladness which is intelligent is better than the gladness which is instinctive.

And the sadness of experience (for we cannot live long in this world without discovering that life is exquisitely sad)--the sadness which comes with experience--is _this_ also a gain? No doubt it is--no doubt it is. A wise man once told us that sorrow is better than laughter; that the house of mourning is better than the house of feasting. And a Greater than Solomon endorsed with His lips and with His life the declaration, “Blessed are they that mourn.”

And who that regards life in its true aspect, but must bow a grave assent to this verdict? He who watches the effect on himself of God’s teaching, and of the lessons which He sets to be learnt, will understand what the Master means by His saying. He who regards his own life as something more than a bee’s life, or a butterfly’s life; he who sees that the life of man has its _schooling_, meant to raise it above our natural meannesses, and petulances, and impulses, and weaknesses, and selfishnesses, and ungenerousness--into something high and noble and stedfast, exalted, sublime, angelic, godlike; he who thus thinks of life, and watches life with this idea ever in view,--will find it not hard in time to thank God for having made him sad, even while the sadness is fresh and new and keen in his subdued and wounded heart. Disappointed in many things, and with many people, he will accept the disappointment with a quiet, anguished, thankful heart, feeling that God, who tore from him his prop, is raising the trailing vine from the ground, and instructing its tendrils to twine around Himself, the only support that can never fail them. And this is well, he knows, who is a watcher of life, and a learner of its lessons.

And when sadness has produced this, its right and intended effect of sweetening, and not souring the soul, a fresh advantage and gain steals, starlike, into the darkened sky. The heart that has been made lonely, except for God’s then most nearly felt presence, in a sorrow, is that which is the most braced and disentangled for the great and noble deeds of life. With a sad and a disappointed, if _yet still a loving, tender_ heart, we can go out on God’s work, go out to face evil, or to do good, more easily and thoroughly oftentimes, than when this great grave, the world, shows to us “its sunny side.” Sadness, to him who humbly and prayerfully is seeking to learn God’s lesson in life, has not a weakening, but a tonic power. God, who sends the sadness, sends also the health and the strength; yea, the strength arises from the sadness. Something of what I mean is grandly expressed in the following extract:--

“There are moments when we seem to tread above this earth, superior to its allurements, able to do without its kindness, firmly bracing ourselves to do our work as He did His. Those moments are not the sunshine of life. They did not come when the world would have said that all around you was glad; but it was when outward trials had shaken the soul to its very centre, then there came from Him ... grace to help in time of need.”

Sadness, then, which braces and strengthens the character, which raises it into something nobler than it would otherwise have been; which sets a man free and stirs him up for great and noble acts, for a resolute devoted doing of Christ’s work on earth--such an experience is certainly a gain; and if this be our own, even when the Autumn woods are growing bare, we are not to wish to have back the old sweet Spring days.

Now one more loss and gain has occurred to my mind, contemplating those Spring days that seem, but are not, so far behind me in life. How often we pine after the innocence of childhood! how the poetry of our hearts, and of our writers, loves mournfully to recur to this!

“The smell of violets, hidden in the green,
Poured back into my empty soul and frame
The times when I remember to have been
Joyful, _and free from blame_.”

But here again a little thought will show us that we _need_ not have left our best behind, when the Spring days are with us no more. Deliberate and intelligent goodness and holiness is a better thing than mere innocence of childhood, which, again, is rather the absence of something than the presence of aught. There has been merely neither time nor opportunity yet for much evil doing: there was no intelligent choice of good because of its goodness. And thus, if the man (although he have sinned far more than the child can have done) has yet, at last, and through much sharp experience, learnt life’s great lesson, and has become (however it be but incipiently) holy and good, that deliberate and positive, though imperfect goodness, is far better than the _mere negative innocence of the child_. Angelic innocence is, and the innocence of Adam would have been, no doubt, _intelligent_ innocence. But now that we have fallen, that innocence (which, after all, is but comparative) of childhood is little else but the lack of time and knowledge and opportunity for sin. Such innocence is merely a negative thing, while holiness is positive. And he who is ripening into holiness in life’s Summer, need not regret the mere innocence of its Spring days. In life’s filled, and alas, blotted pages, if, amid many smears and stains, the golden letters of GOODNESS at last begin to gleam forth in a clear predominance, he who considers wisely will not regret much the newness of the book, whose pages are only white and pure, because scarce yet written in at all.

* * * * *

“The world passeth away, and the lust thereof.” All is evanescent, passing away; not only the objects that we desire, but even our desire and appreciation of them too. Nor does this only apply to that which is _worldly_, in an evil sense, but to some objects sad to lose, but which to have still, but no longer to be able to appreciate, is yet a sadder but an inevitable loss. When we look back upon life’s Spring days, something really sweet, and beautiful, and desirable, seems left behind and gone. Not life’s best; not the _grape_, but the _bloom_ on it; not the deep blue day, but the strange glory of the morning sky. Something seems lost. I am fond of maintaining that it will yet hereafter be found. In Heaven, I think, there will be not only beauty, fairer than our fairest Spring days; but an appreciative power, undying, ever existing; and _hearts_ that shall not know what it is to be _growing old_. This life is one, I again toll, of incessant _passing away_. Friends and joys leave us, and even if they did not, the power of enjoying often goes, and hands that were once little close-locked hands, deteriorate into flabby, cold fishes’ fins.

_Here_, you must lose, if you would gain; you must spend if you would buy. _Hereafter_ it may be different. A hint of this seems given in an old prophecy of choice things to be had without money, and without price. ’Tis all clear profit _there_, I conclude; you add, without subtracting.

Yes, in that Land (to illustrate by a fancy) the Winter flowers will come, one after one, breaking through the frost-bound beds, and when the time comes at which we shall expect them to go, they will surprise us by staying with us still. The sweet, faint, mild Spring primroses will brim the copses, and spill over, trickling down the banks; the daffodils (not _Lent_-lilies there) will dance over the meadows in a golden sheet, and will wonder to find that they are _additions_, not _substitutes_. The trembling cowslips, the starry anemones, the wood-fulls of hyacinths, the rose campions, the purple orchis spires, these will supplement, not supplant, the fair growth that used to fade at the first footfall of their advent. And so the sweetbriar roses, red and burning, and their paler sisters with unscented leaves, and the clematis snow, and the honeysuckle clusters, and the meadow-sweet; these will come not to fill an empty cup, but a full one, and one that yet, though full, is ever capable of containing more. And so snowdrops need not die for violets to come, nor violets vanish to make room for the rose. And Autumn will not supersede Summer, nor come, except to add its quota of beauty. “How then?” ask you, “shall we not soon arrive at the end of the delights of the year, and weary with their sameness?” No, I reply, for I think we shall not stop at Summer in Heaven, but ever go on into new and lovelier seasons; appreciating old pleasures with unweary hearts, but ever adding to them new.

“Old things are passed away.” That is, perhaps, this old fading state of things, of objects, and capacity of enjoying them: and our hearts that once were young, but that still (except for the youth and freshness that religion can preserve in them) _will_ be ever growing so old--so old.

“Behold I make all things new.” _All_ things--our hearts then, too: they will be again fresh, and that old forgotten or sorrowfully remembered child wonder, and appreciation, and love may come back; and the “forgets” of our later years be called to mind again:--

“Is it warm in that green valley,
Vale of childhood, where you dwell?
Is it calm in that green valley
Round whose bournes such great hills swell?
Are there giants in the valley,--
Giants leaving footprints yet?
Are there angels in the valley?
Tell me----I forget.”

But nothing that is beautiful to remember will be forgotten _there_. And the poet will no more lament a light gone out, a glory faded; our worn-out feelings, and spirits, and appreciations, and hopes, and beliefs, and wonders, and admirations, will be restored to us new. So altogether new, so quite different in nature, as well as in degree, from the old, that they will _keep_ new, and not fade and perish in the using. _That_ world will not pass away, nor the enjoyment thereof. For all there will be in perfect harmony with the will of God, which abideth for ever.

Everlasting Spring days! Think of that! I mean an everlasting Spring season and freshness in the _heart_. Oh the sadness which is an undercurrent of all earth’s poetry, from the nightingale’s, upward, will have left our songs then!

“We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”

But this will then and there be no longer the case, for life will no longer be “A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.” Season after season, joy after joy, will indeed dance into light, but will not, after a little brief while of enjoyment, die into the shade. Heaven’s everlasting flowers will not grow dry, and dusty, and colourless; but for ever retain and increase the freshness, and the abundance, and the light, and the exquisite glory of those unimagined SPRING DAYS.

MUSINGS IN A WOOD.

Two sweet little pictures, entitled, “The Lark,” and “The Nightingale,” have greatly charmed me. In one, there was a blue-flecked sky, a Spring morning landscape, and a glad-eyed girl, with a lapful of daisies, lying back and looking up with shaded gaze and listening eyes, into those blue depths, wherein

“The lark became a sightless song.”

In the other, there was an evening glow: warm, orange-grey sky, cooling into steel-blue; a bower of rose-leaves; an earnest face, with darker hair, and pensive brow, flushed into warmth by the setting sun. And you would know, even had you not been told, that the child, old enough just to enjoy that young melancholy which is pleasant,--is listening to that

“Wild bird, whose warble, liquid sweet,
Rings Eden through the budded quicks.”

For in neither case is the songster seen: with true art the minstrel is left to the imagination to supply, and this subtler artist can furnish voice, form, motion; only one of which three could be given by the painter.

These pictures were in the Winter Exhibition; hence, no doubt, their suggestion of the absent bird-songs was the more valued. For perhaps these, like other delights, are the sweetest when they are not possessed, but only remembered and longed-for.

That remembrance, however, of Winter, will serve, by contrast, to freshen our enjoyment, as we start, on this warm March day, for Bramley Wood, to descry and collect the old familiar bird-songs as they come back to us in the Spring. To collect these and the flowers, I say, in the heart’s cases and herbarium, for use when Winter comes, and woods are dead, and bird-songs gone. This is a better way than to crowd the staircase and hall with stuffed, silent birds, or to encumber your shelves with dried, brittle, brown specimens; which can never suggest the fresh, juicy, sweet-breathed blossoms, or the quick, never-still, bright-glancing inhabitants of the bushes. For the heart keeps these collections all fresh and full of life, and if a picture or a poem or a strain of music does but summon them up, why, there they are in a minute. Though they may have seemed laid by and forgotten, yet, at the magic call, lo! the heart is a lane of primroses, or a copse of bluebells; the lark is high in the heaven, and the thrush answering the blackbird out of great white sheets of the may.

We soon settle down to the bird-songs when once they have really all come back; and we plod on our preoccupied way, hearing them without hearing, unless, indeed, one day-note of a nightingale should electrify our heart. But there is no doubt that, at first returning, the silver minstrelsy of the woods is welcomed by most. And we never grow too old to feel a heart-kindling and a brightening of the eye, on that mild November day, when we start, and listen, and--yes, it _is_, the first Thrush-song breaking the meditative misty hush of the landscape. Autumn is stringing the woods with tears, and the first gripe of Winter has ere now pinched to death the more delicate garden flowers; but, even before his reign has begun in earnest, here is a voice which prophesies of his overthrow. Then the frosts come in defiance, and the last leaves spin down, and the snow-sheet falls, and the thrush is silent as though dead, and resistance seems overcome, and Winter’s reign established. An observant eye will, however, still detect a speckled clean breast, flitting into alternate concealment and sight behind the bushes in the shrubbery, and rustling the counterpane of dry leaves, under which those many little dull-green points are crowding out of the frost-held ground. But his song is kept in reserve for a time. And it seems that Spring is close at hand, and that the year is indeed turned, when next you hear him, high on the boughs of that tulip tree, large against the pale blue sky, singing out loud and clear from early morning to dusk of a bright February day. And the dry leaves have huddled away from the searching wind, and left the brown moist beds, over which trembles a surprise of delicate white cups, where the blunt dull-green points had been.

But I mean now to muse in a fanciful way about the characteristics of these returning songs, and the teaching that may be gathered from them. Canon Evans’ little book, “The Songs of the Birds,” might seem to have preoccupied this ground, but the treatment will differ, if the idea be the same.

To what, then, shall we liken the song of the Thrush? Different temperaments of men and women may well be illustrated by the variety in the character of the bird-songs. In the thrush’s song, then, I seem to hear the utterance of the strong and happy Christian. He has never been troubled with any doubts; the dark dismays and hidden misgivings of other minds are without meaning to him. Clear and glad, and untroubled, and strong in faith, the soul of this man sits upon wintry trees, above few trembling flowers, under a pale still sky, and sings from the early morning to the dusking eve an unwavering, undoubting, happy song. A song in which there are not weird mysterious depths of feeling, nor ecstatic, incomprehensible heights, but in which there is ever an even tenor, a stedfast sustained gladness, an unchecked unvarying trust. A song, perhaps, not of the highest intellect, but of the firmest faith. Here are no dark questionings, that must be content to pause for an answer hereafter; no evil suggestions, fiery darts which the shield of faith must ever be upheld to quench. There is almost a hard ignoring and turning away from minds otherwise fashioned; minds full of anxieties and searchings, that are troubles indeed, but not doubts; struggles, but not defeats, because faith upholds where sight fails. These sing more broken snatches of more passionate music, amid thicker branches, and in the dusk; while the thrush-spirit, unknowing of these fierce alternations, sings out, up there upon the naked bough, clear and distinct against the blue soft sky.

There is a wild stormy note which must detain us awhile from our March wood. It comes early in January, and on stormy days, under thin driving clouds, you may hear short bursts, as though the broken song of a husky blackbird, flung from the ivy-clad top of some tall, ancient spruce-fir. This is the note of the Missel-thrush, or Storm-cock. He seems rather to exult in the disturbed sky, and swaying boughs, and passing gleams and showers. There is a wild beauty, tempered with a _little_ harshness, in the short sharp snatches of defiant and militant song. In him I find a type of the religious controversialist and disputant; the watchman set on his tower amid storms and lowering days. Such watchers there are, and they are useful to detect and descry the insidious approach of error. Controversialists-born, as it were, you shall ever hear their sharp short utterances under a stormy sky; and while you value the note, you will often detect and deplore some touch of harshness that grates upon the heart, some falling short of the mellow flute-like tones of Love.

But on our way to the wood, and as we pass through this meadow, a Skylark springs up, and flutters higher and higher; fountain-like, as it rises, scattering about its silver spray of song. Very soon the eye wanders about, searching after it for some time in vain, pleased at last to recover the dim black speck in the grey sky.

I suppose that the picture of which I spoke above gives the natural embodiment of the song of the lark.

“Heigh ho! daisies and buttercups,
Fair yellow daffodils, stately and tall;
A sunshiny world full of laughter and leisure,
And fresh hearts unconscious of sorrow and thrall.”

Up into the sky, bright thoughts and dreams, quivering wings, swelling throat, hurrying ecstasies and crowding notes of joy, impatient, yet impossible to be uttered. Careless flowers upon the lap,--withering, are they? But there is a worldful more to be had for the gathering. Oh yes, the lark’s song is that of the young heart--young enough to stop short at the attainment of simple gladness. There is not yet upon it the sweet hush even of love and sentiment, the upward soaring has no alternate dip and rise; the quick beat of the wings no pause; the bright flash of song no dyings-down into shade. Wonder at life goes hand in hand with joy in it; all is new and all is delicious; all is hope, and nothing is disappointing; the whole widening prospect is one of beauty and glad surprise. The year is in its early Spring, and has never so much as heard of Autumn yet; nor can guess, nor cares to try to divine, what those old brown leaves can mean, out of which huddle the thick primrose clumps. Higher and higher, and brighter and brighter, and gladder and gladder, and more and more impetuous the thronging notes, and more and more untiring the ecstatic wing. And God loves to see this, for He gave the feeling; and we may perceive that He has allotted to most things a young life of fresh colour and unmixed joyfulness. Kittens and lambs, and Spring leaves, and young children--they all sober down soon enough--and well they should. But let us not grudge the short hour of pure lightness of heart, that was God’s gift; nor hunt for ripe fruit among the sheets of blossom; nor dull with our heart’s twilight the first flush of the morning; nor desire, in the song of the lark, the thoughtfulness of the blackbird--far less the moan of the dove. Let not our work ever be to _check_, only to guide, and to tend, and to develop, the heart’s songful gladness, pointing it, indeed, heavenward; or, again, ready to tend the germ which some gust has stolen from its white petal-wings.

I spoke of the Blackbird. And here, as we near the wood, towards which for some long time we have been walking, we catch the smooth, rich, lyric fragments of this deep-hearted poet. Less openly, freely, fearlessly confident and exulting in an unclouded soul, than the thrush,--there is something exceedingly fascinating in the intermitted, but not broken song of the blackbird. The pauses which sever the stanzas of his song, seem well suited to its lyric character. There are in these separate and finished verses the polish and completeness, also the richness and liquid flow, of a set of stanzas of “In Memoriam,” and, moreover, something of their wild mournfulness and tender, deep, questioning thought. The blackbird’s song is that of the grave, mature mind, highly intellectual, somewhat touched with sadness, but more with love, and that has had to battle hard through life to keep both faith and love unimpaired.

“The blackbird’s song at eventide”:

thus it is described, and, in truth, it seems the passionate earnest utterance of one who can understand the difficulties which have blown down unrooted trees, and yet has itself possession of that faith which can control into music notes that make a jarring in undisciplined minds. The riddle of this painful earth has often wrung the heart of this man, but his sorrowful thoughts concerning it have shaped themselves into these rich utterances of yearning love. This trumpet gives no uncertain sound; the speaking is clear, and distinct, and unfaltering. You are, as I said, reminded of the controversial storm-bird by its tones, but all that would have been harsh in its outspoken truthfulness, is mellowed and softened by an exquisite overmastering charm of tender and patient love. So that the blackbird’s song is that of mature faith, which has met and vanquished anxious questionings, and which, if that of a controversialist at all, is only that of one on whom old age is stealing, and whom experience has made gentle and patient; and yearning for souls has made passionate; and love of Christ has made tenderly and invincibly loving. And so when it thrills out clear and full from his hidden quiet retreat in the evening time, even those that think that there is cause for old grudges against the minstrel are arrested reverently to listen to his deep, thoughtful, loving song.

We are at the wood now, at last. We have followed a pleasant stream that played hide-and-seek among its willows, and, while we talked and listened, we have gathered in gleanings of its beauty. And now we cross the narrow plank--parting the branches that half conceal it--and enter the wood. There are tiny pink balls ready to burst into vivid buds, gemming the hawthorn bushes; but the trees and underwood are bare, except for the willow catkins and the hazel tassels, or perhaps the dull green of the elder in a tuft here and there, or the early leaf-bud of a twining honeysuckle. But the pale smooth ash saplings, tall and slim, and silver-grey in the sun, with a narrow shadow edge, the branches studded with black buds; and the golden twigs of the white-stemmed birch; and the warm light brown of the hazel boughs; and the red of the cherry,--these make the wood, though bare, yet neither dull nor colourless. And here, farther in, the many stems are fringed and bearded with the hoary and abundant growth of lichen, cool as the bloom on a greengage, against the pale orange which still lingers in ragged patches upon the six-feet stalks of last year’s bracken.

Certainly there is, all around us in the wood, much material for musing. But we have come hither for a special end. For it is the thirteenth of March, and by this time the first of the train of those songsters, that fly to warmer shores to escape our Winter, ought to have returned. So, all ears, we proceed over the crisp leaves, disturbing the bobbing rabbits. And there! I heard the note--simple enough, yet pleasing even in itself, and sweet as being the forerunner of songs more rich. _Chiff-chaff_,--this dissyllable gives this Willow-wren’s note and name. There is not much in it, may be, still it is the little tuning-fork of the coming concert. And we are reminded by it of some gentle spirit which longs and tries to say a cheery and hopeful word to a heart which has been under wintry skies; that which it repeats may not indeed be very new, very powerful, or very varied; still, it is accepted and loved for the sake of its truth and affection.

This bird has a relation, due some few days later, whose song, though but little more pretentious, is yet a great favourite with me. I call it the laughing Willow-wren; and indeed its note does at once suggest a small silvery peal of merry light-hearted glee. Again and again, peal after peal; flitting through the boughs, almost the tiniest of slim birdlings.

“Gaiety without eclipse,”

it certainly is, and yet it does not weary us, this ceaseless “silver-treble laughter.” This song has its parallel in some life, gay and blight and glad from first to last; hiding for a sobered moment from a shower or a storm, but anon and on a sudden recovering its innocent glee again. Delicate and slim, and easily frightened, but never long troubled; very winning and loveable; too tender and pretty for the hardest hand to crush; never doing huge deeds in the world, but of the same value that a fugitive sunbeam would be in a heavy and gloomy wood, or a daisy in a desert. Keeping the Child’s heart through the Woman’s life; feeling sorrow lightly, and with an April heart; disarming anger or harshness by its simple gleeful innocence; frail yet safe as a feather upon the whirls and eddies of life. Laugh on, light and cheery heart, amid the jay’s harsh dissonance, and the blackbird’s thought, and the thrush’s strength, and the dove’s sadness! Amid Life’s gravities and stern realities there is a grateful place for the gleams of a glad-hearted song like thine!