Chapter IV: Part 4

But it goes on steadily, in the dry Summer glare, in the drought, and dust, and silence; patiently, uncheered by showers, and with many a leaf curling, many a fruit dropping. Though life often seems monotonous, and prosaic, and dry, it none the less steadily and persistently, and without giving up or losing heart, toils on.

Ah, thus in our Summer days, in the time of our manhood, when life’s poetry has fled, and we are not that we wished to be, and we do not that we wished to do; and the romance, and the glory, and the glitter of the once distant warfare, when

“Among the tents we paused and sung,”

has resolved itself into the stern realities, and prose, and smirch, and dust, of the long toilsome march, the weary watching, and the sob and sweat of the struggle and the contest; when this is so, let us gravely, solemnly settle down to the, at first sight, uncheered duties and blank programme of the work of Summer days. Yes, when the dull every-day routine of dry work is near to making us heart-sick and over-tired; when

“Still in the world’s hot, restless gleam
We ply our weary task,
While vainly for some pleasant dream
Our restless glances ask,”

let us remember that, whatever our work be, so it be honest, God gave it us to do, and the homeliest act, or repetition of monotonous acts, is ennobled, if the motive be noble, and the labour stedfast and brave--if it be done heartily and well, as to the Lord, and not as unto men. Think of St. Paul making tents--yea, of CHRIST in the carpenter’s shop--and weary not--oh sick at heart, and disappointed of youth’s sweet Spring dreams and high imaginings!--of the work--however homely, however monotonous, however dull and prosaic--which yet God hath given thee to be done.

Friends, let us work in Summer days. The Spring is past; we will not, therefore, spend our golden hours in useless regrets. The Autumn has not yet come. But the Summer is with us now. Beyond it there may be a land of Beulah, even here, when the dust, and toil, and strain pass by a little, and something of the old-remembered brightness of colour and beauty flushes over the land. Whether or no such an Autumn-quiet be attained, the Summer will pass, and the great Winter sleep will come. And beyond that there shall be Spring without its evanescence, Summer without its toil and weariness, and Autumn without its melancholy and death. Beyond the short labour of Summer days, “_There remaineth a rest for the people of God_.” Let us, therefore, labour, that we may enter into that rest.

MUSINGS IN THE HAY.

Ah! now I am seated as I love to be, the June blue over me, and the sweet, warm, new-made hay underneath. On the shadow side of a great haycock, here have I selected my seat, plunging down and feeling the soft cushion give, until it has attained consistency enough to resist me. I have been busy, very busy, all this week, and the week before that, and indeed several weeks back. And I have earned, and mean to indulge in, a quiet long afternoon, and perhaps evening, in the hay-field. I have a book with me, but I do not pledge myself to read much. I have not come out here to read; not to do much, indeed, but just to sit and muse, nay, chiefly to enjoy the feeling of being able to rest. To feel that there is, or shall be, so far as I can choose, no call for the remainder of this day upon anxious heart and weary brain; no parish troubles; no sick, whose silent cry in the distance forbids the pastor to sit still; no sermon, no article, to think out or to write; no letters to pour into that insatiable post-office,--the true sieve of the Danaids; not even any gardening to do or to superintend; no, nothing necessary but to sit on the side of a haycock “in the leafy month of June.” We may go on and on in the round of every day’s business, on and on, unpausing, till we drop: the mere energy of spinning may keep us up, though perhaps on a weak and tottering peg; and work begets work; and busy day will chase busy day like the sails of a windmill; and we hardly dare stop, because we foreknow how we shall then have a long bill to pay, all the arrears of those fatigues and that weariness that we bade stand aside as we laboured on; and we know that if we once stop to give them a hearing, it will be hard work to set the heavy machinery going again. For myself, I often feel that to go on working, is to be able to work; to pause is to collapse, and to feel incapable. Still, in fact, we make life go farther by careful trading, than by spending all our capital at once. And both for purposes of devotional retirement and of necessary recreation, it is well sometimes just “to sport our oak” (to speak in Oxford phrase) upon the noisy and importunate throng of things clamorous to be done, and yet which, if discharged, would but give place to as many more. I could dizzy my brain with thoughts of business that I might do, and want to do. But for some weeks I have worked on and worked on, hoping to satisfy all claims; waiting for a pause, which never would come; and now I will no longer wait for it, but make it. Away! crowding calls, for this afternoon, for all the rest of this day. The wrestling, restless, toiling, moiling, weary world is quite shut out from me behind this mighty chain of haycocks. I hear the sharpening of scythes, and their long sweep in the bending swathes; once or twice in the afternoon a cuckoo sails with broad wing over me, and voice which stammers now near the end of his monotonous but prized oration; there is a scattered rain of larks’ songs falling all around; and, on a hedge near by, the short plaintive cadence of the yellow-hammer’s few notes.

Grass is always beautiful,--thus I am led to think as, leaning on one arm, I inspect the material of my couch. Beautiful after the winter lethargy, and when it grows lush and green, vividly green, and taller and taller under the showers, at the roots of the pines that step forward here and there from the shrubberies into the lawn. Beautiful again, when the scythe and mowing-machine have destroyed _this_ beauty, and substituted that of the smooth, well-kept velvet sward. Beautiful, growing in the meadows, and deepening for hay; a sweet close under-growth of white or dull pink clover; of orange-flowered trefoil; of purple self-heal; of bright yellow-rattle; of small red orchis; of orchis pale lilac specked with dark; and, more desultory and thinner, above these the tall grass and flower-stalks: “all grass of silky feather”; bright rose ragged-robin; white ox-eye daisy; brimstone toad-flax; tall buttercups; pale pink centaury; numberless varieties of fringed flowers, all yellow; and bobbing myriads of the ribwort plantain, to which we are all, when children, very Henry VIII.’s; tall slight sorrel; tougher dock. Beautiful, when the scythe has laid all this in broad, lowly lines upon the whole face of the field; and the mowers advance yet steadily upon the long yielding ranks. Beautiful when the green has turned grey, and the brighter colours of the flowers are dull, the clover not yet brown, only faded, the yellow tassels showing, as they droop, the paler under-wing of the closing flower, the buttercups spoiled of their square varnished petals, and showing only the green spiked ball, the miniature head of Gog or Magog’s mace. Beautiful to lie in the grey mounds of the soft, fragrant, new-made hay, dying, if this be to die, so graciously, and sweetly, and blessingly; lovely in life, and sweet in death. Beautiful when even this bloom-grey has gone, and we shake out from their close-pressed sleep the loose masses of the yellow hay, and brown leaves and flowers, all, however, still fragrant, and full of hints in Winter days, of the warm Summer. Beautiful when the last cart is carried, and the rick is being thatched, and a pale bright under-growth has given to the dry hot field, in the parched Summer-time, something of a faint imitation of the early green of Spring.

So I lean, listless, idle, and examine my couch. Much I find to examine in it; besides the embalmed flowers, there is a small zoological garden--brown ants climbing up the pole of an upright grass-stem; leopard-spotted lady-birds; alligator grasshoppers; woolly-bear caterpillars; bird-of-paradise butterflies. I am left alone with these, and so can be quite quiet; for I am in the rear of the haymakers.

“All in a row
Advancing broad, or wheeling round the field,
While, as they rake the green-appearing ground,
And drive the dusky wave along the mead,
The russet haycock rises thick behind.”

And my couch is one of these same pale hills that they have done with. My wife is away with the children: I shall not therefore run the risk of being buried, with shouts, under the piled heaps of the hay. My servant has gone out for a walk: I thus escape the apprehension of seeing her advance into my field steering among the haycocks, and, with hand shading her eyes, looking about all over its wide glare for me. I can lean on this arm until it is tired, then change to the other, then lie on my back and watch the fleecy blue, with handkerchief spread for fear of insects; then turn over again, and resume my inspection of the grass. I am thus particular in description, because I would fain carry my hay-field into hot London. A few distinct details may help out many a memory; and the clerk really in the baking, staring London street may yet, if his imagination be my ally, lean back among the yielding warm-breathed hay to muse with me upon the grass and its teachings.

For it is, after all, impossible to be absolutely doing nothing. The mind, that busy alchemist, works on and works on in the worn laboratory of the body, and transmutes gold into earth, or earth into gold, as the case may be, in its peculiar crucible. And so, since I cannot but muse on the hay into which I am closely peering, I may as well also jot my musings down.

* * * * *

Flesh, and grass: how natural the now common-place connection between the short-lived beauty of the two! It is one of those commonplaces, however, which new thoughts could not easily better. The hay-fields, with their life and glee, and loveliness of flowers just now, and now these faded mounds! The generations of men in the gaiety or toil of the world, and then the churchyard with its “shadowed swells”! Half a year for the one growth, and sometimes less, sometimes more, for the other; but all lying in the bending swathes at last. Take the extreme case:

“All the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine
years.”

Was flesh like grass then? What! a thousand years akin to the life of a few months? Yes, closely akin; banded together by the last words of the life of both; for how ends the short history of the longest liver of mortal men?

“----_and he died._”

Yea, the growth, the ripening was longer in progress, but the scythe came at last:

“The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry?
All flesh is grass,--and all the goodliness thereof is as the
flower of the field;
The grass withereth, the flower fadeth.”

And again:

“Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble.
He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down:
He fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.”

And again:

“As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so
he flourisheth.
For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone;
And the place thereof shall know it no more.”

And again:

“In the morning they are like grass which groweth up;
In the morning it flourisheth and groweth up;
In the evening it is cut down, and withereth.”

Oh, faded couch on which I lean, here are witnesses enough of the highest authority of all, to establish a brotherhood between us! I look at these hands which can write and work, I look at these limbs which can rise and go, I consider the brain which can busily toil:--and from these I turn to regard the dry heap that once was living grass;--and I think how slack, and void of energy, and lifeless will these also lie, in the long swathes which ever and ever fall before the advancing mower, Death.

“‘Consider well,’ the voice replied,
‘His face, that two hours since hath died;
Wilt thou find passion, pain, or pride?’”

No; each lies in that especial long line of mown grass that we call his generation:

“Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now
perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any
thing that is done under the sun.”

Flesh, and grass: are they not akin? These ever-succeeding generations;--how the grass still grows after every mowing.

“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh”;

--there is not a word of abiding at all, says Archbishop Leighton. But, however, there is a notice of constant succession, and the grass grows as fast as it is mown. Load after load is added to the store of Eternity; but the mower Death knows no pause. Ever and ever the tall grass and the sweet flowers bend before that industrious scythe. Where is the glad growth of fifty years ago; and where the life that preceded that; and so on, back to Adam? In long fallen ranks they lie, generation parallel with generation, all across the wide field of the world’s history. Flowers, and plain grass, and wholesome fodder, and prickly thistles, and poison weeds, they bowed at the edge of the scythe; so far they are equal:

“There is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to
the good and to the clean, and to the unclean; to him that
sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not; as is the good,
so is the sinner; and he that sweareth, as he that feareth an
oath. This is an evil among all things that are done under the
sun, that there is one event unto all.”

Yes, all lie in the swathes, and are equal there; the almost bitter saying of the wise man, to whom sin had made even wisdom sadness, is so far true. True while we consider the field after the scythe; true while we look on Death, but not applying any longer when we imagine the Resurrection. A very Life shall revive, or a very Death shall wither, each stalk of the myriads that lie waiting in the field, each in the place where it fell.

* * * * *

I cannot help being also reminded by this history of mowing and growing, of the special field of each human life, with its ever springing, ever falling hopes and dreams. One day it is a carpet of brightness and glory; the next, the withered lines lie on the bare field. Yet look closer, and you will find already the tender green of a new growth appearing to clothe the scarred meadow. A constant succession, ever mown and still growing; every year and often in the year a fresh attire, however the heart, when that common-place desolation was new to it, refused in dismay to believe in the possibility of any further crops. Fond thing! even while it thus protested, _the grass had already begun to grow_; and it was in vain to try in sullenness or self-respect to check the smiling flowers that _would_ crowd up over the ruin. Many a one of us can say, of some past sorrow, that,

“When less keen it seemed to grow,
I was not pleased--I wished to go
Mourning adown this vale of woe,
For all my life uncomforted.”

It could not be, except in the case of a hypochondriac. In healthy lands the growth cannot be checked.

“I thought that I should never more
Feel any pleasure near me glow”:

and again:

“I grudged myself the lightsome air,
That makes men cheerful unaware;
When comfort came, I did not care
To take it in, to feel it stir.”

After that devastating flood you did not care to take in the dove with the olive-leaf; you had rather sit moodily alone. Very well for a time, but “will you nill you,” the second crop begins to cover the scars. And soon you can tranquilly and thankfully say,

“But I have learned, though this I had,
’Tis sometimes natural to be glad,
And no man can be always sad,
Unless he wills to have it so.”

For it is an ordinance of God that the grass shall keep on growing.

* * * * *

But, of course, especially, and above all, the analogy before indicated is that which connects this brief life of ours with the grass of the field. We are, above all, alike in our _frailty and evanescence_.

“All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the
flower of grass.
The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away.”

How exquisitely Archbishop Leighton comments upon this text! An idea so anciently true as almost to have become, in our ordinary speech, common-place, blossoms into new beauty under his holy thought. So, however, do what seem to ordinary thinkers bare rods in the teaching of the Bible, yet bloom and bear fruit abundantly in the shrine of a congenial heart. “All flesh is as grass.” Yes, he expands it, and “grass hath its root in the earth, and is fed by the moisture of it for awhile; but, besides that, it is under the hazard of such weather as favours it not, or of the scythe that cuts it down, give it all the forbearance that may be, let it be free from both those, yet how quickly will it wither of itself! Set aside those many accidents, the smallest of which is able to destroy our natural life, the diseases of our own bodies and outward violences, and casualties that cut down many in their greenness, in the flower of their youth, the utmost term is not long; in the course of nature it will wither. Our life indeed is a lighted torch, either blown out by some stroke or some wind; or, if spared, yet within awhile it burns away, and will die out of itself.”

A new idea is here given us as to the mowing. This poet makes the scythe to be the sweeping of disease or accident or violence that every day prostrate their thousands; accidents or violence represent the mowing; and there is, beside these, the withering too. As though a field of deep grass should be left unmown; yet how soon then would its life and light and laughter depart, and a skeleton array of thin, sere, shivering yellow stalks meet the October winds. Even if unmown, we must wither, and either will at times seem saddest to us, until we remember that this field is but the field of Time, and that the eternal God is ordering all.

But Leighton proceeds to develope another exquisite thought, which to many would lie hidden and unperceived in the short and simple word of God--“All flesh is as grass, _and all the glory of man as the flower of grass_.” On the hint of this latter member of the sentence he speaks:

“There is indeed a great deal of seeming difference betwixt the outward conditions of life amongst men. Shall the rich and honourable and beautiful and healthful go in together, under the same name, with the baser and unhappier part, the poor, wretched sort of the world, who seem to be born for nothing but sufferings and miseries? At least, hath the wise no advantage beyond the fools? Is all grass? Make you no distinction? No; _all is grass_, or if you will have some other name, be it so; once this is true, that all flesh is grass; and if that glory which shines so much in your eyes must have a difference, then this is all it can have--it is but the flower of that same grass; somewhat above the common grass in gayness, a little comelier and better apparelled than it, but partaker of its frail and fading nature; it hath no privilege nor immunity that way; yea, of the two, is the less durable, and usually shorter lived; at the best, it decays with it--_The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away_.”

Yes, grass and its flower--loveliness, might, wisdom: Helen of Troy shared the fate of the meanest weed; Julius Cæsar and Napoleon lie with the rank and file; Solomon in his glorious wisdom is at last now equalled with those lilies of the field, that grass which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven. We in the lower rank, we mere grass of the field, look at and admire the glory above us, the flower of the grass, the choice gifts of intellect, of power, of beauty: but even as we gaze, and before the scythe can come, or the sun can wither it, we miss it--“The flower thereof fadeth, and the grace of the fashion of it perisheth”:

“The wind passeth over it, and it is gone.
And the place thereof shall know it no more.”

“The instances are not few, of those who have on a sudden fallen from the top of honour into the foulest disgraces, not by degrees coming down the stair they went up, but tumbled down headlong. And the most vigorous beauty and strength of body, how doth a few days’ sickness, or, if it escape that, a few years’ time, blast that flower!”

And, sadder still, we must feel it to be, the ornaments of the mind are as short-lived; and we watch, with the keenest regret, great intellects quenched by decay or death, and minds that are the most stored with knowledge and learning cut off in a day.

“Yea, those higher advantages which have somewhat both of truer and more lasting beauty in them, the endowments of wit, and learning, and eloquence, yea, and of moral goodness and virtue, yet they cannot rise above this world, they are still, in all their glory, but the _flower of grass_; their root is in the earth. When men have endured the toil of study night and day, it is but a small parcel of knowledge they can attend to, and they are forced to lie down in the dust in the midst of their pursuit of it; that head that lodges most sciences shall within a while be disfurnished of them all; and the tongue that speaks most languages be silenced.”

Yes, and again I look at the jumble of common grass and flower of grass, and bright blossoms all withered, in which I am reclining, and think how our bright days and our commonplace days, our ordinary life and our pageants, fade into dulness even as we live on, and are all swept down at last, as it seems to a superficial thinker, into one common oblivion by Death. “What is become of all the pompous solemnities of kings and princes at their births and marriages, coronations and triumphs? They are now as a dream.” And so with our first flushes of success, our earliest tastes of fame, our new ecstasies of love, our wonders and admirations when life was young--where are they very soon? Lying in the mown ranks, void of their living movement and vivid lustre; numbered with the heap of every-day events and emotions; still distinguished from these, still marked as flowers, but the glory of them dried out under the air of use and the sun of experience. Precious they are still, and dear, but the dreams of youth are not to Age what Youth imagined them; the hay is valuable and sweet, but it is not that field which the least air could stir into a sea of silky light and shade, and a tossing of myriad colours. It was the Flower of grass, and it cannot be, on earth, but that “_the grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away_.”

“Would we consider this, in the midst of those varieties that toss our light minds to and fro, it would give us wiser thoughts, and ballast our hearts; make them more solid and stedfast in those spiritual endeavours which concern a durable condition, a being that abides for ever; in comparison of which the longest term of natural life is less than a moment, and the happiest estate is but a heap of miseries. Were all of us more constantly prosperous than any one of us is, yet that one thing were enough to cry down the price we put upon this life, that it continues not. As he answered to one who had a mind to flatter him in the midst of a pompous triumph, by saying, What is wanting here? _Continuance_, said he.”

Yes, this is the moral of it all, “_we have no abiding city_.” What then? “_But we seek one to come._” And St. Peter, if he talk, it might seem mournfully, of the fading and dying growth from all earth’s sowings, is not really trying to sadden, but rather to cheer us. For he has been telling but just now of incorruptible seed; and he sums up the teaching of the fading grass and its withering glory, with these words of quietness and confidence,

“But the Word of the Lord endureth for ever.”

And this is always the distinction between the Worldling’s or the Sentimentalist’s cry of the vanity of human life and of its glory of hopes and loves and ambitions; and the Inspired declarations of this vanity. In the former it is but a wind which comes with a blight and passes away with a wail. In the latter, some better thing is ever held before us, to which our heart’s yearning tendrils, gently disentangled from their withering support, may safely cling: and if the vanities and emptiness of Time are clearly set before us, we are offered instead the realities and the fulness of Eternity.

“The world passeth away, and the lust thereof”;

yes; but

“He that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.”

I have mused away my afternoon, and the sun is near the hills, and this day is falling beneath the scythe, and will soon lie behind me in the swathe, as I advance upon the yet unmown field or strip of my life. There are in this flowers, and nettles, and thistles, no doubt, and much common undistinguishable grass. Ah, may it, in the end, be found to be, upon the whole, good and useful hay! Yes; but here the life of man outruns the analogy, for the days that are passed are not done with: they remain dried and stored, either to rise and revive their flowers in far more than their pristine beauty; or to be burnt as rubbish and waste. Nothing that God wrought of good or beautiful in us here, but will, fresher and fairer than at first, remain with us hereafter. And there is One for whose sake even the nettles and thistles that mixed with the useful grass and fair flowers, shall have vanished from those hearts that loved Him, and be counted as though they had never been.

Let me lie back for a little while, as the sun sets, and a cool air fans me, to quiet my heart with this happy trust and confidence.

THE BEAUTY OF RAIN.

At the time at which I am writing, a soft shower has just fallen. For months we have had scarcely any rain. Even the massed primrose roots in the hedges, with the last few stragglings of their Easter decorations here and there about them, have drooped their long broad leaves. The grass and the trees have seemed to remain at a standstill, as though waiting for something. The plough-land has stood in great unbroken lumps. The marsh-land has gaped open in huge cracks. The ponds have sunk a foot below their usual mark; the ditches give no savoury smell from their shallow green soup. The roads are like grindstones, wearing down your shoe-leather with myriad-pointed flint-powder, and your patience with loose stones that carry your legs away from your control and supervision. The roofs want washing, the drains want flooding, the butts want filling. When I pour waterpot after waterpot of water about the roots of some favourite or needy plant, the water runs off the caked ground as though it were a duck’s back; or, the mould being loosened, is sucked in, without the chance of collecting into a pool, and, seemingly, without quenching the fever-thirst of the earth.

All things and all people want rain: the farmers for their land, the cottager for his garden--a steady three or four hours’ downpour, not only such a slight shower as this, that, scarce having browned the beds, is already drying off from them.

Just now, it is certain, rain would be appreciated, but still even now more for its usefulness, than for its beauty. For the beauty of rain is a thing often missed, I think, even by those who do keep, as they pass through this world, a keen eye for the Creator’s thoughts, embodied in beauty about them: poems written on the world’s open page by the Hand of the great _Poet_, or Maker. For, rightly regarded, from the vast epic of the starry heavens, to the simple pastoral of a dewdrop, or the lyric a bird, God’s works are to us the expression of His mind, the language which conveys to us His ideas. Man’s noblest descriptive poetry--what is it but a weak endeavour to interpret to less gifted seers the beautiful thoughts of God?

And rain is one of these thoughts--a realised idea of the mind of the Almighty. And since I find, both in men and in books, a general neglect, if not a rooted dislike, with regard to rain--_as such_, and putting out of sight its _usefulness_--I shall devote a few pages to the endeavour to set forth the beauty of this thought of God.

Even Tennyson, nature-loving Tennyson, what word has he for the rain? Of Enid we are told--

“She did not weep,
But o’er her meek eyes came a happy mist,
Like that which kept the heart of Eden green
Before the _useful trouble_ of the rain.”

Nothing, then, even in the desire to praise it, better than “_useful trouble_”? I do not think that even Wordsworth dwells with much frequency or delight on this friend of mine. Longfellow has--

“The day is cold, and dark, and dreary,
It rains, and the wind is never weary.”

One who sent out, some years ago, a volume of unfulfilled promise, writes--

“How beautiful the yesterday that stood
Over me like a rainbow! I am alone,
The past is past. I see the future stretch
All dark and barren as a rainy sea.”

And so on, generally; all that is dreary, uninviting, dismal, seems connected in the English mind with rain. In the English mind, I say, for I suppose the want of appreciation of it arises from its somewhat abundance in our climate. But how differently is it regarded by the poets of an Eastern land! How beautiful the description--

“Thou visitest the earth, and waterest it;
Thou greatly enrichest it with the river of God, which is
full of water:
Thou preparest them corn, when Thou hast so provided for it:
Thou waterest the ridges thereof abundantly: Thou settlest the
furrows thereof:
Thou makest it soft with showers: Thou blessest the springing
thereof.”

How lovingly it is spoken of! That “gracious rain upon Thine inheritance,” refreshing it when it was weary; the “rain upon the mown grass, and showers that water the earth.” How its mention is a signal for thanksgiving--“Sing unto the Lord, who covereth the heaven with clouds, who prepareth rain for the earth.”

* * * * *

To be rightly appreciated in our climate, rain should certainly come after a drought. Most people, no doubt, then appreciate it, because of its watering the crops, or laying the dust. But the true lover of rain regards it not merely or chiefly in this utilitarian matter-of-fact aspect. He has a deep inner enjoyment of the rain, _as rain_, and his sense of its beauty drinks it in as thirstily as does the drinking earth. It refreshes and cools his heart and brain; he longs to go forth into the fields, to feel its steady stream, to scent its fragrance; to stand under some heavy-foliaged chestnut-tree, and hear the rushing music on the crowded leaves. Let the drought have continued two months; let the glass have been, at last, steadily falling for a day or two; let, at last, a delicious mellow gloom have overspread the hot glaring heavens; let it have brooded all day, with a constant momently yet lingering promise of rain. The cattle stand about with a sort of pleasing dreamy anticipation; they know rain is coming, and no more muddy shallow ponds, and dry choking herbage for them. The birds expect it, and chirp and nestle in the foliage, important, excited, joyful. Or some one thrush or blackbird, amid the chirping hush of the others, constitutes himself the loud spokesman of their joy. So Keble--

“Deep is the silence as of summer noon,
When a soft shower
Will trickle soon,
A gracious rain, freshening the weary bower--
Oh sweetly then far off is heard
The clear note of some lonely bird.”

And at last it comes. You hear a patter here and there; you see a leaf here and there bob and blink about you; you feel a spot on your face, on your hand. And then the gracious rain comes, gathering its forces--steady, close, abundant. Lean out of window, and watch, and listen. How delicious! The gradually-browning beds; the verandah beneath losing its scattered spots in a sheet of luminous wet; and, never pausing, the close, heavy, soft-rushing noise; the patter from the eaves, the

“Two-fold sound,
The clash hard by, and the murmur all round.”

The crisp drenching rustle from the dry foliage of the perceptibly grateful trees, broad pavilions for ever-chirping birds; the little plants, in speechless ecstasy, receiving cupful after cupful into the outspread leaves, that silently empty their gracious load, time after time, into the still expecting roots, and open their hands still for more. You can hardly leave the window. You come again at night; you have heard that ceaseless pour on the roof, on the skylight, and the loud clashing under the eaves, in the silence, as you went up late to bed. You open the window and let the mild cool air in, and look through the darkness, and listen, for you cannot see. On the vine-leaves about the casement is the steady

“Sound of falling rain;
A bird, awakened in its nest,
Gives a faint twitter of unrest,
Then smooths its plumes, and sleeps again.”

Your light shines out into the deep dark, and touches the trees just about the house, and gives a dull gleam to some portion of the streaming lines. Unwillingly you shut the window, and hear still, as you kneel and there is silence, the rushing undertone. Or, if a cool breeze arise, sudden bursts of rattling drops come impetuously against the panes, with intervals of dreamy rustling, or in quick succession. You like to hear that sound as you lie in bed, for you think of the bedding plants that you have just put out, or of the burnt patches in the lawn, or of the turnip and onion seed; or, with a larger sympathy, you think of the great thirsty fields of corn, yellowing for want of rain; of the mill-stream, so long shallow and inadequate; of the wells in the cottage-gardens about you, and their turbid or exhausted condition. You look forward, ere you lose consciousness, to how next day all vegetation will have advanced and appear refreshed.

And next morning you look out from your window, as you dress, with a deep sense of luxurious enjoyment. The rain has continued steadily all night, until six in the morning. But it has ceased now, though the warm tender gloom still continues, and only just veils the bright sun, which now and then breaks through it. As you contemplate the scene from the open window, the refreshed look of the rich brown road, that was so white and dusty, makes you long to sally forth upon it. Tearful puddles smile here and there on the walks; the drenched grass twinkles and sparkles, and reminds you of that exquisite description of “the tender grass springing out of the earth by clear shining after rain.” And, breakfast over, you walk out, through the garden gate, a little way into the road. There is a peculiar, as it were, _growing_ warmth in the air. Everything seems to have attained a week’s growth in the one night. You remark the vivid gold-green patches in the hedges. The lime-trees--indeed, all the trees--make a most effective background with their black wet stems and branches for the radiant emeralds that have burst their pink caskets all over them. The corn-blades, the hedge-banks, the drooping boughs, have all a drenched, tearfully-grateful look.

You pass, well pleased, back into the garden again. How well the peas show in the dark mould, and how much taller are they than they were yesterday! The dull green of the potatoes, that appeared but here and there last time you looked, seems now to cover the beds. The little crumpled flowers of the currant and gooseberry bushes have developed all over them into many blossom-laden strings. In the flower-beds the annuals appear above the round sanded patches; and of the bedding plants, no geranium, heliotrope, or verbena droops a leaf. You go back into the house refreshed by the beauty of the rain, as much as vegetation has been by the rain itself. The worst of such a day is, that it makes you feel idle, indisposed to settle down to work, inclined from time to time to saunter out and watch nature chewing the cud of its late refreshment.

But this is only one example of the deliciousness of rain--one, you will say, picked, selected, exceptional. There are many other times at which it is beautiful. It is beautiful when it comes hurried and passionate, fleeing from the storm wind, hurled, like a volley of small musketry, against your streaming panes; and the few tarnished gold leaves of the beech-trees are struck down one after one by the bullets. It is beautiful in the Midsummer, when it comes in light, soft showers, or, more in earnest, accompanied with thunder-music, straight and heavy; when, as the poet says--

“Rolling as in sleep,
Low thunders bring the mellow rain.”

It is beautiful when it rains far away in the distance, the bright sun shining on the mound on which you stand, and only a few guerilla drops heralding the approach of the shower towards you. It is beautiful among leafless trees, in early Spring or late Autumn, under an avenue, or in a copse, when every long bough and black branch is glittering, strung with trembling diamonds; when, the force of the wind and rain being kept from you by the trees and underwood, the gentle sadness and quiet melancholy of the scene can be gathered into your heart. It is beautiful in a town, when you stand at the window, and watch the emptying streets; the gutters pour by in a yellow, twisted flood; the street becomes a river, and, as the sudden gust drives them before it,

“Skirmishing drops
Rush with bright bayonets across the road.”

The window is lined with rows of brilliants, that gradually grow bigger and bigger, and waver and fall, ever supplied by a constant succession of new comers, like the Scotch at Flodden,

“Each stepping where his comrade stood
The instant that he fell.”

And, since I have mostly spoken of the beauty of rain in the country, I will quote a description of its beauty in London:--

“A slight, quick, fervid shower--tears more of happiness brimming over than anger breaking its bounds--had just fallen, and pricked the dry grey pavement into a dark lace pattern of spots, out of which you could select the newest by their being sharper in outline and darker than the rest. The aristocracy of five minutes ago, and the parvenues of the last moment, alike, as the soft warm rain fell now quicker and more petulantly passionate, melting one into the other, losing shape, place, and purpose, as the stone washed luminous brown, and transparent as slabs of Cairngorm agate.”

Londoners caught in a shower will surely thank me for this extract, and recall the description while they admire the process.

* * * * *

But if some people, notwithstanding my special pleading, still agree with Coleridge’s address to the rain,--

“Oh, rain, that I lie listening to
You’re but a doleful sound at best,”

and echo his decision,--

“And, by the by, ’tis understood,
You’re not so pleasant as you’re good”

for these I have yet a word.

If we cannot _enjoy_, let us _accept_ rain at any rate without grumbling; ay, even though it last day after day; ay, though it spoil our pleasure-plans, or our crops--remembering at Whose ordering it comes. People who grumble at the weather always remind me of the Israelites grumbling at Moses and Aaron, the mere instruments used by the Supreme. “_What are we? Your murmurings are not against us, but against the Lord._”

From whence comes the shower that stops our pleasure-party; the drenching rain that falls, just when the hay or the corn was fit to carry? If such events move our ill-temper, or make us irritable and angry (and many are apt to be so), with whom is it that we are vexed? who has aggrieved us so that we speak as injured persons? Let us have a care. What is that “it” that we speak of as being “tiresome,” “annoying”? The clouds, the winds, the rain--_what are these, that we murmur against them?_ Are not such murmurings really against the Sender, if we trace them home? Such a result is commonly born of thoughtlessness more than of purpose. But that will not excuse it.

“Evil is wrought by want of thought,
As well as want of heart.”

But evil it still is, and must remain. Therefore grumbling at the weather appears to me to be something more than foolish and ungrateful. A little thought on the matter seems to mark it as impious and profane. A heathen philosopher would have despised the _silliness_ of losing the balance of your temper, when there is no one that you dare blame for the cause. A Christian ought surely to soar beyond this, and, in things little or large, to accustom himself to recognise a Father’s ordering, and cheerfully to accept it, as sure to be the best and wisest.

I said a heathen might despise the folly of those who lose their temper because it rains. A beautiful anecdote occurs to me, which I met with in a very pleasant book, “Domestic Life in Palestine,” by Mary Eliza Rogers. This lady and her party were traversing, under the conduct of their guide, the fertile plains west of the Carmel range. “Rain began to fall in torrents; Mohammed, our groom, threw a large Arab cloak over me, saying, ‘May Allah preserve you, O lady! while He is blessing the fields!’ Thus pleasantly reminded, I could no longer feel sorry to see the pouring rain, but rode on rejoicing, for the sake of the sweet Spring flowers and the broad fields of wheat and barley.”

Can you fancy a more exquisite instance of the “art of putting things”? Can you not imagine yourself positively enjoying the wetting, even though no whit alive to the beauty of rain, _as_ rain? So much depends on the manner in which a thing is put before you; so much depends on the lead which is given to your way of looking at it. Had a grumbling Christian been beside the lady instead of the at least pious-languaged Moslem, to mutter, and repine, and reiterate, “How very unfortunate” (whatever this word may mean) “we are!” would not a gloom and dulness obscure the memory of that ride, in her mind? Whereas the beautiful thought of the Arab, as it made the idea of the rain pleasant and lovely at the time, so it dwells with a rainbow brightness on all after-memories of that cloud.

But enough has been said as to the beauty of rain. It seems, after all, that much depends on our way of looking at the thing. If we regard rather the inconveniences that will sometimes attend it, we shall probably not even think of looking for the beauty that I have endeavoured to describe. But if our way is to look rather for what is pleasant than for what is disagreeable, in the common events of life; if we love nature in all her moods, and watch, with a lover’s eye, each sweet change in her face; especially if we regard God’s works as the language of God’s thoughts, and consider nothing as the offspring of chance, but all things as consequent on His ordering, who sees the sparrows fall, and by whom the very hairs of the head are all numbered--if this be our manner of regarding those dispensations which are above our control, I dare affirm that in nothing that the Great Maker expresses, shall we miss finding, not only _use_, but _beauty_. And if I have suggested to some minds any thoughts that may hereafter lead them to share my love for the beautiful rain, I rejoice that I have been to them the exponent of a beauty that they have missed hitherto; and I shall receive their gratitude when the soft showers come that water the earth. And if my meditations be read, unhappily for them, not during a dearth, but during a glut of rain, my pleasant labour will not have been in vain, if, though failing to make many admirers, I yet quiet some fretfulness, and correct some thoughtless repining. Some rain, as well as some days, must be dark and dreary. But, after all, it rather receives its tinge of pleasantness or gloom from the colour of our own mind at the time, than itself influences our thoughts. Let there be within us the clear shining of a contented mind, and the darkest clouds will never want for a rainbow. Yea, such a mind, predisposed to enjoy and admire all that the Creator sends, will need no mediation of an interpreter to bid it discern and gather in for itself the exceeding beauty of rain.

AUTUMN DAYS.

Entering upon the last week of August, I may call the year still Summer,--yes, still Summer, but the Autumn days are drawing near. “_September_”--directly I pen that word in the right-hand corner of my letters, a great gap seems to have opened between the Summer and me. Autumn days are here: the gladness and glee of the year have gone, and a tender sweet sadness and mellow lucid gloom seem to have gathered over the still calm expecting landscape. The corn is all cut and carried, the pale stubble fields, edged with the deep green hedges, lie a little blankly on the hill-side or in the valley; the brighter Summer-shoots of the elms and the apple-trees have all sobered down now into uniform darkness; the little blue harebells tremble in clusters on the dried sunny hedge-banks; the gossamers twinkle on the grass, late into the morning, with a thick dew that has not yet quite made up its mind to be frost. The partridges whirr up from under your feet as you throw your leg over that stile; the rooks wheel home much earlier to bed. The fungus tribe begins to look up, and after a shower you come suddenly, as you cross the meadow, upon a cluster of buff-white mushrooms, with the delicious rose-grey under their eaves, and gathering them for the wife at home, you wander here and there to catch the white gleam among the grass, and are pleased, when successful, as a child with his first Spring daisies. Quiet, tenderly-sad Autumn days, after the harvest is gathered in and the plums are picked!

“Autumn! Forth from glowing orchards stepped he gaily, in a gown
Of warm russet, freaked with gold, and with a visage sunny brown;
And he laughed for very joy, and he danced from too much pleasure,
And he sang old songs of harvest, and he quaffed a mighty measure.

But above this wild delight an overmastering graveness rose,
And the fields and trees seemed thoughtful in their absolute repose;
And I saw the woods consuming in a many-coloured death--
Streaks of yellow flame, down-deepening through the green
that lingereth;

Sanguine flushes, like a sunset, and austerely-shadowing brown.
And I heard within the silence the nuts sharply rattling down;
And I saw the long dark hedges all alight with scarlet fire,
Where the berries, pulpy-ripe, had spread their bird-feasts
on the briar.”

We have here, save for some little flaws, a perfect painting of the intensely still, calm, expecting attitude of nature, the absolute repose of the year, which rests by its work done, and asks, in a quiet peace, in a deep trust, of the All-wise and the All-loving, “What next?”

“Calm is the morn without a sound,
Calm as to suit a calmer grief,
And only through the faded leaf,
The chestnut pattering to the ground.”

Autumn days! I think they would be very sad indeed if we could only see decay in them, and if God had not put a little safe bud and germ of hope into every bulb and upon every branch--a promise of future life amid universal death: just as He put that green promise-bud into the heart of Adam and Eve, when such a dreadful death had gathered about the present and the future for them--declaring, to their seemingly victorious foe, of the woman’s seed, that

“It shall bruise thy head.”

A tiny dear little germ of a bud, and oh, how many hundred Summers and Winters passed before it developed into the glorious perfect flower! And so now there is yet a sadness, but only a cheery, gentle, tender sadness, about Autumn days to the heart that is waiting for God. And it seems to me wonderful that He should have given us one of His own minstrels to sit on the twigs as they grow bare and lonely-looking, and to express to us just the feeling that Autumn calls up within the heart, and that we yearn to have set to music for us. The little Robin waits his time; he does not cease, indeed, to trill his note in Spring, although we do not notice him then amid our blackbirds and thrushes and blackcaps and nightingales; for he is very humble-hearted, and content to be set aside when we can do without him. But Autumn days come, and the nightingale has fled, and the blackcap is far away, and the lark and the thrush and the blackbird are silent;--then the robin draws near. Close to our houses he comes, with his cheery warm breast, and kind bright eye, and his message from God. And then he interprets the Autumn to us, in those broken, tenderly-glad thrills of song, that, simple though they be, can sometimes disturb the heart with beauty that it cannot fathom, but that agitates and shakes it even to the sudden brimming of the eyes with tears. “Yes, it _is_ sad,” he says, “to see the flowers dying, and the leaves falling, and the harvest over. It _is_ sad--not a little sad--still, cheer up, cheer up; have a good heart. God has told me, and my little warm heart knows, that it is not _all_ sad. I know it is not. I can’t tell why. But it can’t be all sad; for God sent me to sing in the Autumn days. He taught me my song, and I know that there is a great deal in it about peace and joy. And it must be right; for though my nest is choked up, and my little ones are flown, and my mate has left me, I can’t help singing it. Cheer up. It is sad, but not all sad. Peace and joy--joy and peace.”

“The morning mist is cleared away,
Yet still the face of heaven is grey,
Nor yet th’ autumnal breeze has stirred the grove,
Faded, yet full, a paler green
Skirts soberly the tranquil scene,
The red-breast warbles round this leafy cove.