The Harvest of a Quiet Eye.

With Numerous Illustrations by
Noel Humphreys, Harrison Weir, Wimperis Pritchett, Miss Edwards,
and other eminent Artists.

THE HARVEST OF A QUIET EYE.

LEISURE THOUGHTS
FOR
BUSY LIVES.

By the Author of “My Study Chair,” “Musings,” etc.

LONDON:
THE RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY,
56, Paternoster Row; 65, St. Paul’s Churchyard;
And 164, Piccadilly.

“The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley he has viewed;
And impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude.

“In common things that round us lie,
Some random truths he can impart,
—The harvest of a quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on his own heart.”

WORDSWORTH.

CONTENTS.

Preface

These papers, written in the intervals of parish work, have appeared in the pages of the Leisure Hour and the Sunday at Home. Their publication in a collected form having been decided upon by others, it only remained for me, by careful revision and excision, to render them as little unworthy as might be of starting for themselves in the wide world.

I shall not say that I am sorry that they are thus sent forth on their humble mission. Indeed, I am glad. “Brief life is here our portion”:—and surely the wish is one natural to all earnest hearts, that our work for our Master in this sad and sinful world should not have its term together with the quick ending of our short day’s labour here:—and a book has the possibility of a longer life than that of a man. The Night cometh, when none can work; how sweet, if it might be, that when the day is ended, when the warfare, for us, is over, we may have left some strong watchwords, or some comfortable and cheering utterances, still ringing in the ears of those who stepped into our place in the unbroken ranks.

Yes, the evening soon falls on the field; the day is brief, nor fully employed; inanimate things seem to have an advantage over us; streams flow on, and mountains stand;

“While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise,
We men, who, in our morn of youth, defied
The elements, must vanish:—be it so!
Enough, if something from our hands have power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour.”

And I may be permitted to hope that possibly these meditations may have such power and perform such, service in their modest way. They have but the ambition of a flower that looks up to cheer, or a bird’s note that tranquilly, amid storms, continues a simple melody from the heart of its tree. They will, like these, be easily passed by, but, like these, may have a message for hearts that will look and listen.

There is certainly, in the present age, a want of writing that shall rest and brace the mind; of meditative writing of a tendency merely holy and practical, rather shunning than plunging into controversy:—not the cry of the angry or startled bird, but its evening and morning orisons rather. A contemplative strain; one linked with things of earth, and hallowing them—one heard beside “the common path that common men pursue”:—one rising from the common work-a-day experiences, joys, and pains—rising from these and carrying them up with it heavenward, until even earth’s exhalations catch the light of an unearthly glory. We want more of this spiritual rest; more of this standing apart from the perturbations of the day; more of retirement and retired thought—thought that shall leave the throng, with its absorbed purpose and pushing and jostling, always eager, often angry; and having secured a lonely standing-point apart from it all, become better able to judge of the real truth and importance, also of the just relation of things.

I cannot claim to have done more than make a slight attempt towards the supply of this want. Nay, I would rather lay claim not to have attempted. This is the age of effort and strain; it were well that thought were sometimes permitted to be natural, spontaneous, and simply expressive of that which the heart’s meditations have laid by in store. A stream thus welling up will want the precision and the single aim of the artificial jet, but it will have its modest use and value to cheer and to refresh lowly grasses, and perhaps to water the roots of loftier growths in its vagaries and meanderings.

In these times men will be held nothing if not controversial; and rival parties will skim the book for shibboleths before they read or throw it by. Assuredly fixed principles and definite teaching are (if ever at one time more than another) of special importance in the present day; and I am not one who think it well to blow both hot and cold at pleasure. Only I would ask, is there absolute need that we be always blowing either? may we not sometimes be permitted simply to breathe? There are occasions on which I find myself compelled to blow one or the other, but I grudge the good breath spent in the exertion, and prefer to return to the normal state of even respiration. A story, told of Archbishop Leighton’s youth, is to the point:—“In a synod he was publicly reprimanded for not ‘preaching up the times.’ ‘Who,’ he asked, ‘does preach up the times?’ It was answered that all the brethren did it. ‘Then,’ he rejoined, ‘if all of you preach up the times, you may surely allow one poor brother to preach up Christ Jesus and eternity.’”

No doubt, we must be militant here on earth, militant against every form of error—old error undisguised, and old error in a new dress; but the more need that we should secure breathing times when we may sheathe the biting sword and lay the heavy armour by. Perhaps many with whom we war, or from whom we stand aloof in suspicion, would be found, when the vizors were raised, to be brothers, and henceforth warriors by our side.

One word as to the title of this book. “The Harvest of a Quiet Eye.” This has always been a favourite line with me, and now I take it to describe my unpretentious volume, though this be rather a handful gleaned than a harvest got in. With some people this gleaning by the way would be contemned, in their single-eyed advance upon some goal; with some it is a thing continual and habitual, this instinctive gathering and half-unconscious storing of hints and touches of wayside beauty—a process so well described in Wordsworth’s verses. To have an eye for the wide pictures and slight studies of Nature; to gather them up, in solitary walks which thus are not lonely; to lay them by, together with the heart’s deeper thoughts, its associations, meditations, and reminiscences;—this is to fashion common things into a beauty which, to the fashioner at least, may be a joy for ever.

“To see the heath-flower withered on the hill,
To listen to the woods’ expiring lay,
To note the red leaf shivering on the spray,
To mark the last bright tints the mountain stain,
On the waste fields to trace the gleaner’s way,
And moralise on mortal joy and pain,”

—this has been with me the secondary occupation of many a walk, solitary or in company. A rosy sunbeam slanting down a bank, and catching the stems of the ferns and the tops of the grasses; a coral twist of briony berries; a daisy in December;—the eye would be caught, and the train of grave or anxious musing intermitted without being broken off, by the ever-allowed claim of Nature’s silent poetry. And often the deeper meaning of such poetry would run parallel with the mind’s thought—sometimes suggest for it a new path.

“Few ears of scattered grain.” Though this be all my harvest, yet if that be grain at all which has been collected, it may have its use. He who with a very little fed a great multitude, has a ministry for even our humble handfuls. At His feet be this laid: may He accept and bless it, and deign to refresh and hearten by its means some few at least of those who, faint and weary, are following Him in the wilderness of this world!

THE OLD YEAR AND THE NEW.

A HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Words repeated by how many myriads, in how many zones—tropic, temperate, frigid, wherever the English tongue is spoken! Words said commonly with more of meaning and sincerity than fall to the lot of many almost-of-course salutations. Words in which there is a shade of melancholy, and a gleam of gladness; a lingering of regret, with the very new birth of anticipation. “A Happy New Year.”

Ah, but it is not unlike parting with an old friend, the saying good-bye to the Old Year. And it seems unkind to turn from him who has so long dwelt with us, and to take up too jauntily with a new friend.

He had his faults: but, at any rate, we know them; and those of the new-comer have yet to be discovered. And his virtues seem to stand out in bolder relief, now that we feel that we shall never see him again. Such experiences, too, we have had together! we have been sad and merry in company, and the days of our past society come with a warm rush to our heart:—

“Though his eyes are waxing dim,
And though his foes speak ill of him,
He was a friend to me.”

And so we keep hold still of his hand, loth, very loth indeed to part—as we sit in silence by the flickering fire, and listen to the sudden bursts and sinking of the bells.

It is our habit—(I speak in the name of myself, and of many of my readers)—it is an immemorial custom with us, to assemble, all that can do so, in the old home, from which we have at different times taken wing—to gather together there again, on the last night of the Old Year. I have heard the plan objected to, but I never heard any objections that to my mind seemed weighty ones. True, the gaps that must come from time to time, are perhaps most of all brought prominently, sadly before us, at such a gathering as this. We miss the husband, the brother, the sweet girl-daughter, the little one’s pattering feet—ah, sorely, sorely then! Last year the familiar face was here, and now, now, far away, under the white sheet of snow. This is sad, but it is not a mere unstarlit night of gloom. Nay, I maintain that, to those who look at it rightly, more and brighter stars of comfort shine out then than at other times to compensate for the deepening dark. There is the comfort of sympathy, and of seeing in all surrounding faces how the lost one was loved. But, especially, it seems as though, when all are met again, he may not be far away from the circle that was so unbroken upon earth:—

“Nor count me all to blame if I
Conjecture of a stiller guest,
Perchance, perchance, among the rest,
And, though in silence, wishing joy.”

And most of all, there is the old-fashioned, but ever new comfort—balm, indeed, of Gilead, for every bereaved heart.

“I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope.

“For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him.”

And these home gatherings, yearly growing more incomplete, and yearly increasing, lead the heart to glad thought of that reunion hereafter, in that House of our Father in which the mansions are many, the Home, one.

Well, you are gathered, my friend and reader, you and your dear ones, about your father’s fireside on this last night of the Old Year. The hours have stolen on: at ten o’clock the servants came in, and the last family prayers have been offered up, and the last thanksgiving of the assembled household for this year; and the chamber candlesticks have been set out, and the father has drawn his chair near the fire, and another log cast upon it crackles and flashes; and each and all announce the intention of seeing the Old Year out and the New Year in.

Cheery talk, reminiscent talk, pensive talk, thankful talk; a little silence. The wind flaps against the window, and throws against it a handful of the Old Year’s cast-off leaves. The clock on the mantelpiece gives eleven sharp, clear tings. The year has but an hour to live. And now the wind brings up a clear ring of bells; and then sinks, that the Old Year may die in peace, and his requiem be well heard over the waking land.

But an hour to live! And the burden of depression that ever comes with the exceeding sweetness of bells, loads, grain after grain, the descending scale of your spirits. It is a solemn time, a time for quiet: a time in which it is well to leave even the dear faces, and to get you apart alone with God.

So you steal away from the fireside blaze; and ascend the creaking stairs, and enter your own room; and close the door, even as a dear Friend long ago advised; and offer the last worship of the year—confessions, supplications, intercessions, praises. You go over the dear names, sweet beads of the heart’s rosary, telling them one by one to God, with their several wants and needs. You mention once more the special blessings to them and to yourself of the past year. You put, once more, all the future for them and for you into that kind, wise Father’s hand; and you feel rested then, and at peace. A few words read, for the last time this year, in the Book of books; and now there is yet a little space for quiet thought about the dying year, before his successor enters at the door.

And it is then, as you sit pensively before the dancing fire, alone in your silent room—while the bell music now comes in bursts, and now dies in whispers—that a sort of abstract of many thoughts that have hovered about you all day is summoned up before your mind. It is the hour of soft regret, helped, I say, by those merry, melancholy bells, which

“Swell up and fail, as though a door
Were shut between you and the sound.”

You have had your sad times in the year that is so nearly dead; you have shed your bitter tears; you have had your lonely hours, your weariness of this unsatisfying, disappointing world. Unkindness, estrangement, bereavement, intense solitariness of the spirit, when it is conscious that not another being than the Creator can ever understand, far less supply, its want, or heal its woe—these experiences, these wearing, shaping, refining operations of the kind Father are part of your memories of the dying year. While their bitterness was present with you, you would have said that it was impossible that you could ever regret to part with the year that brought them. “Ring out,” you would have said, “ring out, wild bells, this unkind and bitter year; this year that hath brought a blight over my life; this year that hath dispelled the dreams of youth, and changed into a wilderness that which did blossom as the rose. Ring out, and let this hard year die. Fleet, hours and days and weeks and months, and set a distance between me and what I long to call the past. Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky; gladly would I say now, even now, while I listened to you—

“The year is dying—let it die!”

But those hours of bitterness are now, even now, of the past. That sharp pain, or that weary ache, is dulled, perhaps removed. Perhaps you have learned God’s lesson in it, and can thank Him, though the ache still dwells in the heart’s heart; at any rate, the Old Year is passing away; the sad Old Year, the glad Old Year; on the whole—yes, on the whole, the dear Old Year. He is with you but for a few minutes more; he has come to say good-bye.

Who does not unbend at such a time? In all the friendships, in all the ties of life, there comes up surely all the warmth, all the kindly feeling of the heart, when the time comes which is to end that connection for ever. There may have been some old grudges, discontents, heart-burnings, jealousies, disappointments. But they are forgotten now, and the eyes have a kindly light, and the lips a tender word, and the hand a hearty shake, when it has indeed come to saying good-bye.

And so with the Old Year, whatever he has been to us, whatever little disagreements we may have had, whatever heart-burnings, they are not much remembered now.

It is a friend that is leaving you, you are not glad to part with him; good-bye, Old Year, good-bye.

Another regretful thought, as the twilight flickers and dances on the blind, and those bells still dance hand-in-hand, row after row, close up to the window, and still pass away hardly perceived into the distant fields. The dying Year brought some happiness, some love; this is now warm and safe in the nest of the heart; the coming time may fledge it, and it may, some summer day, take sudden wing and fly.

“He brought me a friend, and a true, true love,
And the New Year will take ’em away.”

Youth is especially the time, perhaps, for a sort of tender prophetic hint of the evanescence and passing away of hopes, loves, dreams. It is indeed but a rose-leaf weight on the heart, but a gossamer passing across the sun; yet there it frequently is. The iron hand of real crushing bereavement, of actual anguish, has never yet had the heart in its gripe, to crush out all that more tender sentiment. Yet some soft, faint shadows of darker hours do, unaccountably, fall early across the daisy fields of youth. And thus in youth a certain foreshadowing, in mature years a stern experience, brings into the heart at this time a thoughtful dread of losing what we already have; an undefinable apprehension of the future. This time next year, when the New Year has become the Old, and its time has come round to say good-bye, what changes may have come to us, to our circle, to our home! Will all be then as it is now? Will love, perhaps newly-acquired, still nestle in our heart, or will it have even taken wings like a dove, and have left it—

“Like a forsaken bird’s nest filled with snow”?

Oh, who shall tell? Answer, quiet heart, that hast learned to trust in God; and rest, rest peacefully, brightly, hopefully, on the answer that God hath taught thee!

But a quarter of an hour left now of the Old Year’s life! and the wind brings the bells in a sudden burst like rain against the window. Before you join the group downstairs there is yet another, the saddest subject for regretful thought. The past hours of the past days of the year nearly past might have been better spent, oh, how much so, than they have been!

“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” Has that been the rule of the past year? Ah, if it had been, how different a year to look back upon! How many opportunities neglected altogether! How many but weakly and slackly employed! Opportunities that can never come again, that, employed or neglected, are past now. The word that might have done infinite good, but that was not spoken—cowardice, weak complaisance, in a word, worldliness, God’s enemy, fettered the tongue: excuses were ready, though the heart did not believe them, and God’s soldier failed, and the devil had the better of that field. Again, actions, that sloth or love of worldly ease caused to die out into smoke when they should have been eager leaping fire. An opportunity came, once and again, of doing something for God. The duty was a laborious one, a painful one; nevertheless, however painful, it must be done; you had resolved that it should be done; you had even sought help upon your knees for the work. But mark the carnal coward spirit creeping over the spiritual manly resolve: a friend came in, a persuasion turned you; your heart, alas! hardly really in earnest, did not set itself as a flint to its purpose; too willing to be turned aside, it basely accepted the tempting excuse, and laboured thereupon to believe itself really acquitted from the duty. Those opportunities passed away, the noble action was not done, the faithful word was never spoken, the heart’s reproaches became dull, and the duty ceased its ceaseless gnawing at the conscience. But amid the fitful sinking and falling of the firelight and the bells as you sit on the rug, hand-shading your eyes—the neglected opportunity comes back, with all its reproach, even newer and keener than at the first; back again to accuse your faint-heartedness, to upbraid your lukewarm love; to tell you of One who died for you, and yet for whom you shirk the least distasteful labour, the least taking up the cross, and denying yourself to follow Him.

And, besides all this, when you think of the whole past year, even of its hours (how few, and how grudged!) when you have tried to do the work which the Master put into your power to perform for Him, how conscious you are of the want of heart in even your best endeavours; you cannot but feel how hard the world’s votaries have been working for their master, and how slackly you have been labouring for your Master and only Saviour—how they have been running, with eyes fixed on the goal; and how you have been hobbling and limping, looking behind, and on this side and on that, not with single purpose, pressing towards the mark—ah, no!

And you think, then, what this life might have been—might be. A life that looked straight forward, that turned not to the right hand nor to the left, that paused for no alluring of pleasure, for no constraining of business—

“This way and that dividing the swift mind,”

and wasting its energy and powers. A life that set God first, utterly first; that shouldered aside the world’s jostling, distracting importunities; that left the little concerns, the little loves, the little jealousies of this brief life, staring after its eager, swift, stedfast advance, whenever they would have interposed to hinder it. A life that really and in good earnest, not half-heartedly and in pretence, should leave all to follow Christ. Something of the unflinching, unswerving, unpausing persistency of those old Jesuits; only in the service of Christ, and not in that of the Pope and the Inquisition. You think of a St. Paul, and his onward, onward still, “in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness,” and you think of your lagging, loitering——!

Ah, well, that is best: on your knees once more, for pardon and for grace—grace to love Him more and serve Him better in the year so near at hand! God shall wipe away all those tears that love for Him made to flow, and the blessed Saviour’s perfect righteousness shall hide all our vile and miserable rags; yet even the saved, we can almost fancy, will wish with a feeling akin to regret, to have loved the blessed Lord more; and he who has gained but five pounds will surely wish that it had been ten. For our opportunities, it often seems to me, are such as angels might long to have. Where all are serving God, and we have no longer a sinful nature dragging us back, nor a glittering world around us, nor a subtle tempter at our ear—it will seem little, methinks, to serve God then and there. But now, and here, in a world lying in wickedness, where the more part are not on Christ’s side, but rather leagued with or deserters to the devil, the world, and the flesh—oh, what an Abdiel opportunity to stand up, a speaking, living protest in life’s least and greatest thought, word, and act; a burning and a shining light, reflecting the beams of the Sun of Righteousness in a dark and naughty world!

Ah, may this quiet hour of thought, of regretful meditation, by God’s grace, be the point on which you have collected your powers and energies for a forward spring, that shall not grow slack through eternity!

Five minutes to twelve now. The hour of Regret is near its close. The hour of Anticipation is close at hand. The Old Year’s bells are running down, and the Old Year’s life is passing with them. Five minutes more. First you bow your head, and adore the Almighty and the All-loving—God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost—for the Past, for the Present, and for the Future. Then you go downstairs, according to old custom, to join the rest of the dear circle at the open window, and to listen for the ceasing of the bells.

They are gathered at the window, standing quietly and thoughtfully; those that are nearest and dearest linked with loving arms; they are silent, or speak in a subdued tone. You might almost think that they were indeed standing by some bedside, watching the last breathing of a friend; for a solemn thing it is, the passing from one to another of these stepping-stones in the brook of life, and seeing the other shore seem to gather a more distinct shape through the mist of the future.

You join the group. A cold, moist air, full of films of snow, comes out of the dark night into the warm, bright room. The bells are running away; you might almost fancy them the sands, the last few grains of the Old Year’s life. Suddenly they stop, and in the breathing silence a deep clang falls from the church tower,—another,—ten more yet,—and the Old Year is dead.

“A happy New Year!—a happy New Year!” Warm kisses, and hearty shakes of the hand, and, like the crash of a great breaker that has seemed to pause for a moment in the air, down bursts the glad, the melancholy ring of bells again, and floods the bare shore of silence,—still lingering, seething, receding, gathering into new bursts again, and yet again.

A happy New Year! The Past is past, the Old Year is dead, the hour of Regret is gone by, the time of Anticipation is here; not good-bye now, but welcome; not lingering retrospect, but earnest advance. Life is too short for long mourning; not much time can be spared to meditate by the fresh grave of the past. Forward, towards the unknown future: grasp its opportunities, its sorrows, its joys, to be woven into some fabric for the Master’s use! On, towards the untried future, bravely, trustfully, hopefully, cheerfully; but remember you can never overtake it. It changes into the present even as you come up with it; and it is now, or never, that you must be serving God.

“Trust no future, howe’er pleasant,
Let the dead past bury its dead;
Act, act in the living present,
Heart within, and God o’erhead.”

But good night to all, or good morning—which?—and then upstairs, and tired, to bed. When you wake, things will go on much as usual, though the Old Year be dead, and sentry January have relieved sentry December. Only for a time you will find yourself dating still 18—, and, if untidy, you will have to smear, if tidy, to erase, the last figure, and substitute the number of your new friend.

* * * * *

Anticipation. This is especially the dower of the young, if Regret be often the possession of the old. What a strange, glorious thing a New Year is to the child! Little of the feelings that I have been describing find place in the breast of the boy and girl, that were fast asleep and warm in their beds, while you and the bells were at conference: little of such musings trouble them, as they bound out of bed in the morning, and scuttle off in their night-gowns, patter patter, in a race, to be the first to wish father and mother a happy New Year. They are growing out of childhood: that is the joy for them: another of those vast periods has passed. Happy Spring, that does but long to shed and cast away her myriad white blossoms; and to rush on towards the full-grown Summer:—unknowing in the least, of the sober, misty, tear-strung, if fruitful, Autumn boughs! A happy New Year, little ones! Far be it from me to strip Spring boughs in order to imitate the Autumn which they cannot know! God keep you, my children; God teach you, and God bless you!

* * * * *

A little farther on. Anticipation is glowing warmly in the heart of the young man and the young woman. The time of childhood is left behind. The time of independence, the time of manhood, is drawing near: that time which shall transform into realities the great things,—the noble, world-stirring deeds, that have hitherto been only schemes. That time when the loves that are budding in the heart shall burst into exquisite blossoms, and never a frost nip them, and never a rude wind carry at unawares a loose petal away.

A happy New Year. The heart accepts this wish, fearlessly, without doubt, before the strife; before the rough work of a field or two in the scarce-tried warfare of life has smirched the glittering armour, and shorn the gay plumes, and changed the song before the battle into hard labouring sobs, in the stern hand-to-hand tussle with sin and with sorrow, with disappointment and dismay. Before many a scheme overturned, many a brave effort fallen dead as bullets against a stone wall, many a seeming hopeful struggle forced back by the sheer dead weight of evil, has made the heart sick and the knees to tremble, and brought an early weariness and hint of despair over the amazed Recruit; a touch of that felt by the Sage of old: “It is enough: evil is too strong for me: I can do no more than others have done before: my schemes have come to nothing, my bubbles have burst: now let me die.” But the Recruit becomes the Veteran, and is content to wait, where he was once ready to despair. He does not hope so much, and therefore is not so much dismayed; he relies now not so much on earthquake efforts, as on the still small voice uttered to the world by the life which is given to God. He is content to labour,—and to leave it to the Master to give the increase.

Yes, the young heart, even when lit with heavenly love, and full of great designs for God, must submit to the overthrow of the bright visions that anticipation set before it. How much more, when its fire was lit from earth; and earth’s loves, or fame, or pleasure, or power, were the prizes for which life’s battle was to be fought. Vanity and vexation of spirit, disappointment, dismay, despair; these are the ruins that shall be won for Moscows, if that battle be fought to the end!

A happy New Year. That glad wish of youth may come to sound, to the man, nothing but bitter irony. But much of the early hope, and more than the early peace, comes back to the veteran worker for God.

“Who, but the Christian, through all life
That blessing may prolong?
Who, through the world’s sad day of strife,
Still chant his morning song?”

A happy New Year, young man and young woman! God grant it you, in the one true sense of the word. It need not be a freedom from sorrow: this is an ennobling, useful discipline, that I may not wish you to avoid. But, to be happy, it must be free from sloth and wilful sin.

Look out from your window again, at the snow sheet which has silently, deeply, fallen upon the earth. Let it be very early in the morning, while the world is asleep and the broad moon and the glittering stars watch alone over the smooth, sparkling, white face of the land. Not a footstep, so far as you see, has impressed the smooth, pure snow; not a dark cart-track has yet left a long stain on the spotless road. No thawing penitential drippings have made dark wells in it here and there; no rude sweeping has piled the snow in stained heaps hither and thither by the path. All is yet pure, untouched, undefiled.

This is the New Year upon which we have entered, as we look at it from the casement of the Old Year, before yet one step has been placed on its first moment. All as yet unstained, and white, and calm.

For how short a time to remain so! Can we set our first step upon it without somewhat marring its virgin beauty? And then the traffic, the hurrying of many feet, the crushing of many wheels; thought, word, and deed, too often unwatched and unsanctified by prayer; oh, what a change soon, and how short a time that purity and calm has lasted!

New Year; clean New Year; how dark, how defiled, how changed will you be, when you also are now waxing old, and ready to vanish away! The white virgin opportunity all passed by, leaving dark, dreary, sodden fields, and roads churned up into yellow mud. The clinging spotless moments—flakes that, in innumerable combination, made up the great stainless carpet of the untrodden New Year; for them there will be many a trickling rivulet of penitential tears; and the steam and mist of heavy sighs that go up to God because of life’s work too faintly, slackly done. Well then, that is well. Better, of course, if this could have been, that the pure year had remained unstained.

“My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not.”

But well, if we are indeed humbly striving, and if hearty repentance, and a true, lively, cleansing faith follow upon our many, many sad failings, faults, and shortcomings. For, sweet words!—

“If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and He is the propitiation for our sins.”

And, glorious thought! if we are indeed loving and seeking after purity and holiness, striving because of the hope within us, to purify ourselves, even as He is pure—then know this, we shall not love, and seek, and strive in vain.

“When He shall appear, we shall be like Him.”

Think of that! So that, when our last hour comes, and the bellringers are ready for us, to ring out the Old Year of this life, and to ring in the New Year of the next; and we are looking (our near and dear ones still by us) out of the casement of the Old Year of TIME, what may we then see? There shall be stretched out before us the immeasurable unstained tract of the New Year of ETERNITY, unsullied, spotless, pure and white; and we need not then be afraid to enter upon that. The blood of Jesus, which cleanseth from all sin, will have so cleansed us, that even our footprints will not stain nor mar it. The spots and the defilements, the tears and the sighs, they will lie all behind us then, in the Old Year which is dead. Ring out, oh, ringers, then—toll not, but ring out the year of sadness and of sin, of weak strivings, cold hearts, and dull love! Ring out the year of partings and estrangements, of death and tears! And ring in—oh, that it might be so for every reader of this chapter!—ring with none but joy-notes, ring in that everlastingly happy New Year!

MUSINGS ON THE THRESHOLD.

I call February the Threshold of the Year. In January we were indoors, beside the fire, and there seemed little of new and various to tempt us out. But February comes, and with it the first dream of change, the first scarce-heard whisper of the Spring. The faint possibility of a snowdrop, hinting its yet undrooping white through a peaked green film; the distant hope of a primrose bud, peeping—with yellow point, for all the world just like that of a coloured crayon—out of the young, crisp, green leaves that are crowning the limp, ragged ones of last year; the wild dream of a find of those sweet buds—little geologists’ hammers, with white or violet noses—among their round seeds and drilled leaves, in some warmer corner; such, summonings as these woo the steps to the threshold on a strayed mild day late in February. The black, soaked trees have, we find, taken a warm hue of life; the dull willow bushes have the gleam of golden hair; the first soft air of the year comes to our hearts with a gush of promises; flowers and leaves seem possible to the heart waking from its winter stagnation; trees and men alike feel a new life, a fresh impulse. Even though we have become hard wood and wrinkled rind, our sap is, nevertheless, stirred:

“And even in our inmost ring
A pleasure is discerned,
From those blind motions of the Spring,
That show the year is turned.”

And, perhaps, we are content to pause on the threshold, and lean against the lintel, and survey the smile close at hand, and the gleam far away; and, while the robin draws near in a cheerful, not to say jovial, sympathy with our humour, and the faint branchy shadows move tenderly on the glistening lawn, to muse on the year’s threshold, concerning the programme that the wind is whispering among the bushes, and the promises that the warm air is wafting into the heart.

* * * * *

Musings on the Threshold. Such musings might take many an obvious high road, or quaint turn, we must feel, as we stand on the threshold of our house, and of the year, looking out upon the herald-gleam, and fanned by what seems a Spring air; an air that summons sweet thoughts of March, April, May—scarce June yet; certainly not October or November. On the threshold of the Spring; this we would rather say, and forget that it is really the threshold of the year,—that thing composed of smiles and tears, of gleams and showers, of full green boughs and bare sticks, of promises and disappointments, of growth and life, and decay and death. For instance, with regard to these threshold musings, how often, ere we shall have passed on so far in life’s journey, that we stand on the threshold of the next state,—how often do we pause for awhile upon some threshold, and lean back against the door and muse. On the threshold of joy, or on the threshold of misery; on the threshold of hope, or on the threshold of despair; on the threshold of school, or of the holidays; on the threshold of wearing tail-coats; of being flogged or expelled; of gaining the three head prizes of the school,—these gave musings to some in early days. Later, on the threshold of a pluck, or of a double first-class; on the threshold of first love; and—oh, the dim, delicious look-out, and long, ecstatic musings!—on the threshold of being married; of parting with some beloved one,—and ah, how a stern hand seems to drag you forth from your contemplation here, when your musings were scarce begun! On the threshold of the first fall from purity or honour,—and, alas, the dismal journey that shall follow upon the threshold left, and the first step taken! On the threshold of repentance; and angel-eyes watch eagerly, and angel-hands poise above their golden harps; and at the first step forward a ringing rapture peals up into the trembling roof of Heaven. “Musings on the Threshold”:—are there not then, highways and by-paths which such musings might well take? But it is time for us to choose our present road; and, to do so, we will even go back to the beginning of a certain well-trodden way, upon which every one of us is found, some far back, some near the middle, some tottering on close to the goal.

On the threshold of Life. Yes, once upon a time we stood there: and the Spring air was rife with half-shaped songs and indistinct delicious whispers; and we knew that the hedges and copses were full of all sweet promise-buds; and there were songs in the distance, and an interminable thronging of inexhaustible flowers; and life seemed too sweet, when the first blossom that was our own was grasped in our hand, and the stir of life growing conscious and intelligent first made the heart glow and kindle, as we paused musing upon the Threshold, and looked out upon the sweet, strange opening year of Life.

Ah well, the step soon has to be taken, that marks the beginning of separation from those lovely, unreal dreams. There is Solomon’s way of leaving them—much labour, and little profit, and a bitter heart at the end. And there is that other way of leaving them—the hearing once and again, and gradually heeding, an oft-repeated solemn call, “Follow Me.” Out of the sunshine into the shadow; away from dreamy threshold musings, into the rough and stony highway; drop the flowers and clasp the cross: for how run the instructions given long ago, and given to all; given by precept, and given by example? “Whosoever will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.”

How true of those who—at last, and after long hesitation—take the first step, and leave the threshold of this world’s young dreams, and begin to follow Him; how true that “little did they know to what they pledged themselves, when, in that first season of awe, they arose and followed His voice. But now they cannot go back, for they are too nigh to the unseen One, and His words have sunk deeply within them. Day by day they are giving up their old waking dreams; things they have pictured out and acted over in their imaginations and their hopes, one by one they let them go, with saddened but willing hearts. They feel as if they had fallen under some irresistible attraction, which is hurrying them into the world unseen; and so in truth it is. He is fulfilling to them His promise: ‘And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me.’ Their turn is come at last, that is all. Before, they had only heard of the mystery; now, they feel it. He has fastened on them His look of love, even as on Peter and on Mary; and they cannot choose but follow, and in following Him, altogether forget both themselves and all their visions of life.”

How strange it is, verily, after we have for many years now, followed that Voice,—followed it, no doubt, with many a declension, many a wavering, many a wayward swerving, and almost turning back; yet, on the whole, followed it, and that with less of timidity, and more of implicitness, as experience justified hope;—how strange, about midway in the journey, to look back at life’s threshold! The January of infancy had past; the February of awakening, conscious life had come, and we came out from our dormant state, and paused upon the threshold, and looked forth upon the world. And now we look back, and with a strange, wondering interest, contemplate that single lonely figure that was ourself, leaning in wrapt musing; the small home behind it; and before, the siren murmurs, and warm, flattering airs of the fairy, enticing Future. The magic dreams, the mirage-reveries, the profuse promises, the unshaped hopes, the just-caught notes of some divine, distant melody: all the flowers to blossom; and all the birds to come. Ah, what sweet, wild musings were those! Far away we seemed to catch a gleam of that

“Light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration, and the poet’s dream.”

And even tears had their sparkle, and melancholy its charm, and death its unreal beauty.

“To think of passing bells, of death and dying—
’Twere good, methought, in early youth to die,
So loved, lamented: in such sweet sleep lying,
The white shroud all with flowers and rosemary
Stuck o’er by loving hands.”

Thus, we remember, once stood that figure, solitary in its own individuality, upon the threshold, and looking out upon life. And, contemplating our present self, we feel that it is “the same, yet not the same.” How changed all has become! It is not only nor chiefly that flowers are less valued than fruit-germs, or sparkling glass than rough, hereafter-to-be-cut diamonds; it is not only, nor so much, that the world’s promises and life’s young dreams have failed us, as that we have turned away from them. That our taste has altered; that the things that then were all, are now nearly nothing; that what once rose before us a golden mirage, seems now as but bare sand; that what seemed gain, would be now held as loss; that what seemed too rare, and delicious, and high, and exquisite, and sublime, for more than trembling hope, has now become as refuse in our thought.

Time was, when other thoughts and purposes than these which now possess us, held sway in our hearts. Time was, when we stood on the threshold, dazzled, and wondering, in a delicious dream, which of all the sublime or lovely paths that opened before us we should pursue. Time was, when at last we began to heed a kind, but still small Voice, that had from the first been speaking to us; when a grave Eye that had from the first watched us, at last fixed our attention. Time was, when we were compelled as it were, at first with hesitating, reluctant step, to follow that Voice and that Look—away from those bright gay paths, or grand aspiring ways, down a lowly, narrow way, strewn with thorns and stones, and sloping into a mist-hid valley. Time was—if we followed still—that the disturbing, distracting sounds and sights above being left behind and hushed,—the mist lifted, and, lo! the valley was a pleasant valley, an abode of “peace that the world cannot give”: and if the way were still rough sometimes, there were undying flowers of unearthly beauty here and there; and if the lark was away, the nightingale was singing; and it was answered to us, yea, our heart returned answer to itself, that, albeit narrow and strait at first, the name of that way was, in very truth, the Way of Pleasantness and the Path of Peace.

Ah, yes, if once we, with purpose of heart, set ourselves to follow His guiding, how God draws us on! We clutch at this, and would rest at that; and surely this is the Chief good, and the Ideal beauty? But no; the early flowers depart, and the late, and we leave the threshold and wander on; and February goes, and March goes, and even June, and August; and sorrowfully and wonderingly we look up at God, following Him on through life, even into the grave September, and the hushed October, and the tearful November; and so into the winter of alienation from the world, which death’s snow comes to seal.

But ere this we have found out His meaning in life, and the flowers of earth are no more regretted; and there is no point at which we would choose to have rested, now that we look back upon the past experiences and events of the journey; and both our hands are laid in His, and we look up with unutterable trust and ineffable love. It was not so once:

“I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou
Wouldst lead me on;
I loved to see and choose my path, but now
Lead Thou me on.”

And then He has led you, little by little, with gentle steps, hiding the full length of the way that you must tread, lest you should start aside in fear, and faint for weariness. And as it has been, so it must be; onward you must go; He will not leave you here; there is yet in store for you more contrition, more devotion, more delight in Him. A few years hence, and you will see how true these words are. If by that time you have not forsaken Him, you will be nigher still, walking in strange, it may be solitary paths, in ways that are “called desert”; but knowing Him, as now you know Him not, with a fulness of knowledge, and a bowing of heart, and a holy self-renouncement, and a joy that you are altogether His. What now seems too much, shall then seem all too little; what too nigh, not nigh enough to His awful cross. Oh, how our thoughts change! A few years ago, and you would have thought your present state excessive and severe; you would have shrunk from it then, as at this time you shrink from the hereafter. But now you look back, and know that all was well. In all your past life you would not have one grief the less, or one joy the more. It is all well.

And so it is, then, that we are led on from our February threshold, on through the maturing, decaying months, until the silent Winter comes. And what then? Is it to be the same over again—the same promises and disappointments, the same dreams and awakenings, the same unreal glory at the threshold, and the same gradual weaning from it on the journey?

Not so. To us the years are not repeated, nor is the “second life, only the first renewed.”

“I know not, oh, I know not
What joys await us there;
What radiancy of glory,
What bliss beyond compare.”

But I love to wander, nevertheless, in my musings far beyond the journey to the Land whither the journey is tending. Beyond this state of probation to that of fruition; beyond striving, to attainment; beyond discipline, to perfection; beyond warfare, to victory; beyond labour, to rest; beyond constant slips and shortcomings, and half-heartedness at best, to stedfast holiness; beyond the cross, to the crown. We are yet within doors: oh, what will open before us on the threshold of that next year!—when the first wonder of its January has passed, and the amazed and almost dizzied soul has straightened and uncrumpled its wings, and collected its powers, and can calmly begin to understand its change, and to muse on its future, and to grasp the idea of the possession upon which it has come: to anticipate the endless succession of amaranthine flowers, ever increasing in glory throughout the months of Eternity, and the songs that shall ever throng more and more abundant and ecstatic, and never migrate nor pass away!

On the Threshold. Those in Paradise are now musing on the threshold, waiting for their full consummation and bliss both in body and soul, waiting for that coming of the Lord with regard to which they are still crying out, “How long?” and are bid to “rest yet for a little season.” And so then they rest, and wait upon the threshold, and contemplate the mighty and magnificent panorama outspread before them as their Future. The Voice is still there, and the Look; and they wait its summons, to leave the threshold, and to follow once again. But how different that following then! How far other than of old that summons! Not to paths of humiliation and discipline, and hills of difficulty, and valleys of shadow, but to realms of brightness and beauty unspeakable, and to heights to which earth’s ambitions never soared. From the threshold of blessedness into the domain of glory; from Abraham’s bosom to the throne of the Lamb; from a star to the Sun in His strength.

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!

What variety in the character of the bird-music! Hark, for a moment, at those wise, solemn caws, and watch those sedate, respectable, gravely-clad Rooks sailing across this opening above us; so black and cleanly painted against the filmy blue. Caw! This is the voice of a steady, respectable mediocrity, that by reason of its deep, portentous gravity, and weighty utterance, and staid appearance, might be almost mistaken for philosophy. True, the utterance, if profound, is not remarkable for variety; but then the manner will often make up for lack of matter. And it is something to have one maxim or apophthegm which may be fitted to every case. To all the world’s customs and businesses, its problems and aspirings, its cries and laughter, he gravely and meditatively listens. And when you eagerly await his verdict, he puts his sapient head on one side, looks at you out of one eye,

“And says,—what says he? Caw!”

The young impatient askers, the subtle and patient tracers of truth’s hidden vein, will chafe at his sedate utterances, and in time take their confidences elsewhere. But he can get on without them, and will never want for company of his kind. Raised above all intellectual excitements, and never in a hurry, the rooks step side by side with stately dignity over the scarred earth; or wing a heavy and cautious flight towards the trees; or sail serene in the still sky. For though there may be times when

“The rooks are blown about the skies,”

this haste is involuntary, and must no doubt for the time much discomfort the methodical and stately traveller. And no doubt such characters are as useful ballast in the world, and well counterbalance the full excited sails, and the mad fluttering pennons above them. Commonplace, unruffled, happy Christians are these; with some they gain reputation for wisdom, with some for folly; but they go evenly on; not much troubled by sunshine or storm; not caring to enter into the dusks and gleams of the more passionate songsters and thinkers; ever with one quiet and not unmelodious answer: a life rather of deeds than of words. Caw, to all your spasms and heart-searchings,—and then I must just away to my work. Up in the tall trees, bending and swaying to break off the twigs for the nest; practical, if not colloquial; early at work in the morning, and at home in good time in the evening; a life not excited nor greatly eventful, but that has its own quiet, serene lesson.

A day or two hence we might hear a notable and distinguished visitor to the woods and shrubberies. Even now, I have once or twice paused, half-fancying that I heard his voice, and ready to do honour to such a guest. For, while you are momently expecting to hear the Blackcap, the warbling of the meditative Robin has, here and there, a note which puzzles you. You follow out the voice, and there, on an elm branch, is the dark eye, and the warm breast, and the comfortable shape; and you feel half ashamed to have mistaken such a familiar friend for a stranger.

The Blackcap is indeed a wonderful little warbler. So small and so energetic, thrilling song and swelling throat; brown body and whitish chest and jetty head. There are those who trace a resemblance to the nightingale’s song in its quick joyous utterances. If so, certainly the melody is but a suggestion here and there, and not a sustained and continuous resemblance. Shall I be unkind to the sweet little songster, if here I write that its song has its counterpart in the life of unequal Christians? Many there are who, now and then, in thought, word, or deed, seem to touch some perfect chord, and then disappoint the intent listener by sinking down to the more commonplace again.

A moment, and there seemed a strain of angelic utterance, but it was not sustained, and you turn away disappointed at a more homely song which would otherwise have pleased you well. You do not look for Seraph notes in the hedge-sparrow’s song, or the wren’s chatting, and so you are well content with these. But high hopes unfulfilled become disappointment, and you feel an injury in having to resign the exalted idea which you had taken up; until, at last you see yourself in the sweet, but unequal and inadequate song; and learn to reverence and to love the ever-failing and unsustained effort after higher things. Thus, ay thus, do you aim high, and ever fall below your aim; there is one touch of heaven, and a hundred of earth, in the broken and unsustained song of your life; and yet you would rather strive with hopeless yearning after the nightingale’s music, than acquiesce content with the lesser warblings, which accomplish the less that they attempted. Sing on, then, little bird, to an answering heart! In your song I read the rises and falls, the endeavours and failings, the aspirings and rare glimpses of attainment, which are the sweet exceptions, and the commonplace and every-day Christianity, which is the rule, of a life that would fain become the song of an Angel, but that scarce reaches the homeliest warble of the simplest wayside bird. Let us aim high, if we still fall below our passionate striving; let us never acquiesce quietly in less than Perfection; hereafter—who knows? who knows?

It is evening now, as we wend our way home. A thin sickle of light is barred by the slender topmost ash twigs, and the sky is deepening to that cold, clear dusk, that foreruns twilight. We hear a quiet song, far away—the Woodlark’s note always seems far away—you would have asked me the name of the not-generally-familiar songster, but I have just given it. “That, the woodlark? Well, I never heard, or never noticed it before” I dare say. But if is a quiet, saintly song; a heavenly voice, serene and clear, never passionate: a twilight, still, calm song, removed far away from the world’s bustle, and deeply imbued with wisdom and melody from a Land far beyond this eager fevered strife. It is not glad, nor sorrowful; nor so much thoughtful as spiritual. It images to us that life which, separated from the world, is yet not ascetic; unobtrusive, yet fascinating when once perceived and heeded; simple, somewhat as is the language of St. John, but with unfathomable suggestions and revelations when you come to study and learn it. Quite away from controversy and strife, there is in it a divine peace, an entranced contemplation, a serene and peaceful uplifting of the soul. Perhaps the writings of Archbishop Leighton best give words to my ideal of the woodlark’s song.

But those throbbing coos must stay our foot ere we quite leave the wood. The Dove—its voice is, of course, the embodiment of love; troubled, but not passionate; earnest, but not of earth merely. It has a melancholy vehemence, a sobbing urging of its cause, that is rather the voice of one seeking the good of another than its own delight. There is a tremulousness, a trembling fulness that might be that of one bidding farewell in death to some very dear friend whom he fain would win to the right and happy path, but for whom he sadly stands in doubt. There is such abundance from which to speak, such love and such mournfulness in saying it, that you smile with the tears near your eyes, on suddenly recollecting whither fancy was leading you, and that it is, after all, but the old old story being beautifully and melodiously told. For you caught a sight of the ash-blue wing, the mild eye, and swelling crop, and of the mate on a branch close by; and so your fancy was overturned.

But there is one song which we shall not hear yet, as we return home from the wood; of which, nevertheless, some words must be said. Yet what words have even the greatest word-masters yet found for the Nightingale’s unearthly melody! What other song has even a likeness of the instantaneous and riveting fascination that is produced by one note of this? It is music which speaks, not to what we call the heart, merely, or the intellect, merely, but straight at once to that mysterious divine thing within us, which we call the spirit.

And so it represents that recognition of, and yearning for, an ideal perfection and beauty, which many own, but few can express. And thus we start to hear it represented and embodied in sound without language, and, without knowing how, acknowledge a dumb music in ourselves which is closely akin to this superhuman and unearthly song. And we cannot, if we try, exactly define its character; some call it joyous; more sorrowful. But perhaps there is a hint in it of something within us higher and deeper than either of these; else how can it thus startle and electrify our being? At least it tells us of melody that we cannot yet grasp or fully understand, of beauty and harmony and perfection that is not yet our own. And I liken it to the raptured speakings of the prophet, or to an echo of the angelic messages seldom brought to earth.

Well, ’tis difficult, and perhaps hopeless, to strive to interpret the songs of these little minstrels of God. After all, each heart will set them to words of its own. And, by leading others to do so, perhaps my musings may best fulfil their end. Many a one who would have appreciated them, misses the pictures in earth’s great gallery, and the music of earth’s great concert, for want of a finger to point him once to the one, and a hand on his shoulder to arrest his attention for the other. And it is worth regarding pictures at which God is working, and to listen to songs which yet remain in a saddened world, exactly as He first taught them.

THE MAY-DAYS OF THE SOUL.

“All things are new: the buds, the leaves,
That gild the elm-tree’s nodding crest;
And e’en the nest beneath the eaves:
There are no birds in last year’s nest!”

May has come; that time of year has passed the sweet April time,

“When all the wood stands in a
mist of green,
And nothing perfect.”

The sparsely-gemmed hedges have thickened now, so that you cannot see the gardens through their bare ribs; and little bunches of tight-clenched buds give abundant promise of the sweet-breathed, shell-petaled hawthorn flowers. The coy ash-trees have begun to fringe over with their feather foliage; the ruddy bushy growth that seemed comically like whiskers, at the base of the elms and the lindens, has changed into a surprise of glorified green; the low shoots from the stump of the old oak-tree in the hedge bring out their wealth of soft, crumpled, young red leaves; the elders on the banks have gotten a deep, full garment of green upon them now; above the ash-hued stem of the maples there is a numberless array of small maroon-tinged fists; the tender beech-leaves edge the low boughs that are spread out just above the grass.

The birds are full of importance, and excitement, and enjoyment. The robin has his “fuller crimson”; the “livelier iris shines upon the burnished dove,” The black rook sails lazily with broad wing up in the blue sky: he, too, has his high nest to attend to; but life, on such a day as this, imperatively demands to be enjoyed. The copse rings with the laugh of the little willow-wren; the chiff-chaff ceaselessly announces his presence; the woodpecker cries as he leaves tree for tree; the blackcap, not singing just now, makes that “check, check,” like the striking of two marbles together; the cuckoo, besides telling his name to all the hills, has also a low, cooing, wooing voice for his mate; also another cry, as of a startled blackbird, but flute-like and liquid.

“Flattered with promise of escape
From every hurtful blast,
Spring takes, O sprightly May, thy shape,
Her loveliest and her last.”

A sweet grey tint, that had begun to overspread the bare parts of the copse, is deepening into such a sapphire sheet, that our ungrateful hearts half forget or retract the regret they felt, when the fair young hazels and the tall thin ash-wands bowed in the Winter before the cruel bill. Only lately, it seems, on the way across the fields to the station, a delicate fairy mass, the light lilac of the “faint sweet cuckoo-flower,” had spread its kindly screen over the hacked and maimed stumps of the fallen wood. But the hyacinths take their place now; and, after these, we expect the bright rose of the ragged-robin; and, after these, quite a garden of tall spires of the foxglove, alternating from pale to darker red, with, rarely and preciously, a clustered sceptre of milky white.

But why go on to the ragged-robin and the foxglove, later flowers of the year? Truly, there are flowers enough at this season to satisfy the most avaricious. Look but at the yellow meadows of the daffodils.

“I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er dales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

“Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.”

So the poet; and how could he but be of a May-day heart, amid such a May wealth of flowers? It was a light, a gleam, a possession that he thenceforth held; a sweet, living landscape of the heart, a landscape alive, indeed, not only with colour and light and shade, but with ceaseless gleeful motion.

“I gazed, and gazed, but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought.”

No; for often, when May-days were far away, and perhaps shallow snow, streaked with patches of brown land, slanted away under a pale grey sky, even at such times that wealth and glory, and abundance of the flowers, suddenly would

“Flash upon that inward eye,
Which is the bliss of solitude.”

And then, even in a lonely hour, a time of dulness and depression, a time when this sad life seemed saddest; in such a time even, that glad gleeful yellow landscape would come back, with something of the light and joy of a kind deed done, or a strong word said; and, amid the pale snow, and the ever-increasing depression, well can the possessor say that—then,

“Then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.”

Life has its May-days, as well as the year. They come, sometimes; rarely to some, but exquisitely beautiful when God sends them—the May-days of the soul. The times when the Winter fogs have passed away, and the clear sun shines down in its glory on the land; the times when the bare brown trees have become ruddy, and have then flushed into crowded variety of leaf; the times when the flowers, that had been thought to be buried for ever, dawn like a smile upon earth’s pale and furrowed face; the times when youth’s forgotten glow comes back, and a hint of the vigour to which dreams seemed realities, and impossibilities possible, stirs the sluggish sap of the soul. Such times there are, when the mists of November have departed, and the frosts of the succeeding months, and the bitter winds of March, and the flooding tears of April; it is the May, with its lavish promise and exuberant life, and ecstatic beauty! Times when illness or earth or laziness or lack of power no longer chill the soul that is indeed eager to burst into leaf; times when we are winged, when the hardest toils are easy to us, the heaviest stone rolled away; times when soul and body seem in perfect accord, and tongue and limb and eye instantly execute the least mandate of the ruler within; times when the ship obeys the lightest touch of the man at the helm; times that come like holidays scattered through the dull half-year of school-days; times of exuberant life and spirits and powers that visit us rarely, sweetly, now and then, as May-day comes in the year.

I often think how little we use life thoroughly; how little we really live our life; how seldom we are in the humour to carry out its great and solemn purposes: how we let its opportunities fly by us, like thistledown on the wind. Why are we not always denying ourselves, taking up the cross, and following our Master? Why are we not always on the watch for every occasion in which a word may be said, or a deed done, or a thought thought, that shall be a protest for Christ, in this vain and sinful world? Why is God’s love but a rare Wintry gleam, and never a steady Summer in our soul? Think, for instance, of such a thing as Prayer; what a wonderful and beautiful thing it is! To kneel, an atom in creation, at the Throne of the Almighty! To be able to bare our hearts to Him, and to feel sure that the least throbs, as well as the great spasms, are perfectly appreciated, felt, understood, sympathised with, by that awful, loving Mind!

And yet, how Wintry our hearts are in our prayers! how seldom they burst into exuberant flower! how constantly the sky above us seems pale and heavy, and dull and impenetrable, and our hearts beneath abiding in their Wintry sleep! Or a snowdrop here and there wanders out, and now and then a pinched primrose—not enough for even the poorest garland.

But that is not all; not only in religion is it that we are more often Wintry-hearted than May-hearted. I have heard of an artist who used sometimes to keep his sitter waiting a whole morning, and at last send him away, unable to win the right humour to his heart, and feeling that his work would not be well done if he forced it. And in reading Haydon’s life you may often find traces of how difficult is this mood to attract, when it has not a mind to come.

So, too, in composition, whether grave or light, how different a thing it is, according to our mood! How delicious a thing is it when the soul has a May-day, and when the pen cannot overtake the mind! when

“Thought leaps out to wed with thought,
Ere thought can wed itself with speech!”

when ideas throng

“Glad and thick,
As leaves upon a tree in primrose time!”

when we seem to see,

“Smiling upward from the page,
The image of the thought within the soul!”

But these times, at least after one has written a good deal, are comparatively rare times, and it is more often February than May within us. A subject that seemed full of leaf when it occurred to the mind some weeks ago, in a May-day mood, stands often a stripped bare Winter tree when we sit down to work it out.

Yes, in most of the business of life that is not mere routine and machine-work, no doubt the soul has its May-days—its times of being in the humour for its work, and of doing that work easily and glibly. How many a Clergyman would endorse this, merely in the every-day case of taking a class in his school! Words, earnest and abundant and interesting, throng forth at one time; at another, how bare the mind, and how unready the tongue!

And now, to what do these thoughts lead us? I think to two considerations—one of warning, one of encouragement.

The warning is an obvious one, and yet one much and often neglected. Let such times of warmth and light and glow and possession of blossom be not only enjoyed but employed. The soul’s Flower-time should never be allowed to pass away without having left some noble fruit set. It is common-place to repeat that the May-days of the soul are most abundant and most glowing in youth, the May-time of life. And, in connection with this whole subject, I quote, with an addition, Longfellow’s verse:—

“Maiden, that read’st this simple rhyme,
Enjoy thy youth: it will not stay;
Enjoy the fragrance of thy prime,
For oh! it is not always May.”

This is gentle and tender advice; and far am I from wishing to correct it, or to do otherwise than allow it, in its degree. Only there is deeper and more grave advice to be given with it, not instead of it. It is well to enjoy the soul’s May-time, but only well if it be employed as well as enjoyed; otherwise it will pass, and no trace be left. We may make a great May-day show by merely gathering our flowers and weaving them into garlands; and there may be much dancing and excitement and glee. But then, it seems purely and simply sad to see them next day lying neglected, limp, and withering, in patches and dribblets, on the ground; whereas, although the apple-tree and the primrose bank may look sobered and saddened when their blossom-time is past, you yet know that all trace of that sweet adornment is not lost; they are busy henceforth, maturing fruit and seed from the germs that the bloom has left.

Therefore, to return to the principal thing, namely, Religion: remember, when the blossom-time comes, or returns, that its fairy brightness is evanescent. It must pass, therefore use it; enjoy it, but put it out to usury; let it not fade and fall without having left a germ of noble fruit behind. When the heaven seems open to prayer, when the dull sky has cleared, and, thick and sweet as May-flowers, the earnest longings and ready words burst from your bare heart, seize the auspicious hour; let it not pass unemployed. Do not merely taste, but exhaust its sweetness. When God seems to make His listening apparent, refrain not; besiege His throne with prayers, supplications, praises. And again, when the heart has thawed from its deadness and indifference, and a very May-gathering of zeal for God, of love for God and man, of high and holy yearnings and longings and resolves and purposes, crowd upon the Winter sleep of the soul; oh, then, indulge not in a mere sensuality of spiritual enjoyment; stay not at mere revelling in the warm sky and profuse up-springing of flowers; set to work to form, in that propitious hour, some germs of fruit, some careful reforms, some holy resolves, some earnest and lofty purposes, some self-denials, some pressing towards the mark. Prayerfully and painfully set to work, so that, by God’s grace, when the beauty has gone, the use may remain, and the boughs bend with fruit that were once winged with bloom.

Oh, we all know, I say, these May-days of the soul: times when the love of God seems natural to us, and our hearts overflow into a spontaneous love of man; times when hard things are easy, and Apollyon in the way, or Giant Maul coming out of his cave, rather stir the soul to exultation than daunt it with dismay; times when God seems to us not an abstraction, but a reality; when we can fancy the Saviour beside us, as in old days He stood beside Peter or John; times when it seems a light thing to spend and to be spent for Christ’s sake and the brethren; times when the World has no allurements and the Flesh no power, and Satan seems already beat down under our feet; times when we go out to face the hardest duties with no secret desire that the call on us may not be made, but rather with grave steady resolution and with face set like a flint. There are times, I say, when God’s image seems to shine out for a while, clearly and brightly, from the rust and mildew of marring sin and sloth; times when, Samson-like, we rise from sleep, and the fetters that have hitherto tied us down from life’s great deeds become upon our shoulders like as tow when it hath seen the fire. Yes, May seasons there are for the soul, in which there is a press and hurry of blossom, that is well and fair if it be secured for God.