ah! now i am seated as i love to be, the june blue over me, and the sweet, warm, new-made hay underneath. on the shadow side of a great haycock, here have i selected my seat, plunging down and feeling the soft cushion give, until it has attained consistency enough to resist me. i have been busy, very busy, all this week, and the week before that, and indeed several weeks back. and i have earned, and mean to indulge in, a quiet long afternoon, and perhaps evening, in the hay-field. i have a book with me, but i do not pledge myself to read much. i have not come out here to read; not to do much, indeed, but just to sit and muse, nay, chiefly to enjoy the feeling of being able to rest. to feel that there is, or shall be, so far as i can choose, no call for the remainder of this day upon anxious heart and weary brain; no parish troubles; no sick, whose silent cry in the distance forbids the pastor to sit still; no sermon, no article, to think out or to write; no letters to pour into that insatiable post-office,—the true126 sieve of the danaids; not even any gardening to do or to superintend; no, nothing necessary but to sit on the side of a haycock “in the leafy month of june.” we may go on and on in the round of every day’s business, on and on, unpausing, till we drop: the mere energy of spinning may keep us up, though perhaps on a weak and tottering peg; and work begets work; and busy day will chase busy day like the sails of a windmill; and we hardly dare stop, because we foreknow how we shall then have a long bill to pay, all the arrears of those fatigues and that weariness that we bade stand aside as we laboured on; and we know that if we once stop to give them a hearing, it will be hard work to set the heavy machinery going again. for myself, i often feel that to go on working, is to be able to work; to pause is to collapse, and to feel incapable. still, in fact, we make life go farther by careful trading, than by spending all our capital at once. and both for purposes of devotional retirement and of necessary recreation, it is well sometimes just “to sport our oak” (to speak in oxford phrase) upon the noisy and importunate throng of things clamorous to be done, and yet which, if discharged, would but give place to as many more. i could dizzy my brain with thoughts of business that i might do, and want to do. but for some weeks i have worked on and worked on, hoping to satisfy all claims; waiting for a pause, which never would come; and now i will no longer wait for it, but make it. away! crowding calls, for this afternoon, for all the rest of this day. the wrestling, restless, toiling, moiling, weary world is quite shut out from me behind this mighty chain of haycocks. i hear the sharpening of scythes, and their long129 sweep in the bending swathes; once or twice in the afternoon a cuckoo sails with broad wing over me, and voice which stammers now near the end of his monotonous but prized oration; there is a scattered rain of larks’ songs falling all around; and, on a hedge near by, the short plaintive cadence of the yellow-hammer’s few notes.
grass is always beautiful,—thus i am led to think as, leaning on one arm, i inspect the material of my couch. beautiful after the winter lethargy, and when it grows lush and green, vividly green, and taller and taller under the showers, at the roots of the pines that step forward here and there from the shrubberies into the lawn. beautiful again, when the scythe and mowing-machine have destroyed this beauty, and substituted that of the smooth, well-kept velvet sward. beautiful, growing in the meadows, and deepening for hay; a sweet close under-growth of white or dull pink clover; of orange-flowered trefoil; of purple self-heal; of bright yellow-rattle; of small red orchis; of orchis pale lilac specked with dark; and, more desultory and thinner, above these the tall grass and flower-stalks: “all grass of silky feather”; bright rose ragged-robin; white ox-eye daisy; brimstone toad-flax; tall buttercups; pale pink centaury; numberless varieties of fringed flowers, all yellow; and bobbing myriads of the ribwort plantain, to which we are all, when children, very henry viii.’s; tall slight sorrel; tougher dock. beautiful, when the scythe has laid all this in broad, lowly lines upon the whole face of the field; and the mowers advance yet steadily upon the long yielding ranks. beautiful when the green has turned grey, and the brighter colours of the flowers are dull,130 the clover not yet brown, only faded, the yellow tassels showing, as they droop, the paler under-wing of the closing flower, the buttercups spoiled of their square varnished petals, and showing only the green spiked ball, the miniature head of gog or magog’s mace. beautiful to lie in the grey mounds of the soft, fragrant, new-made hay, dying, if this be to die, so graciously, and sweetly, and blessingly; lovely in life, and sweet in death. beautiful when even this bloom-grey has gone, and we shake out from their close-pressed sleep the loose masses of the yellow hay, and brown leaves and flowers, all, however, still fragrant, and full of hints in winter days, of the warm summer. beautiful when the last cart is carried, and the rick is being thatched, and a pale bright under-growth has given to the dry hot field, in the parched summer-time, something of a faint imitation of the early green of spring.
so i lean, listless, idle, and examine my couch. much i find to examine in it; besides the embalmed flowers, there is a small zoological garden—brown ants climbing up the pole of an upright grass-stem; leopard-spotted lady-birds; alligator grasshoppers; woolly-bear caterpillars; bird-of-paradise butterflies. i am left alone with these, and so can be quite quiet; for i am in the rear of the haymakers.
“all in a row advancing broad, or wheeling round the field, while, as they rake the green-appearing ground, and drive the dusky wave along the mead, the russet haycock rises thick behind.”
and my couch is one of these same pale hills that they have done with. my wife is away with the children: i shall not133 therefore run the risk of being buried, with shouts, under the piled heaps of the hay. my servant has gone out for a walk: i thus escape the apprehension of seeing her advance into my field steering among the haycocks, and, with hand shading her eyes, looking about all over its wide glare for me. i can lean on this arm until it is tired, then change to the other, then lie on my back and watch the fleecy blue, with handkerchief spread for fear of insects; then turn over again, and resume my inspection of the grass. i am thus particular in description, because i would fain carry my hay-field into hot london. a few distinct details may help out many a memory; and the clerk really in the baking, staring london street may yet, if his imagination be my ally, lean back among the yielding warm-breathed hay to muse with me upon the grass and its teachings.
for it is, after all, impossible to be absolutely doing nothing. the mind, that busy alchemist, works on and works on in the worn laboratory of the body, and transmutes gold into earth, or earth into gold, as the case may be, in its peculiar crucible. and so, since i cannot but muse on the hay into which i am closely peering, i may as well also jot my musings down.
* * * * *
flesh, and grass: how natural the now common-place connection between the short-lived beauty of the two! it is one of those commonplaces, however, which new thoughts could not easily better. the hay-fields, with their life and glee, and loveliness of flowers just now, and now these faded mounds! the generations of men in the gaiety or toil of the world, and134 then the churchyard with its “shadowed swells”! half a year for the one growth, and sometimes less, sometimes more, for the other; but all lying in the bending swathes at last. take the extreme case:
“all the days of methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years.”
was flesh like grass then? what! a thousand years akin to the life of a few months? yes, closely akin; banded together by the last words of the life of both; for how ends the short history of the longest liver of mortal men?
“——and he died.”
yea, the growth, the ripening was longer in progress, but the scythe came at last:
“the voice said, cry. and he said, what shall i cry? all flesh is grass,—and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field; the grass withereth, the flower fadeth.”
and again:
“man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. he cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.”
and again:
“as for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. for the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.”
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and again:
“in the morning they are like grass which groweth up; in the morning it flourisheth and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth.”
oh, faded couch on which i lean, here are witnesses enough of the highest authority of all, to establish a brotherhood between us! i look at these hands which can write and work, i look at these limbs which can rise and go, i consider the brain which can busily toil:—and from these i turn to regard the dry heap that once was living grass;—and i think how slack, and void of energy, and lifeless will these also lie, in the long swathes which ever and ever fall before the advancing mower, death.
“‘consider well,’ the voice replied, ‘his face, that two hours since hath died; wilt thou find passion, pain, or pride?’”
no; each lies in that especial long line of mown grass that we call his generation:
“also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun.”
flesh, and grass: are they not akin? these ever-succeeding generations;—how the grass still grows after every mowing.
“one generation passeth away, and another generation cometh”;
—there is not a word of abiding at all, says archbishop leighton. but, however, there is a notice of constant succession, and the grass grows as fast as it is mown. load after load is added to the store of eternity; but the mower death136 knows no pause. ever and ever the tall grass and the sweet flowers bend before that industrious scythe. where is the glad growth of fifty years ago; and where the life that preceded that; and so on, back to adam? in long fallen ranks they lie, generation parallel with generation, all across the wide field of the world’s history. flowers, and plain grass, and wholesome fodder, and prickly thistles, and poison weeds, they bowed at the edge of the scythe; so far they are equal:
“there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not; as is the good, so is the sinner; and he that sweareth, as he that feareth an oath. this is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that there is one event unto all.”
yes, all lie in the swathes, and are equal there; the almost bitter saying of the wise man, to whom sin had made even wisdom sadness, is so far true. true while we consider the field after the scythe; true while we look on death, but not applying any longer when we imagine the resurrection. a very life shall revive, or a very death shall wither, each stalk of the myriads that lie waiting in the field, each in the place where it fell.
* * * * *
i cannot help being also reminded by this history of mowing and growing, of the special field of each human life, with its ever springing, ever falling hopes and dreams. one day it is a carpet of brightness and glory; the next, the withered lines lie on the bare field. yet look closer, and you will find already the tender green of a new growth appearing to clothe the scarred137 meadow. a constant succession, ever mown and still growing; every year and often in the year a fresh attire, however the heart, when that common-place desolation was new to it, refused in dismay to believe in the possibility of any further crops. fond thing! even while it thus protested, the grass had already begun to grow; and it was in vain to try in sullenness or self-respect to check the smiling flowers that would crowd up over the ruin. many a one of us can say, of some past sorrow, that,
“when less keen it seemed to grow, i was not pleased—i wished to go mourning adown this vale of woe, for all my life uncomforted.”
it could not be, except in the case of a hypochondriac. in healthy lands the growth cannot be checked.
“i thought that i should never more feel any pleasure near me glow”:
and again:
“i grudged myself the lightsome air, that makes men cheerful unaware; when comfort came, i did not care to take it in, to feel it stir.”
after that devastating flood you did not care to take in the dove with the olive-leaf; you had rather sit moodily alone. very well for a time, but “will you nill you,” the second crop begins to cover the scars. and soon you can tranquilly and thankfully say,
“but i have learned, though this i had, ’tis sometimes natural to be glad, and no man can be always sad, unless he wills to have it so.”
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for it is an ordinance of god that the grass shall keep on growing.
* * * * *
but, of course, especially, and above all, the analogy before indicated is that which connects this brief life of ours with the grass of the field. we are, above all, alike in our frailty and evanescence.
“all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. the grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away.”
how exquisitely archbishop leighton comments upon this text! an idea so anciently true as almost to have become, in our ordinary speech, common-place, blossoms into new beauty under his holy thought. so, however, do what seem to ordinary thinkers bare rods in the teaching of the bible, yet bloom and bear fruit abundantly in the shrine of a congenial heart. “all flesh is as grass.” yes, he expands it, and “grass hath its root in the earth, and is fed by the moisture of it for awhile; but, besides that, it is under the hazard of such weather as favours it not, or of the scythe that cuts it down, give it all the forbearance that may be, let it be free from both those, yet how quickly will it wither of itself! set aside those many accidents, the smallest of which is able to destroy our natural life, the diseases of our own bodies and outward violences, and casualties that cut down many in their greenness, in the flower of their youth, the utmost term is not long; in the course of nature it will wither. our life indeed is a lighted torch, either blown out by some stroke or some wind; or, if spared, yet within awhile it burns away, and will die out of itself.”
a new idea is here given us as to the mowing. this poet139 makes the scythe to be the sweeping of disease or accident or violence that every day prostrate their thousands; accidents or violence represent the mowing; and there is, beside these, the withering too. as though a field of deep grass should be left unmown; yet how soon then would its life and light and laughter depart, and a skeleton array of thin, sere, shivering yellow stalks meet the october winds. even if unmown, we must wither, and either will at times seem saddest to us, until we remember that this field is but the field of time, and that the eternal god is ordering all.
but leighton proceeds to develope another exquisite thought, which to many would lie hidden and unperceived in the short and simple word of god—“all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass.” on the hint of this latter member of the sentence he speaks:
“there is indeed a great deal of seeming difference betwixt the outward conditions of life amongst men. shall the rich and honourable and beautiful and healthful go in together, under the same name, with the baser and unhappier part, the poor, wretched sort of the world, who seem to be born for nothing but sufferings and miseries? at least, hath the wise no advantage beyond the fools? is all grass? make you no distinction? no; all is grass, or if you will have some other name, be it so; once this is true, that all flesh is grass; and if that glory which shines so much in your eyes must have a difference, then this is all it can have—it is but the flower of that same grass; somewhat above the common grass in gayness, a little comelier and better apparelled than it, but partaker of its frail and fading nature; it hath no privilege nor immunity that way;140 yea, of the two, is the less durable, and usually shorter lived; at the best, it decays with it—the grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away.”
yes, grass and its flower—loveliness, might, wisdom: helen of troy shared the fate of the meanest weed; julius c?sar and napoleon lie with the rank and file; solomon in his glorious wisdom is at last now equalled with those lilies of the field, that grass which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven. we in the lower rank, we mere grass of the field, look at and admire the glory above us, the flower of the grass, the choice gifts of intellect, of power, of beauty: but even as we gaze, and before the scythe can come, or the sun can wither it, we miss it—“the flower thereof fadeth, and the grace of the fashion of it perisheth”:
“the wind passeth over it, and it is gone. and the place thereof shall know it no more.”
“the instances are not few, of those who have on a sudden fallen from the top of honour into the foulest disgraces, not by degrees coming down the stair they went up, but tumbled down headlong. and the most vigorous beauty and strength of body, how doth a few days’ sickness, or, if it escape that, a few years’ time, blast that flower!”
and, sadder still, we must feel it to be, the ornaments of the mind are as short-lived; and we watch, with the keenest regret, great intellects quenched by decay or death, and minds that are the most stored with knowledge and learning cut off in a day.
“yea, those higher advantages which have somewhat both of truer and more lasting beauty in them, the endowments of141 wit, and learning, and eloquence, yea, and of moral goodness and virtue, yet they cannot rise above this world, they are still, in all their glory, but the flower of grass; their root is in the earth. when men have endured the toil of study night and day, it is but a small parcel of knowledge they can attend to, and they are forced to lie down in the dust in the midst of their pursuit of it; that head that lodges most sciences shall within a while be disfurnished of them all; and the tongue that speaks most languages be silenced.”
yes, and again i look at the jumble of common grass and flower of grass, and bright blossoms all withered, in which i am reclining, and think how our bright days and our commonplace142 days, our ordinary life and our pageants, fade into dulness even as we live on, and are all swept down at last, as it seems to a superficial thinker, into one common oblivion by death. “what is become of all the pompous solemnities of kings and princes at their births and marriages, coronations and triumphs? they are now as a dream.” and so with our first flushes of success, our earliest tastes of fame, our new ecstasies of love, our wonders and admirations when life was young—where are they very soon? lying in the mown ranks, void of their living movement and vivid lustre; numbered with the heap of every-day events and emotions; still distinguished from these, still marked as flowers, but the glory of them dried out under the air of use and the sun of experience. precious they are still, and dear, but the dreams of youth are not to age what youth imagined them; the hay is valuable and sweet, but it is not that field which the least air could stir into a sea of silky light and shade, and a tossing of myriad colours. it was the flower of grass, and it cannot be, on earth, but that “the grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away.”
“would we consider this, in the midst of those varieties that toss our light minds to and fro, it would give us wiser thoughts, and ballast our hearts; make them more solid and stedfast in those spiritual endeavours which concern a durable condition, a being that abides for ever; in comparison of which the longest term of natural life is less than a moment, and the happiest estate is but a heap of miseries. were all of us more constantly prosperous than any one of us is, yet that one thing were enough to cry down the price we put upon this life, that it continues not. as he answered143 to one who had a mind to flatter him in the midst of a pompous triumph, by saying, what is wanting here? continuance, said he.”
yes, this is the moral of it all, “we have no abiding city.” what then? “but we seek one to come.” and st. peter, if he talk, it might seem mournfully, of the fading and dying growth from all earth’s sowings, is not really trying to sadden, but rather to cheer us. for he has been telling but just now of incorruptible seed; and he sums up the teaching of the fading grass and its withering glory, with these words of quietness and confidence,
“but the word of the lord endureth for ever.”
and this is always the distinction between the worldling’s or the sentimentalist’s cry of the vanity of human life and of its glory of hopes and loves and ambitions; and the inspired declarations of this vanity. in the former it is but a wind which comes with a blight and passes away with a wail. in the latter, some better thing is ever held before us, to which our heart’s yearning tendrils, gently disentangled from their withering support, may safely cling: and if the vanities and emptiness of time are clearly set before us, we are offered instead the realities and the fulness of eternity.
“the world passeth away, and the lust thereof”;
yes; but
“he that doeth the will of god abideth for ever.”
i have mused away my afternoon, and the sun is near the hills, and this day is falling beneath the scythe, and will soon144 lie behind me in the swathe, as i advance upon the yet unmown field or strip of my life. there are in this flowers, and nettles, and thistles, no doubt, and much common undistinguishable grass. ah, may it, in the end, be found to be, upon the whole, good and useful hay! yes; but here the life of man outruns the analogy, for the days that are passed are not done with: they remain dried and stored, either to rise and revive their flowers in far more than their pristine beauty; or to be burnt as rubbish and waste. nothing that god wrought of good or beautiful in us here, but will, fresher and fairer than at first, remain with us hereafter. and there is one for whose sake even the nettles and thistles that mixed with the useful grass and fair flowers, shall have vanished from those hearts that loved him, and be counted as though they had never been.
let me lie back for a little while, as the sun sets, and a cool air fans me, to quiet my heart with this happy trust and confidence.