My
Big Grass Book I Have Left At Home, And The Dust Is Settling On The Gold
Of The Binding.
I have picked a handful this morning of which I know
nothing.
I will sit here on the turf and the scarlet-dotted flies shall
pass over me, as if I too were but a grass. I will not think, I will be
unconscious, I will live.
Listen! that was the low sound of a summer wavelet striking the uncovered
rock over there beneath in the green sea. All things that are beautiful
are found by chance, like everything that is good. Here by me is a
praying-rug, just wide enough to kneel on, of the richest gold inwoven
with crimson. All the Sultans of the East never had such beauty as that
to kneel on. It is, indeed, too beautiful to kneel on, for the life in
these golden flowers must not be broken down even for that purpose. They
must not be defaced, not a stem bent; it is more reverent not to kneel on
them, for this carpet prays itself I will sit by it and let it pray for
me. It is so common, the bird's-foot lotus, it grows everywhere; yet if I
purposely searched for days I should not have found a plot like this, so
rich, so golden, so glowing with sunshine. You might pass by it in one
stride, yet it is worthy to be thought of for a week and remembered for a
year. Slender grasses, branched round about with slenderer boughs, each
tipped with pollen and rising in tiers cone-shaped - too delicate to grow
tall - cluster at the base of the mound. They dare not grow tall or the
wind would snap them. A great grass, stout and thick, rises three feet by
the hedge, with a head another foot nearly, very green and strong and
bold, lifting itself right up to you; you must say, 'What a fine grass!'
Grasses whose awns succeed each other alternately; grasses whose tops
seem flattened; others drooping over the shorter blades beneath; some
that you can only find by parting the heavier growth around them;
hundreds and hundreds, thousands and thousands. The kingly poppies on the
dry summit of the mound take no heed of these, the populace, their
subjects so numerous they cannot be numbered. A barren race they are, the
proud poppies, lords of the July field, taking no deep root, but raising
up a brilliant blazon of scarlet heraldry out of nothing. They are
useless, they are bitter, they are allied to sleep and poison and
everlasting night; yet they are forgiven because they are not
commonplace. Nothing, no abundance of them, can ever make the poppies
commonplace. There is genius in them, the genius of colour, and they are
saved. Even when they take the room of the corn we must admire them. The
mighty multitude of nations, the millions and millions of the grass
stretching away in intertangled ranks, through pasture and mead from
shore to shore, have no kinship with these their lords.
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