There Is No Hope On The Old Lines - They Are Dead, Like The
Empty Shells; From The Sweet Delicious Violets Think Out Fresh Petals Of
Thought And Colours, As It Were, Of Soul.
Never was such a worshipper of earth.
The commonest pebble, dusty and
marked with the stain of the ground, seems to me so wonderful; my mind
works round it till it becomes the sun and centre of a system of thought
and feeling. Sometimes moving aside the tufts of grass with careless
fingers while resting on the sward, I found these little pebble-stones
loose in the crumbly earth among the rootlets. Then, brought out from the
shadow, the sunlight shone and glistened on the particles of sand that
adhered to it. Particles adhered to my skin - thousands of years between
finger and thumb, these atoms of quartz, and sunlight shining all that
time, and flowers blooming and life glowing in all, myriads of living
things, from the cold still limpet on the rock to the burning, throbbing
heart of man. Sometimes I found them among the sand of the heath, the sea
of golden brown surging up yellow billows six feet high about me, where
the dry lizard hid, or basked, of kin, too, to old time. Or the rush of
the sea wave brought them to me, wet and gleaming, up from the depths of
what unknown Past? where they nestled in the root crevices of trees
forgotten before Egypt. The living mind opposite the dead pebble - did you
ever consider the strange and wonderful problem there? Only the thickness
of the skin of the hand between them. The chief use of matter is to
demonstrate to us the existence of the soul. The pebble-stone tells me I
am a soul because I am not that that touches the nerves of my hand. We
are distinctly two, utterly separate, and shall never come together. The
little pebble and the great sun overhead - millions of miles away: yet is
the great sun no more distinct and apart than this which I can touch.
Dull-surfaced matter, like a polished mirror, reflects back thought to
thought's self within.
I listened to the sweet-briar wind this morning; but for weeks and weeks
the stark black oaks stood straight out of the snow as masts of ships
with furled sails frozen and ice-bound in the haven of the deep valley.
Each was visible to the foot, set in the white slope, made individual in
the wood by the brilliance of the background. Never was such a long
winter. For fully two months they stood in the snow in black armour of
iron bark unshaken, the front rank of the forest army that would not
yield to the northern invader. Snow in broad flakes, snow in semi-flakes,
snow raining down in frozen specks, whirling and twisting in fury, ice
raining in small shot of frost, howling, sleeting, groaning; the ground
like iron, the sky black and faintly yellow - brutal colours of
despotism - heaven striking with clenched fist. When at last the general
surface cleared, still there remained the trenches and traverses of the
enemy, his ramparts drifted high, and his roads marked with snow. The
black firs on the ridge stood out against the frozen clouds, still and
hard; the slopes of leafless larches seemed withered and brown; the
distant plain far down gloomy with the same dull yellowish blackness. At
a height of seven hundred feet the air was sharp as a scythe - a rude
barbarian giant wind knocking at the walls of the house with a vast club,
so that we crept sideways even to the windows to look out upon the world.
There was everything to repel - the cold, the frost, the hardness, the
snow, dark sky and ground, leaflessness; the very furze chilled and all
benumbed. Yet the forest was still beautiful. There was no day that we
did not, all of us, glance out at it and admire it, and say something
about it. Harder and harder grew the frost, yet still the forest-clad
hills possessed a something that drew the mind open to their largeness
and grandeur. Earth is always beautiful - always. Without colour, or leaf,
or sunshine, or song of bird and flutter of butterfly's wing; without
anything sensuous, without advantage or gilding of summer - the power is
ever there. Or shall we not say that the desire of the mind is ever
there, and - will - satisfy itself, in a measure at least, even with the
barren wild? The heart from the moment of its first beat instinctively
longs for the beautiful; the means we possess to gratify it are
limited - we are always trying to find the statue in the rude block. Out
of the vast block of the earth the mind endeavours to carve itself
loveliness, nobility, and grandeur. We strive for the right and the true:
it is circumstance that thrusts wrong upon us.
One morning a labouring man came to the door with a spade, and asked if
he could dig the garden, or try to, at the risk of breaking the tool in
the ground. He was starving; he had had no work for two months; it was
just six months, he said, since the first frost started the winter.
Nature and the earth and the gods did not trouble about - him - , you see;
he might grub the rock-frost ground with his hands if he chose - the
yellowish black sky did not care. Nothing for man! The only good he found
was in his fellow-men; they fed him after a fashion - still they fed him.
There was no good in anything else. Another aged man came once a week
regularly; white as the snow through which he walked. In summer he
worked; since the winter began he had had no employment, but supported
himself by going round to the farms in rotation. They all gave him a
trifle - bread and cheese, a penny, a slice of meat - something; and so he
lived, and slept the whole of that time in outhouses wherever he could.
He had no home of any kind.
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