If summer brings a flower so lovable
Of such a meditative restfulness
As this, with all her roses and carnations.
The morning hardly stirs their noiseless bells;
Yet could I fancy that they whispered "Home,"
For all things gentle, all things beautiful,
I hold, my mother, for a part of thee.
So have I held. All things beautiful, but chiefly flowers. Her feeling
for them was little short of adoration. Her religious mind appeared to
regard them as little voiceless messengers from the Author of our
beings and of Nature, or as divine symbols of a place and a beauty
beyond our power to imagine.
I think it likely that when Dolmen penned those lines to the Snowdrop
it was in his mind that this was one of his mother's favourites. My
mother had her favourites too; not the roses and carnations in our
gardens, but mostly among the wild flowers growing on the pampas -
flowers which I never see in England. But I remember them, and if by
some strange chance I should find myself once more in that distant
region, I should go out in search of them, and seeing them again, feel
that I was communing with her spirit.
These memories of my mother are a relief to me in recalling that
melancholy time, the years of my youth that were wasted and worse,
considering their effect and that the very thought of that period,
which is to others the fullest, richest, and happiest in life, has
always been painful to me. Yet to it I am now obliged to return for
the space of two or three pages to relate how I eventually came out of
it.
My case was not precisely like that of Cooper's Castaway, but rather
like that of a fugitive from his ship on some tropical coast who, on
swimming to the shore, finds himself in a mangrove swamp, waist-deep
in mire, tangled in rope-like roots, straining frantically to escape
his doom.
I have told how after my fifteenth anniversary, when I first began to
reflect seriously on my future life, the idea still persisted that my
perpetual delight in Nature was nothing more than a condition or phase
of my child's and boy's mind, and would inevitably fade out in time. I
might have guessed at an earlier date that this was a delusion, since
the feeling had grown in strength with the years, but it was only
after I took to reading at the beginning of my sixteenth year that I
discovered its true character. One of the books I read then for the
first time was White's Shelburne, given to me by an old friend of our
family, a merchant in Buenos Ayres, who had been accustomed to stay a
week or two with us once a year when he took his holiday. He had been
on a visit to Europe, and one day, he told me, when in London on the
eve of his departure, he was in a bookshop, and seeing this book on
the counter and glancing at a page or two, it occurred to him that it
was just the right thing to get for that bird-loving boy out on the
pampas. I read and re-read it many times, for nothing so good of its
kind had ever come to me, but it did not reveal to me the secret of my
own feeling for Nature - the feeling of which I was becoming more and
more conscious, which was a mystery to me, especially at certain
moments, when it would come upon me with a sudden rush. So powerful it
was, so unaccountable, I was actually afraid of it, yet I would go out
of my way to seek it. At the hour of sunset I would go out half a mile
or so from the house, and sitting on the dry grass with hands clasped
round my knees, gaze at the western sky, waiting for it to take me.
And I would ask myself: What does it mean? But there was no answer to
that in any book concerning the "life and conversation of animals." I
found it in other works: in Brown's Philosophy - another of the ancient
tomes on our shelves - and in an old volume containing appreciations of
the early nineteenth-century poets; also in other works. They did not
tell me in so many words that it was the mystical faculty in me which
produced those strange rushes or bursts of feeling and lifted me out
of myself at moments; but what I found in their words was sufficient
to show me that the feeling of delight in Nature was an enduring one,
that others had known it, and that it had been a secret source of
happiness throughout their lives.
This revelation, which in other circumstances would have made me
exceedingly happy, only added to my misery when, as it appeared, I had
only a short time to live. Nature could charm, she could enchant me,
and her wordless messages to my soul were to me sweeter than honey and
the honeycomb, but she could not take the sting and victory from
death, and I had perforce to go elsewhere for consolation. Yet even
so, in my worst days, my darkest years, when occupied with the
laborious business of working out my own salvation with fear and
trembling, with that spectre of death always following me, even so I
could not rid my mind of its old passion and delight. The rising and
setting sun, the sight of a lucid blue sky after cloud and rain, the
long unheard familiar call-note of some newly-returned migrant, the
first sight of some flower in spring, would bring back the old emotion
and would be like a sudden ray of sunlight in a dark place - a
momentary intense joy, to be succeeded by ineffable pain. Then there
were times when these two opposite feelings mingled and would be
together in my mind for hours at a time, and this occurred oftenest
during the autumnal migration, when the great wave of bird-life set
northwards, and all through March and April the birds were visible in
flock succeeding flock from dawn to dark, until the summer visitants
were all gone, to be succeeded in May by the birds from the far south,
flying from the Antarctic winter.
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