CHAPTER XXXVI. "O dreary life!" we cry, "O dreary life!" Sing through our sighing, and the flocks and herds With Heaven's true purpose in us, as a knife Grant me some smaller grace than comes to these ;- Grows by, contented, through the heat and cold. E. B. BROWNING. AUBIN. O THIS westerly wind and sunshine! How the white clouds drive, and the poplar-leaves glance and rustle! Every breath is health this morning. So lofty and so blue the sky is, and such fresh thoughts one has in looking up at it. It is poetry and religion to be in the open air to-day; is it not? It is as though God were abroad. What am I saying? As though the Divinity were not omnipresent, and present always and everywhere alike! I mean, this morning feels as Eden may have felt, when, in the cool of the day, Adam became sensible of the Lord God's presence among the trees. MARHAM. It is a very pleasant morning. I looked for you in the garden, Oliver. AUBIN. In autumn I do not much like the sight of a garden. MARHAM. It is melancholy; it certainly is. AUBIN. The melancholy of the woods I like; but in the blighted prettiness of a garden there is no promise of a revival. But the woods look so grandly in decay, that it is as though they knew of their being to be green again. So when I saw how the dahlias were blackened with the frost, and how one flower hung its head, and another was dropped on to the ground, I came through the garden, and I have been sitting in the field here and meditating. What about ? MARHAM. AUBIN. Sit on the bench here, and I will tell you, uncle. But I must remember first, which I do not think I can very well. MARHAM. O, you have been dreaming, Oliver; and pleasantly, I hope. AUBIN. No, I have not been dreaming, but only feel ing. I have been feeling like a portion of the scene about me, and as though my being were blended with that of the trees and the fields; so that the leaves fell as though through my spirit; and it was not as though I heard with my ears the robin sing, but as though he sung within me. And I felt just as the trees and hedges and grass might feel together, if they could know of their life's subsiding into a wintry pause. MARHAM. Yellow, and then naked, and then as green again as ever! I ought not to have seen this in the woods seventy times, without myself growing old the more cheerfully. It is a day for thinking, this is; and every autumn, for a few days, it is as though there were a power in the air making us be thoughtful. AUBIN. The spirit of the season is on us, and it is as though from every thing about us we were whispered, "Now know yourselves." And a very seasonable warning it is, after the contentment that summer has given us, in health, and warmth, and plenty, and light. Summer would make us self-sufficient; but autumn says to us, that we are mortal: very mildly she speaks; but if she is not minded, then the voice of winter is the more terrific, when he comes roaring out of the north. And if a man dies at the coming of winter, he dies the more mournful if he has not talked quietly with the autumn just gone. MARHAM. Poor man! But we do not any of us feel as we ought, that here we have no continuing city. The leaves are fading about us, and so the more submissively do we ourselves fade as a leaf. AUBIN. Yes, our feelings are soothed by nature about us; and then, as soon as they are calmed, they grow hopeful of themselves, and our walk among the dead leaves becomes triumphant, and we say that we know that our Redeemer lives. MARHAM. Among the works of God our feelings get soothed, and grow prophetic of immortality; but not so among the works of men, not so in towns. In a town every thing is so noisy and bustling; and it is as though there were not much thought in it fit for an old man to have, and not much feeling about it that he can well share in. AUBIN. O, in Yet men grow old in towns, and faster than in the country, perhaps. And in a large city, the clock never strikes twice in the hearing of the same population; for within the hour, a child has been born and some soul has been taken. the sight of God who sees it all, how the population of a city must be ever changing! In one home there is a babe just born, and in the next house is stretched the cold length of a corpse. Always there is one generation going, and another coming. So that in a city the inhabitants may be as many as ever, but they are never the same, even for a few hours. Year by year, and hour by hour, the population renews itself; the son in the place of the father, and youth out of decay. Now, in an aged heart, is there no sympathy with this? Nay, in this life of a city, ever fresh and strong, is not there something like the immortality of the soul? is not there what shows how the inward spirit may renew itself through the very perishing of the outward form? For in some cities, energy, wisdom, frankness, friendliness, and little peculiarities of mind, are the same from age to age, while the men, and the buildings, and the streets, are changing every day. MARHAM. Your faith is like an evergreen, for it is always so fresh; and in the smoke of a city it does not fail, but even there it smells of the country. |