The Green Hawthorn Buds Prophesy On The Hedge; The Reed Pushes Up In The
Moist Earth Like A Spear Thrust
Through a shield; the eggs of the
starling are laid in the knot-hole of the pollard elm - common eggs,
But
within each a speck that is not to be found in the cut diamond of two
hundred carats - the dot of protoplasm, the atom of life. There was one
row of pollards where they always began laying first. With a big stick in
his beak the rook is blown aside like a loose feather in the wind; he
knows his building-time from the fathers of his house - hereditary
knowledge handed down in settled course: but the stray things of the
hedge, how do they know? The great blackbird has planted his nest by the
ash-stole, open to every one's view, without a bough to conceal it and
not a leaf on the ash - nothing but the moss on the lower end of the
branches. He does not seek cunningly for concealment. I think of the
drift of time, and I see the apple bloom coming and the blue veronica in
the grass. A thousand thousand buds and leaves and flowers and blades of
grass, things to note day by day, increasing so rapidly that no pencil
can put them down and no book hold them, not even to number them - and how
to write the thoughts they give? All these without me - how can they
manage without me?
For they were so much to me, I had come to feel that I was as much in
return to them. The old, old error: I love the earth, therefore the earth
loves me - I am her child - I am Man, the favoured of all creatures. I am
the centre, and all for me was made.
In time past, strong of foot, I walked gaily up the noble hill that leads
to Beachy Head from Eastbourne, joying greatly in the sun and the wind.
Every step crumbled up numbers of minute grey shells, empty and dry, that
crunched under foot like hoar-frost or fragile beads. They were very
pretty; it was a shame to crush them - such vases as no king's pottery
could make. They lay by millions in the depths of the sward, and I
thought as I broke them unwillingly that each of these had once been a
house of life. A living creature dwelt in each and felt the joy of
existence, and was to itself all in all - as if the great sun over the
hill shone for it, and the width of the earth under was for it, and the
grass and plants put on purpose for it. They were dead, the whole race of
them, and these their skeletons were as dust under my feet. Nature sets
no value upon life neither of minute hill-snail nor of human being.
I thought myself so much to the earliest leaf and the first meadow
orchis - so important that I should note the first zee-zee of the
titlark - that I should pronounce it summer, because now the oaks were
green; I must not miss a day nor an hour in the fields lest something
should escape me. How beautiful the droop of the great brome-grass by the
wood! But to-day I have to listen to the lark's song - not out of doors
with him, but through the window-pane, and the bullfinch carries the
rootlet fibre to his nest without me. They manage without me very well;
they know their times and seasons - not only the civilised rooks, with
their libraries of knowledge in their old nests of reference, but the
stray things of the hedge and the chiffchaff from over sea in the ash
wood. They go on without me. Orchis flower and cowslip - I cannot number
them all - I hear, as it were, the patter of their feet - flower and bud
and the beautiful clouds that go over, with the sweet rush of rain and
burst of sun glory among the leafy trees. They go on, and I am no more
than the least of the empty shells that strewed the sward of the hill.
Nature sets no value upon life, neither of mine nor of the larks that
sang years ago. The earth is all in all to me, but I am nothing to the
earth: it is bitter to know this before you are dead. These delicious
violets are sweet for themselves; they were not shaped and coloured and
gifted with that exquisite proportion and adjustment of odour and hue for
me. High up against the grey cloud I hear the lark through the window
singing, and each note falls into my heart like a knife.
Now this to me speaks as the roll of thunder that cannot be denied - you
must hear it; and how can you shut your ears to what this lark sings,
this violet tells, this little grey shell writes in the curl of its
spire? The bitter truth that human life is no more to the universe than
that of the unnoticed hill-snail in the grass should make us think more
and more highly of ourselves as human - as men - living things that think.
We must look to ourselves to help ourselves. We must think ourselves into
an earthly immortality. By day and by night, by years and by centuries,
still striving, studying, searching to find that which shall enable us to
live a fuller life upon the earth - to have a wider grasp upon its violets
and loveliness, a deeper draught of the sweet-briar wind. Because my
heart beats feebly to-day, my trickling pulse scarcely notating the
passing of the time, so much the more do I hope that those to come in
future years may see wider and enjoy fuller than I have done; and so much
the more gladly would I do all that I could to enlarge the life that
shall be then.
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