LITMIR.BIZ

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that I enjoy you still!

      “For, lo, the winter is past,

       The rain is over and gone;

       The flowers appear on the earth;

       The time of the singing of birds is come,

       And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.”

      This exquisite poetry has its voice of delight for me, and as I shut my eyes, it brings a change over the bare boughs and the Winter land. I dream of the chill black hedges and trees, flushing first into redness, and then “a million emeralds burst from the ruby buds.” I dream of the birds coming back, one after one, until the poetry of the flowers is all set to music. And I go out into the land to behold, not only to dream of and image, these things. I watch for the delicious green, tasselling the earliest larch (there is one every year a fortnight in advance of the others) in the clump of those trees beside the road on my way home. I look, in a warm patch that I know, for the first primroses, and when I find them mildly and quietly gazing up at me from the moss, and ivy, and broken sticks, and dead leaves, a surprise, although I was expecting them, and a dim reflection of that old child-joy, bring with a rush to my heart again those “Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” And in the garden I wander through the bare shrubberies, varied with bright green box, and gather in my harvest there. The little Queen Elizabeth aconites, gold-crowned in their wide-frilled green collars; these are no more scant, and just breaking with bent head through cracking frosty ground. They have carpeted the brown beds, and are even waxing old and past now. The snowdrops have but left a straggler here and there; and the miniature golden volcano of the crocus has spent its columns of fire. The hazels are draped with slender, drooping catkins; the sweetbriar is letting the soft sweet-breathed leaves here and there out of the clenched hand of the bud. The cherry-tree is preparing to dress itself almost in angels’ clothing, white and glistening, and delicious with all soft recesses of clear grey shadow, seen against the mild blue sky. The long branches of the horse-chestnut trees, laid low upon the lawn, are lighting up all over with the ravishing crumpled emerald that bursts like light out of the brown sticky bud—as sometimes holy heavenly thoughts may come from one whose first look we disliked; or as God’s dear lessons unfold out of the dark sheath of trouble. The fairy almond-tree—of so tender a hue that you might fantastically imagine it a cherry-tree blushing—casts a light scarf over a dark corner of the shrubbery. The laburnum is preparing for the Summer, and is all hung with tiny green festoons. Against the blue sky, on a bare sycamore branch, that stretches out straight from the trunk, a glad-voiced thrush seems thanking God that the Spring days are come. Wedged tight into three branching boughs, near the stem of a box-tree, I find a warm secure nest, filled with five little blue-green eggs. It is still a delight to me to find a nest; a delight, if not now a rapture, an intoxication.

      All these I see on one Spring day or another, as I walk into my garden, or out into the changing lanes. All these I see, and all these I love. But I see them, and I love them tenderly and quietly, not with the wonder and the glee of life’s early Spring days. I am sad, partly because I know that a great deal of that old wondering ecstatic thrill has gone.

      “The rainbow comes and goes,

       And lovely is the rose,

       The moon doth with delight

       Look round her when the heavens are bare;

       Waters on a starry night

       Are beautiful and fair;

       The sunshine is a glorious birth;

       But yet I know, where’er I go,

       That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.”

      It must be so, naturally, if only from the mere fact that things must lose their newness, and so their wonder, to the eye and the heart. Do what you will, you must become accustomed to things. And the scent of a hyacinth or of the may, will cease when familiar to be the wonderful enchanting thing that childhood held it to be. And the thirtieth time that we see, to notice, the first snowdrop bursting through the pale green sheath above the brown bed, is a different thing from the third time. We appreciate delights keenly when we are young, seek the same in later years, but never find them; and then all our life remember the search more or less regretfully. So Wordsworth, the old man, addresses the cuckoo that brought back his young days and his young thoughts by its magic voice:—

      “Thou bringest unto me a tale

       Of visionary hours.

      “Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring!

       Even yet thou art to me No bird, but an invisible thing, A voice, a mystery:

      “To seek thee did I often rove

       Through woods and on the green;

       And thou wert still a hope, a love;

       Still longed for, never seen.

      “And I can listen to thee yet;

       Can lie upon the plain

       And listen, till I do beget

       That golden time again.”

      Ah well, I must get on to my moral. I must not wail like an Autumn wind among the young flowers, and the bright leaves, and the blithe songs of the sweet Spring days, else I shall lay myself open to the reproach of the poet describing one who—

      “Words of little weight let fall,

       The fancy of the lower mind—

       That waxing life must needs leave all

       Its best behind.”

      It is not true really, that we are leaving behind our best, when we have passed into the Summer, or even into the Autumn days. But there is a degree, a portion of truth in it. There is a sense, no doubt, in which even the Summer does lose a beauty which is the peculiar possession of life’s Spring days.

      First then (to divide sermon-wise), what is that we lose, when we lose Spring days? I have hinted at this loss in nearly all that has been written above. We lose the gladness of inexperience, the gladness and enjoyment that is not thoughtful, nor such as can give a reason for itself, but that is merely natural, and welling up irresistibly like a spring. We lose the newness of things—aye, more, far more than this, we lose the newness of ourselves, the freshness of our own heart. This is (with some in a greater, with some in a less degree) what we discover that we have left behind, when we look back on life’s Spring days. Some of us, with a tender half-regretful watering, keep a hint, a reminiscence, of that old freshness. But many heedlessly suffer the world’s dust to coat it over, and the world’s drought to shrivel it up.

      But now, what may we have gained, if there be something lost in our leaving Spring days behind? If we lose a little, let us not fear but that our gain is far larger than our loss. We gain gladness and we gain sadness (I use the word gain advisedly)—the gladness and the sadness of experience. A gladness that is part of the depth of a grave river now; profound, if not light-hearted like the little spring. A gladness that, when it comes, is more rational than merely animal; that has a reason to give for itself, and does not exist merely because it exists. A joy that is far more rare, also less ecstatic, but that is higher and deeper, having its birth in the intellect, and not simply in the life of the human creature.

      To exemplify my meaning. In art, compare the mere admiration without knowledge, with the intelligent appreciation. Turned loose without knowledge into a picture-gallery, how many things you admire, almost everything; and how fresh and uncritical is your admiration! But gain knowledge of art, gain experience; and you straightway lose in quantity what you yet gain in quality. You admire fewer pictures, but your admiration of the few is a different thing from that old admiration of the many. It is a higher thing, more intelligent, more subtle, more refined. It is an appreciation now, not merely an ignorant admiration. You are harder to please; in one sense you have lost; but manifestly, on the whole you have gained.

      And so with the gladness of manhood. It is a deeper, graver, more fastidious, yet a more reasonable and higher feeling than the gladness of the child. The sparkle, and bubble, and glitter, and singing

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