The Summer is past, the Autumn is passing quite away, the Harvest is long ended, the fruit all garnered. And the year seems as desolate as Solomon in his sad time, having been clad in more than all his glory. It has gathered gardens, and orchards, and pools, and singers, and delights; and whatsoever its eyes desired it kept not from them, nor withheld its heart from any joy or beauty; and it rejoiced in all its labour. But now what a change! You may fancy that it has looked on all the works that it had wrought, and on the labour that it had laboured to do,—and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun! And so it hastens to cast away all its gathered store and cherished delights, and stands naked,268 desolate, bankrupt, under the cold searching gaze of the clear bright stars. Ah!
“Where is the pride of Summer, the green prime,— The many, many leaves all twinkling? Three On the mossed elm; three on the naked lime, Trembling,—and one upon the old oak tree!”
Nature is always beautiful to those who always look for beauty in her. But perhaps she is least lovely when clad in a close thick fog. And it is thus that we have seen her continually of late. The wet black trees stood dim and ghostlike in the mist, and much like seaweed under tissue-paper. The hedges looked unreal and distant, as you passed between them on the pale road. Passengers and carriages loomed blurred and big and indistinct, out of the chill cloud in front of you, long after the wheels and the steps had been heard. Dull unglittering dew strung the branches that stretched over you, and gave a blunt light here and there in the hedge. You were isolated from your kind; scarce could you see one approaching until he was close upon you; and then, a few steps, and he was straightway swallowed up. It was not a fading morning mist; but a good November fog, one developing from cold blue to grey, and thence to yellow, and so on to tawny dun. Homeward-bound, you emerge from it into the railway-station. The train is late; the fire is pleasant; and you muse or doze away half-an-hour by the waiting-room fire. Presently a red spot dyes part of the mist; a behemoth mass is perceivable beside the platform; you get into a carriage, the whistle shrills, the train moves, and the station lights are gone in a minute,—and you also are swallowed up in the fog.
269 And as you pass, up the garden, home,—the chance is that you hurry on, where you would have paused to admire beauty. In the cold fog, the asparagus, hung with leaden mist-drops that chilly gleam here and there, bends and falls about its mounded bed; a black, wet, sere leaf or two clings to the ragged black sticks against that wall; the acacias drop pattering drops upon the broad fallen sycamore leaves: you might as well walk through water, as cross that lawn for a short cut to the warm mellow room, at whose window, which opens to the ground, stands she who chiefly makes that house, home. You are not sorry to shut the windows, and to have the curtains drawn, and to let the earth stand without, like a shrouded ghost, clad in winding-sheet of fog, while you enjoy the genial blaze, the cosy meal, the little ones on your lap after dinner, the gentle wifely smile that loves to see these loved.
Well, I contend that there is beauty even in the fog; but I will not stop to prove this now. I will only say that there is less beauty in this than in most other aspects of nature, and much excuse for the connecting the foggy bare time of year with chill and dreary thoughts. Then, growth of flower and fruit seems suspended, save for a scarlet splash on the hedge here and there; and dead-fingered fungi crowd in bunches above the graves of the flowers, and at the roots of the trees.
The fields are bare, with no coming crops; only swart and self-satisfied pigs roam in herds over them: the grass has stopped growing; there is neither blossom nor fruit, nor leaves upon the trees; the birds’ nests are empty and sodden;270 hope and fulfilment seem alike departed, and death seems to reign in solitary gloom over the pale and shrouded land. Is not all this sad beyond tears?
No; we are sure that this is not sad in the year, really; for that memory and hope are alike supporting the year’s aged steps, as it totters into December. The hope is to be found in every twig, as well as in the broad brown lands that are beginning to be ruled in music lines of thin emerald. The memory suggests by analogy, and in a sweet figure, those words that have comforted many a mourner,—
“I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours; and their works do follow them.”
It is not sad, really, to see the year in its bareness and barrenness; lonely winds searching over the cornless uplands, and sighing amid the stripped boughs; dull fogs brooding over the damp fields, and shrouding the universal desolation and decay. No; because the fruits have been, and are garnered in. It is not that the year’s work has been left, until too late, to do. It is only that it is done. It is not sad, really; for when we walk through the dull bare fields, that once moved with millions of stalks and one whisper, we think of the heaped, massed grain, or of the crumbling white flour, or of the tawny square loaves. Or, if we miss the dancing grass and the bobbing clover, we look at the goodly camps of close-stacked hay, under the peaked roofs of straw. And walking through the garden or the orchard, if for a moment we are271 chilled by the bare look of the pitiful cold boughs, black, and ragged, and starred with tears, our thought flies from these to the bright, smooth red or white cherries, and the dark blue-bloomed damsons, and the ruddy plums, and the yellow pears, and the grey greengages, and the dead-orange apricots, and the smooth nectarines, and the soft, crimson-hearted peaches,—all of which were, in their turn, yielded faithfully by those desolate branches. Ay, and we think with double satisfaction of a store yet left; of the cosy apples and freckled pears, sorted, wiped, and laid by in rows—brown-yellow nonpareils, streaked ribstones, mellow Blenheim oranges, and russets, betraying a gleam of gold just where the brown has rubbed. We may, perhaps, think—but this is a pleasing thought,—how different all would be with the year, were all this otherwise, and had the Spring, and Summer, and Autumn been squandered in merely making wreaths of dying flowers, that perished at the chill breath of the fogs and frosts.
Thus, then, our sober thought concludes. But still, to our fancy the year seems desolate, forlorn, and sad; the fog is a chill and heavy depression; the rain sobs out its heart in tears; the wind—
“Like a broken worldling wails, And the flying gold of the ruined woodland drives through the air.”
In poetry, and even in prose, we do not most readily think of the year, between November and Christmas, as asleep after work done, but as stagnant, and brooding in despair over a wasted life and lost opportunities, and hopes withered and gone by. Why does this aspect arise most naturally272 to our mind? for no such thought would trouble that of a contemplating angel.
Well, the truth is, that we look through coloured glass, tinting with a hue of sadness to the mind’s eye things not really sad. We see the leaves circle down, and straightway are reminded that—
“We all do fade as a leaf.”
We see the mists gather and the rain descend, and no one but can recall heavy mists of sorrow that rose over the heart’s landscape, and glooming clouds that burst in bitter tears. And the wind gets its wail as it passes through our heart, and not from the bare boughs of the watered resting trees. And we choose to represent the year as thoughtlessly glad and wastefully profuse in its lost seasons, and as now broken-hearted and despairing; because this is so common a case, if not in our own experience, yet in the history of so very many about us. We cannot but think how this idle business and succeeding gloom is indeed to be found too often, too often, in the year of man’s life. Flowers, when he is young; flowers, in life’s prime; flowers, in its Autumn; and what will ye do in the end thereof? What, when the fogs and the frosts have come, and the evil days are close at hand, and the years draw nigh when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them? Where is the secure store, the treasure laid up in the safe garner, to cheer the heart when the sap has gone down for this year, and the fields are blank, and growth is stayed?
How foolish, we can see and should readily acknowledge;273 how unpardonably shortsighted it would be of the Year to postpone its work of preparing, maturing, ripening its fruits until the dark, short, chill days towards its end. “It is the sweet pleasure time, this Spring; wait for Summer, I will then begin. Summer, with its thick leaves and hazy blue—who would begin at such a time as this to work? Autumn—let me enjoy the cool bracing air after Summer’s heat; soon, really, a start shall be made.” And so November—and all the year’s harvest, and all the year’s fruits to be begun, grown, matured, all the year’s work crowded into the last thin group of dwindling days. Desolate, indeed, would the year be then, and a wild wail of “Too late!” would sweep with a shiver over the dreary land; no sunshine now, no time, no opportunity, no inclination, no power. The sap would be sluggish, the impulse of growth gone by; and at last a stolid, hard frost of indifference and fixed sterility close the sad story of the year.
Well, this may be fanciful—yet, brothers and sisters mine, that which is fanciful in the year of Nature, which always does God’s work faithfully, even while it enjoys His glad sun and refreshing rain, and smiles up to Him in flowers—that which is fanciful applied to the life of the Year, is gravely, heart-touchingly true of many and many a life of Man. Nature,
“True to her trust, tree, herb, or reed, She renders for each scattered seed, And to her Lord with duteous heed Gives large increase: Thus year by year she works unfee’d, And will not cease.”
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