Part 7

Walking rivals angling in demanding and engendering quiet. "To make a walk successful," says another dear old gentleman, writing at the same time of life but in modern times, "mind and body should be free of burthen." The true and abiding joy of walking is in calm. "The mood," says John Burroughs, "in which you set out on a spring or autumn ramble or a sturdy winter walk ... is the mood in which your best thoughts and impulses come to you.... Life is sweet in such moods, the Universe is complete, and there is no failure or imperfection anywhere." Only Nature can induce such moods--

"Dear Nature is the kindest mother still,"

says the soul-tossed, self-torturing Byron. Books, music, art, the drama, philosophy, science--at bottom there seems to be something disquieting in these. They come in such questionable shape. They are the works of man; and we never altogether trust the works of man. We never feel, even with the first of those who know, that our fellow-man, who is, after all, like unto ourselves, has answered every question, allayed every doubt, stilled every fear. Was something of this in Matthew Arnold's mind when he cried:

"One lesson, Nature, let me learn of thee,"

and prayed her to calm, to compose him to the end?--But enough in praise of calm. Calm is compatible with the highest and most exuberant spirits. Indeed, high and exuberant spirits are the first and natural outcome of a mind at peace with itself. Good old Walton is continually breaking out into pious or pastoral song--and making milkmaids and milkmaids' mothers break out into song, too.

Evening Meditations

§ 21

If, as Messieurs Piscator, Venator, and Auceps, and their tuneful milkmaids, show, early morning walks tend to blithesomeness of heart, evening walks tend perhaps to meditation of mind. As day wears on--I do not know, I may be wrong, but to me it seems that as day wears on it takes a more sombre aspect. It was at dusk that Gray's Elegy was written. In the very sound of Milton's simple words,

"Then came still evening on,"

there is to me an echo of quietness, perhaps of melancholy.--Many a lesson I have learned by quiet meditation in quiet scenes, prolonged far into the night.--Indeed, he is a wise walker who chooses for himself one or more secluded spots, sequestered deep, whither he may go, there to commune with himself; or to hold high converse with the mighty dead; or to lend an expectant ear for the dryads of the woods; or, if nothing more, to rid him of the petty perturbations incident to a life lived between four walls, a floor, and a ceiling, and broken into fragments by clocks which strike the hours and watches which point to the minute.

§ 22

One such spot I have, and from it many a lesson I have learned.--It is a great amphitheatre, Nature-made, vast and open. It slopes to the north and west, and all about it and about are green trees--green trees and shrubs and lowly plants. In the whole space I am the one spectator--save for little grasses that stand on tiptoe to look and listen; save for little weeds that nod their heads; and a beetle crawling heedless over dry and shining grains of sand. In the orchestral centre, where, in ancient Greece, should stand the lighted altar, there chances to be a little crimson maple; and behind and beyond rise verdant hills. Before me, as where should be the stage, stand, in green habiliments, beech and elm and fir; oak and cedar; lithe and virginal saplings; broad-shouldered pines, staid and stalwart--a goodly company, goodly and green, wondrous green; and for me they act and pose and sing.... The drama opens.

* * * * *

There is no fanfaronade. On the left, against a dove-grey cloud, the topmost twigs of a silver poplar rustle, the signal to commence. Gently, and with grace supreme, the boughs begin a cosmic song, and sway the while they chant. They dip and fall, and lightly rise; take hands and touch, and smile, and sing again. Troop after troop takes up the measure as the wind sweeps through the trees, and there is revealed to the eye and to the ear sound and motion obedient to an unseen power.... The movement deepens. Great masses join the dance, swell the vespertinal hymn. Huge and cumbrous boughs sweep back and forth, melodious, eloquent; and from tremulous leaf to swaying limb rises a choric song, beautiful, wonderful.... Of what is it that they speak?

* * * * *

Presently, beneath the dove-grey cloud, the red sun momentarily shows. Gleams strike the amphitheatre, the stage. My neighbour grasses glint in the sheen, the beetle's wing-sheaths glow; the sand grains glisten, and, overhead, the veined leaves of the larch, which before were black against the sky, become translucent to the light. The massed greens grow radiant; solitary boughs shake sunshine from their locks; the shrubs stand out overt; a divine gleesomeness fills all the wood.... Whence comes the mystic impulse?

* * * * *

Then slowly evening falls. The wind dies down. A fitful breeze, now warm with Summer's breath, now chill, strays aimless; and the major song sinks to a key in flats.--The sun sinks. The green shadows grow black; and where before was great leafage, is now a great gloom, in which even the white-stemmed birches lose their tapering limbs. Gone are the leaves of the larch; the shrubs hide; the beetle creeps out of sight. A far-off rill mingles a bass maestoso sob with its treble trill; and slowly, very slowly, a thin thin mist creates itself in every cranny of the dell. Only I am left, dull of hearing, miscomprehending, obtuse.

Only a little scene in an unending play; for all through the night, and for endless days and nights, before man was, and long after man will be, these leafy persons uplift that solemn chant, enact that choric dance: now frolicsome and free; now plaintive: now expectant, patient, still.... What is it that they hymn?

§ 23

It is but little that I, I and the heedless beetle, comprehend of this mighty but mystical drama. Some supernal power impels them, so it seems, and they hymn and praise this power; some hidden force, emanating in regions far beyond the sun, yet immanent in the grass blade, in the leaflet, in the sand grains at my feet. Often a darksome power, ruthless, blind; slaying horde on horde; spilling blood like water; scattering real pain and poignant agony like hail; yet often thrilling, joyous, tremulous with bliss--inscrutable, recondite, dark. It is formed and transformed into myriad shapes, out-running time, out-living life; muted and re-muted, here into gross and ponderable matter, there into filmiest air; anon revealing itself as exuberant life; again vanishing in so-called death; a breath; a spirit; the soul of eternal things.... Some hidden power they hymn.

* * * * *

The darkness deepens. The mist grows thick apace, heavy and sombre. The keen jagged edge that cut the horizon is blunted. The mystic play is withdrawn; the persons of the drama vanish; and spectators and stage, proscenium and scene, the ampitheatre, the open earth, and the illimitable sky, are blent into one dark and invisible whole.

* * * * *

Then in the silence of night I heard the soundless voice of that Spirit of Eternal Things: that Mystery, impenetrable as the dark, impalpable: revealing itself as one with the shapes it took and one with the impulse they obeyed; in the grass blade and the leaf, and in the wind to which they swayed; in the ponderous earth that, darkling, rolls through space, and in the subtle mind that holds this earth in fee. The vast and the far-off were embraced in the vision, for from the remotest star came rays that united me with it. The minute and the trivial were summoned from their hiding to prove themselves near and akin. Magnitude and proportion were swallowed up in unity; number and computation disappeared in a stupendous integer. Not a leaf shook, not a bud burst, but was moved to motion and to life by forces infinite and remote, ante-dating sun or star, one with sun and star, older than the Milky Way, vaster than the limits of vision. For in each leaflet of the boscage ran a sap ancient as ocean; and but yesterday, in the history of Time, that whole assemblage was something far other than it is. Bud and leaf were but manifestations of a something supreme--a Force, a Spirit, a God; a mysterious Thing that took hold of dew and sunshine and soil and transformed them into shape and perfume. And sunshine and dew and soil were in turn themselves but mutations of things, chemical elements or movements of molecules; and these again but mutations of things more subtle still--atoms or electrons, infinitesimal and innominate particles; till ultimately, surely, we arrive at something immense, immutable.--Something there must be behind all change; behind all appearances Something that Appears. And the last appearance, and the sum-total of appearances, must be potential in the first, as in the acorn is contained a potential forest. Given one acorn, and enough of space and time, and there is actually possible a cosmos of oaks; and every oak different, and no two twigs alike. So, could we explain the electron, we should comprehend the inane; in the moment lies concealed the æon. Indeed, it is only to time-fettered space-bound man that these are not one and identical. And, if in leaf and bud, then in perceiving mind. For somehow mind, this wondering mind of man, arose upon this planet; uprose, appeared, became. No trailing comet, surely, in wanton sport, showered mind upon this world. Whencesoever it arose, being here, and fed and nurtured by all things here, emergent from matter, a fragment of earth and sea and sky, surely in this mind of man must also be that self-same hidden power....

* * * * *

I, too, then, was one of a mystic band, was in the hands of the self-same power, was indeed but a mutation amid its mutations, and had a part to play on my little stage, a part without which the mighty drama would be incomplete, however lowly it were. For, as by inexorable law the youngest leaflet in that dell was potentially existent from before all time, could not help but be and sway and flutter in the breeze, so I in my little world. But what the mighty drama portended or portrayed I knew as little as did the heedless beetle that had crept out of sight; and surely, he, poor little soul, had as much right to know as I--not many mutations, on this paltry planet, separated me from him. Only I saw, behind all, some ineffable power enacting an ineffable drama: playwright and protagonist in one; conceiving and enacting an endless plot; manifesting itself to itself, yet ever remaining the thing unmanifest; sundering itself into innumerable myriads, yet remaining one and a whole--incomprehensible--divine.

By degrees the great sky broke up into clouds. A half moon, cut into fantastic shapes by the twigs, peered through the trees; and as I thridded the boles--I miscomprehending, obtuse, merely a larger atom in a small inane, finding my devious way by a doubly reflected light--the scene was shifted, fresh actors called, and the great drama went on, unfolding for ever a tale without end.