Essays | Page 4

are to be
plotted and concealed. Without anxiety, without haste, and without
misgiving are all great things to be done, and neither interruption in the
doing nor ruin after they are done finds anything in them to betray.
There was never any disgrace of means, and when the world sees the
work broken through there is no disgrace of discovery. The labour of
Michelangelo's chisel, little more than begun, a Roman structure long
exposed in disarray--upon these the light of day looks full, and the
Roman and the Florentine have their unrefuted praise.

RAIN
Not excepting the falling stars--for they are far less sudden--there is
nothing in nature that so outstrips our unready eyes as the familiar rain.
The rods that thinly stripe our landscape, long shafts from the clouds, if
we had but agility to make the arrowy downward journey with them by
the glancing of our eyes, would be infinitely separate, units, an
innumerable flight of single things, and the simple movement of
intricate points.
The long stroke of the raindrop, which is the drop and its path at once,
being our impression of a shower, shows us how certainly our
impression is the effect of the lagging, and not of the haste, of our
senses. What we are apt to call our quick impression is rather our
sensibly tardy, unprepared, surprised, outrun, lightly bewildered sense
of things that flash and fall, wink, and are overpast and renewed, while
the gentle eyes of man hesitate and mingle the beginning with the close.

These inexpert eyes, delicately baffled, detain for an instant the image
that puzzles them, and so dally with the bright progress of a meteor,
and part slowly from the slender course of the already fallen raindrop,
whose moments are not theirs. There seems to be such a difference of
instants as invests all swift movement with mystery in man's eyes, and
causes the past, a moment old, to be written, vanishing, upon the skies.
The visible world is etched and engraved with the signs and records of
our halting apprehension; and the pause between the distant woodman's
stroke with the axe and its sound upon our ears is repeated in the
impressions of our clinging sight. The round wheel dazzles it, and the
stroke of the bird's wing shakes it off like a captivity evaded.
Everywhere the natural haste is impatient of these timid senses; and
their perception, outrun by the shower, shaken by the light, denied by
the shadow, eluded by the distance, makes the lingering picture that is
all our art. One of the most constant causes of all the mystery and
beauty of that art is surely not that we see by flashes, but that nature
flashes on our meditative eyes. There is no need for the impressionist to
make haste, nor would haste avail him, for mobile nature doubles upon
him, and plays with his delays the exquisite game of visibility.
Momently visible in a shower, invisible within the earth, the
ministration of water is so manifest in the coming rain-cloud that the
husbandman is allowed to see the rain of his own land, yet unclaimed
in the arms of the rainy wind. It is an eager lien that he binds the
shower withal, and the grasp of his anxiety is on the coming cloud. His
sense of property takes aim and reckons distance and speed, and even
as he shoots a little ahead of the equally uncertain ground-game, he
knows approximately how to hit the cloud of his possession. So much
is the rain bound to the earth that, unable to compel it, man has yet
found a way, by lying in wait, to put his price upon it. The exhaustible
cloud "outweeps its rain," and only the inexhaustible sun seems to
repeat and to enforce his cumulative fires upon every span of ground,
innumerable. The rain is wasted upon the sea, but only by a fantasy can
the sun's waste be made a reproach to the ocean, the desert, or the
sealed-up street. Rossetti's "vain virtues" are the virtues of the rain,
falling unfruitfully.
Baby of the cloud, rain is carried long enough within that troubled
breast to make all the multitude of days unlike each other. Rain, as the

end of the cloud, divides light and withholds it; in its flight warning
away the sun, and in its final fall dismissing shadow. It is a threat and a
reconciliation; it removes mountains compared with which the Alps are
hillocks, and makes a childlike peace between opposed heights and
battlements of heaven.

THE TOW PATH
A childish pleasure in producing small mechanical effects unaided
must have some part in the sense of enterprise wherewith you gird your
shoulders with the tackle, and set out, alone but necessary, on the even