Field and Hedgerow | Page 3

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. There is no hope on the old lines--they are dead, like the
empty shells; from the sweet delicious violets think out fresh petals of
thought and colours, as it were, of soul.
Never was such a worshipper of earth. The commonest pebble, dusty
and marked with the stain of the ground, seems to me so wonderful; my
mind works round it till it becomes the sun and centre of a system of
thought and feeling. Sometimes moving aside the tufts of grass with
careless fingers while resting on the sward, I found these little
pebble-stones loose in the crumbly earth among the rootlets. Then,
brought out from the shadow, the sunlight shone and glistened on the
particles of sand that adhered to it. Particles adhered to my
skin--thousands of years between finger and thumb, these atoms of
quartz, and sunlight shining all that time, and flowers blooming and life
glowing in all, myriads of living things, from the cold still limpet on
the rock to the burning, throbbing heart of man. Sometimes I found
them among the sand of the heath, the sea of golden brown surging up
yellow billows six feet high about me, where the dry lizard hid, or
basked, of kin, too,