The Life of the Fields | Page 6

field between the thistles and
rushes that so often grow in woodside pastures, quietly hopping to their
favourite places, utterly heedless how heavy the echoes may be in the
hollows of the wooded hills. Till the rain comes they take no heed
whatever, but then make for shelter. Blackbirds often make a good deal
of noise; but the soft turtle-doves coo gently, let the lightning be as
savage as it will. Nothing has the least fear. Man alone, more senseless
than a pigeon, put a god in vapour; and to this day, though the printing
press has set a foot on every threshold, numbers bow the knee when
they hear the roar the timid dove does not heed. So trustful are the
doves, the squirrels, the birds of the branches, and the creatures of the
field. Under their tuition let us rid ourselves of mental terrors, and face
death itself as calmly as they do the livid lightning; so trustful and so
content with their fate, resting in themselves and unappalled. If but by
reason and will I could reach the godlike calm and courage of what we
so thoughtlessly call the timid turtle-dove, I should lead a nearly perfect
life.
The bark of the ancient apple tree under which I have been standing is
shrunken like iron which has been heated and let cool round the rim of
a wheel. For a hundred years the horses have rubbed against it while
feeding in the aftermath. The scales of the bark are gone or smoothed
down and level, so that insects have no hiding-place. There are no
crevices for them, the horsehairs that were caught anywhere have been
carried away by birds for their nests. The trunk is smooth and columnar,
hard as iron. A hundred times the mowing-grass has grown up around it,
the birds have built their nests, the butterflies fluttered by, and the
acorns dropped from the oaks. It is a long, long time, counted by
artificial hours or by the seasons, but it is longer still in another way.

The greenfinch in the hawthorn yonder has been there since I came out,
and all the time has been happily talking to his love. He has left the
hawthorn indeed, but only for a minute or two, to fetch a few seeds, and
comes back each time more full of song-talk than ever. He notes no
slow movement of the oak's shadow on the grass; it is nothing to him
and his lady dear that the sun, as seen from his nest, is crossing from
one great bough of the oak to another. The dew even in the deepest and
most tangled grass has long since been dried, and some of the flowers
that close at noon will shortly fold their petals. The morning airs, which
breathe so sweetly, come less and less frequently as the heat increases.
Vanishing from the sky, the last fragments of cloud have left an
untarnished azure. Many times the bees have returned to their hives,
and thus the index of the day advances. It is nothing to the
green-finches; all their thoughts are in their song-talk. The sunny
moment is to them all in all. So deeply are they rapt in it that they do
not know whether it is a moment or a year. There is no clock for feeling,
for joy, for love.
And with all their motions and stepping from bough to bough, they are
not restless; they have so much time, you see. So, too, the whitethroat
in the wild parsley; so, too, the thrush that just now peered out and
partly fluttered his wings as he stood to look. A butterfly comes and
stays on a leaf--a leaf much warmed by the sun--and shuts his wings. In
a minute he opens them, shuts them again, half wheels round, and
by-and-by--just when he chooses, and not before--floats away. The
flowers open, and remain open for hours, to the sun. Hastelessness is
the only word one can make up to describe it; there is much rest, but no
haste. Each moment, as with the greenfinches, is so full of life that it
seems so long and so sufficient in itself. Not only the days, but life
itself lengthens in summer. I would spread abroad my arms and gather
more of it to me, could I do so.
All the procession of living and growing things passes. The grass
stands up taller and still taller, the sheaths open, and the stalk arises, the
pollen clings till the breeze sweeps it. The bees rush past, and the
resolute wasps; the humble-bees, whose weight swings them along.
About the oaks and maples the brown chafers swarm; and the fern-owls
at dusk, and the blackbirds and jays by day, cannot reduce their legions