Under the Trees and Elsewhere | Page 8

Hamilton Wright Mabie
thought to the
dancing mood of the flowers.
Sometimes, on quiet afternoons, when the great world of work has
somehow seemed to drop its burdens into space, and carries nothing but
rest and quietude along its journey under the summer sky, I have seen a
pageant in the open fields that has made me doubt whether a dream had
not taken me unawares. I have seen the first sweet flowers of spring
rise softly out of the grass where they had been hiding and call gently
to each other, as if afraid that a single loud word would dissolve the
charm of sun and warm breeze for which they had waited so long. After
their dreamless sleep of months, these beautiful children of Mother
Earth seemed almost afraid to break the stillness from which they had
come, and strayed about noiselessly, with subdued and lovely mien,
exhaling a perfume as delicate as themselves. Then, with a rush and
shout, the summer flowers suddenly burst upon the scene, overflowing
with life and merriment; in lawless troops they ran hither and thither,
flinging echoes of their laughter over the whole country-side, and soon
overshadowing entirely their older and more sensitive fellows; these,
indeed, soon vanish altogether, as if lonely and out of place under the
broad glare and high colours of mid-summer. And now for weeks

together the game went on without pause or break; the revelry grew fast
and furious, until one suspected that some night the Bacchic throng had
passed that way and left their mood of wild and lawless frolic behind.
At last a softer aspect spread itself over the glowing sky and earth. The
nights grew vocal with the invisible chorus of insect life; there was a
mellow splendour in the moonlight, which touched the distant hills and
wide-spreading waters with a pathetic prophecy of change. And now,
ripe, serene, and rich with the accumulated beauty of the summer, the
autumn flowers appeared. Their movement was like the stately dances
of olden times; youth and its overflow were gone forever; but in the
hour of maturity there remained a noble beauty, which touched all
imaginations and communicated to all visible things a splendour of
which the most radiant hours of early summer had been only faintly
prophetic. In the calm of these golden days the autumn flowers reigned
with a more than regal state, and when the first cold breath of winter
touched them, they fell from their great estate silently and royally as if
their fate were matched to their rank. And now the fields were bare
once more.
From such a dream as this I often awake joyfully to find the drama still
in its first act, and to feel still before me the ever-deepening interest and
ever-widening beauty of the miracle play to which Nature annually bids
us welcome. Across this noble playground, with its sweep of landscape
and its arch of sky, I often wander with no companions but the flowers,
and with no desire for other fellowship. Here, as in more secluded and
quiet places. Nature confides to those who love her some deep and
precious truths never to be put into words, but ever after to rise at times
over the horizon of thought like vagrant ships that come and go against
the distant sea line, or like clouds that pass along the remotest circle of
the sky as it sleeps upon the hills. The essence of play is the
unconscious overflow of life that seeks escape in perfect
self-forgetfulness. There is no effort in it, no whip of the will driving
the unwilling energies to an activity from which they shrink; one plays
as the bird sings and the brook runs and the sun shines--not with
conscious purpose, but from the simple overflow. In this sense Nature
never works, she is always at play. In perfect unconsciousness, without

friction or effort, her mightiest movements are made and her sublimest
tasks accomplished. Throughout the whole range of her activity one
never comes upon any trace of effort, any sign of weariness; one is
always impressed--as Ruskin said long ago of works of genius--that he
is standing in the presence, not of a great effort, but of a great power;
that what has been done is only a single manifestation of the play of an
inexhaustible force. There is somewhere in the universe an infinite
fountain of life and beauty which overflows and floods all worlds with
divine energy and loveliness. When the tide recedes it pauses but a
moment, and then the music of its returning waves is heard along all
shores, and its shining edges move irresistibly on until they have bathed
the roots of the solitary flower on the highest Alp.
It is this divine method of growth which Nature opposes to
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