"Here, where the world is quiet,
Here, where all trouble seems
Dead winds' and spent waves' riot
In doubtful dream of dreams;
I watch the green field growing,
For reaping folk and sowing,
For harvest time and mowing,
A sleepy world of streams."
Here are the bees, the birds, and the butterflies; here, too, nestling cosily on hillside or meadow, are dotted dozens of umber-brown châlets, each of which seems to suggest that "haunting sense of human history" of which George Macdonald speaks, when he says that "many a simple home will move one's heart like a poem, many a cottage like a melody."
And now there is a change in the picture: the drowsiness and the dreaminess are gone, and there is the free, fresh sense of motion, and of the open. In my ears is the journeying music of the diligence—music which despite its jingle never becomes monotonous, for every now and then the horses toss their heads to shake off the too persistent flies, and sprinkle the air with spray of silvery sounds. The road winds along a mountain path overlooking a lake, and the mirroring of sunset fire upon the surface of the water, the cool clear crystal of the blue depths that swim away below, the purple distance of the farther hills, fast-shrouding in light-drawn mist, and lastly, the solemn splendour of that sky-hung, soaring summit, brooding like a presence athwart the skies,—all these make up a scene upon which I am never weary of dwelling, and which I dearly love to recall; a scene of such indescribable loveliness as to leave me at last bowed and breathless, and
"Sad with the whole of pleasure."
I thought when I penned the last paragraph that I had made an end of telling you of my love of life and of the things of it, but that half-line which I have quoted from Rossetti's most beautiful sonnet sets me thinking of another love of which I have not yet spoken. Need I say that I mean the love of music? not only of the music which is "like soft hands stealing into ours in the dark, and holding us fast without a spoken word," but also of those sobbing soaring strains, which sound as sadly in our ears as does the wintry flittering of dead leaves upon a withered bough? To those who feel that every ray of morning sunlight which strikes across their path calls them to a higher and holier living; to whose hearts the pure petals of a primrose are as a silent reproach against their own impurity; to whom a glint of blue sky, gleaming out between rain-beaten tree-tops is as an aspiration towards a loftier, lovelier life; to whom the very wind, as it sings from the gates of morning, cries out "Unclean! unclean!"—to such, I suppose, music must ever contain less of joy than of sadness, if, indeed, it appeal not with a pleasure which cuts to the heart like a pain. It is to them as if an angel from heaven had cast, for one passing second, upon a cloud-screen drawn across the soul, a vision of what they might be, of what they were meant to be, and of what in God's good time they may yet become; and as if at the very moment when the spirit was pouring itself forth in one unutterable cry of longing after the Divine beauty of that ideal, there rose before them the shadow-horror of what they really are.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Then why print it here? asks the reader. For the reason, I reply, that this Diary is the history, not only of a sin, but of a soul; and that to leave the aspect of my subject here treated unnoticed would be to give but a maimed and one-sided representation. I do not think any reader who studies my sketch-outline as a whole will consider the introduction of this chapter as inartistic.
