"Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood
Stand dressed in living green;
So to the Jews old Canaan stood,
While Jordan rolled between."
She lifted up her voice and sang the old hymn:
"There is a land of pure delight
Where saints immortal reign;
Infinite day excludes the night,
And pleasures banish pain.
"There everlasting spring abides
And never withering flowers:
Death, like a narrow sea, divides
This pleasant land from ours."
Alas! How strange and sad it sounded with the "careless rapture" of the birds. Never before had a song of death been sung in those forest aisles, and suddenly she stopped, silenced by a sense of the incongruity of such a hymn in the spring woods. Why should one sing of "sweet fields" and "pleasant lands" beyond the sea of death? Right here are pleasant lands and sweet fields, and our songs should be of the "pure delight" of this old earth. Better than such worship as ours the worship of the pagan, who went forth with music to meet the dawn and sang hymns in praise of seed-time and harvest.
It is not alone by "getting and spending" that we "lay waste our powers" and loosen our hold on the possessions that Nature so freely offers us. Perpetually she calls to us with her voice of many waters, her winds and bird songs. She opens and closes each day with cloudy splendors that transcend the art of poet or painter. She spends centuries making the columned sanctuaries of her forests more majestic than Solomon's temple, and lights them with the glory of the sun and stars. Life more abundant is in her air and sunshine. She offers to each soul the solitude of the wilderness, and the mountains, where Christ found rest and strength after the presence of crowds had drained him of his virtue. And we—we wrap ourselves in the mantle of Care; we build walls of stone to shut out from us all sweet influences of Nature; we sing of "an everlasting spring", and then let the fleeting hours of our earthly springs go by without once tasting their full sweetness; we look for a heaven beyond death, unmindful of the heaven within and around us; we deem the light that falls through a stained glass window more religious than the light of open day, and a waxen taper more sacred than a star; we shorten life by cutting it off from its source, and at last, worn out with sordid cares, we give our bodies back to earth without having known one hour of the real joy of life.
Vague, half-formed thoughts like these were in Miranda's mind as she paused and looked up in response to a voice from a neighboring oak: "Chic-o-ree! Chic-o-ree!" The syllables were clear and distinct as if spoken by a human voice, and from a tree across the path came the answer: "Chic-o-ree! Chic-o-ree!" All her consciousness had been merged in seeing, but now she was aware of a chorus of voices calling, chirping, whistling, trilling, fluting, warbling from far and near, the orchestra of May assembled a month in advance of its usual time.
"If we could only live outdoors!" she whispered to herself. All the high emotions that fill the heart of a poet in spring were stirring in the breast of the country girl, and finding no way of expression they could only change into poignant longings that she herself but half understood. There was a puzzled, baffled look on her face as she stood hesitant, wondering what step to take next. So many remembered things she had found in the woods!—music, perfume, light winds and warmth and flowers and trees, but there was still something, nameless, elusive, that had once been hers, and she must find it before the day ended.
She stooped to gather a violet growing by a fallen tree, and the second time that day a wave of memory and feeling swept over her, and in one exquisite moment she found the lost treasure! For the heart that leaped and throbbed faster at sight of the violet was the heart of a little child.