I cannot claim to have done more than make a slight attempt towards the supply of this want. Nay, I would rather lay claim not to have attempted. This is the age of effort and strain; it were well that thought were sometimes permitted to be natural, spontaneous, and simply expressive of that which the heart’s meditations have laid by in store. A stream thus welling up will want the precision and the single aim of the artificial jet, but it will have its modest use and value to cheer and to refresh lowly grasses, and perhaps to water the roots of loftier growths in its vagaries and meanderings.
In these times men will be held nothing if not controversial; and rival parties will skim the book for shibboleths before they read or throw it by. Assuredly fixed principles and definite teaching are (if ever at one time more than another) of special importance in the present day; and I am not one who think it well to blow both hot and cold at pleasure. Only I would ask, is there absolute need that we be always blowing either? may we not sometimes be permitted simply to breathe? There are occasions on which I find myself compelled to blow one or the other, but I grudge the good breath spent in the exertion, and prefer to return to the normal state of even respiration. A story, told of Archbishop Leighton’s youth, is to the point:—“In a synod he was publicly reprimanded for not ‘preaching up the times.’ ‘Who,’ he asked, ‘does preach up the times?’ It was answered that all the brethren did it. ‘Then,’ he rejoined, ‘if all of you preach up the times, you may surely allow one poor brother to preach up Christ Jesus and eternity.’”
No doubt, we must be militant here on earth, militant against every form of error—old error undisguised, and old error in a new dress; but the more need that we should secure breathing times when we may sheathe the biting sword and lay the heavy armour by. Perhaps many with whom we war, or from whom we stand aloof in suspicion, would be found, when the vizors were raised, to be brothers, and henceforth warriors by our side.
One word as to the title of this book. “The Harvest of a Quiet Eye.” This has always been a favourite line with me, and now I take it to describe my unpretentious volume, though this be rather a handful gleaned than a harvest got in. With some people this gleaning by the way would be contemned, in their single-eyed advance upon some goal; with some it is a thing continual and habitual, this instinctive gathering and half-unconscious storing of hints and touches of wayside beauty—a process so well described in Wordsworth’s verses. To have an eye for the wide pictures and slight studies of Nature; to gather them up, in solitary walks which thus are not lonely; to lay them by, together with the heart’s deeper thoughts, its associations, meditations, and reminiscences;—this is to fashion common things into a beauty which, to the fashioner at least, may be a joy for ever.
“To see the heath-flower withered on the hill,
To listen to the woods’ expiring lay,
To note the red leaf shivering on the spray,
To mark the last bright tints the mountain stain,
On the waste fields to trace the gleaner’s way,
And moralise on mortal joy and pain,”
—this has been with me the secondary occupation of many a walk, solitary or in company. A rosy sunbeam slanting down a bank, and catching the stems of the ferns and the tops of the grasses; a coral twist of briony berries; a daisy in December;—the eye would be caught, and the train of grave or anxious musing intermitted without being broken off, by the ever-allowed claim of Nature’s silent poetry. And often the deeper meaning of such poetry would run parallel with the mind’s thought—sometimes suggest for it a new path.
“Few ears of scattered grain.” Though this be all my harvest, yet if that be grain at all which has been collected, it may have its use. He who with a very little fed a great multitude, has a ministry for even our humble handfuls. At His feet be this laid: may He accept and bless it, and deign to refresh and hearten by its means some few at least of those who, faint and weary, are following Him in the wilderness of this world!
