Ah! now I am seated as I love to be, the June blue over me, and the sweet, warm, new-made hay underneath. On the shadow side of a great haycock, here have I selected my seat, plunging down and feeling the soft cushion give, until it has attained consistency enough to resist me. I have been busy, very busy, all this week, and the week before that, and indeed several weeks back. And I have earned, and mean to indulge in, a quiet long afternoon, and perhaps evening, in the hay-field. I have a book with me, but I do not pledge myself to read much. I have not come out here to read; not to do much, indeed, but just to sit and muse, nay, chiefly to enjoy the feeling of being able to rest. To feel that there is, or shall be, so far as I can choose, no call for the remainder of this day upon anxious heart and weary brain; no parish troubles; no sick, whose silent cry in the distance forbids the pastor to sit still; no sermon, no article, to think out or to write; no letters to pour into that insatiable post-office,—the true sieve of the Danaids; not even any gardening to do or to superintend; no, nothing necessary but to sit on the side of a haycock “in the leafy month of June.” We may go on and on in the round of every day’s business, on and on, unpausing, till we drop: the mere energy of spinning may keep us up, though perhaps on a weak and tottering peg; and work begets work; and busy day will chase busy day like the sails of a windmill; and we hardly dare stop, because we foreknow how we shall then have a long bill to pay, all the arrears of those fatigues and that weariness that we bade stand aside as we laboured on; and we know that if we once stop to give them a hearing, it will be hard work to set the heavy machinery going again. For myself, I often feel that to go on working, is to be able to work; to pause is to collapse, and to feel incapable. Still, in fact, we make life go farther by careful trading, than by spending all our capital at once. And both for purposes of devotional retirement and of necessary recreation, it is well sometimes just “to sport our oak” (to speak in Oxford phrase) upon the noisy and importunate throng of things clamorous to be done, and yet which, if discharged, would but give place to as many more. I could dizzy my brain with thoughts of business that I might do, and want to do. But for some weeks I have worked on and worked on, hoping to satisfy all claims; waiting for a pause, which never would come; and now I will no longer wait for it, but make it. Away! crowding calls, for this afternoon, for all the rest of this day. The wrestling, restless, toiling, moiling, weary world is quite shut out from me behind this mighty chain of haycocks. I hear the sharpening of scythes, and their long sweep in the bending swathes; once or twice in the afternoon a cuckoo sails with broad wing over me, and voice which stammers now near the end of his monotonous but prized oration; there is a scattered rain of larks’ songs falling all around; and, on a hedge near by, the short plaintive cadence of the yellow-hammer’s few notes.
Grass is always beautiful,—thus I am led to think as, leaning on one arm, I inspect the material of my couch. Beautiful after the winter lethargy, and when it grows lush and green, vividly green, and taller and taller under the showers, at the roots of the pines that step forward here and there from the shrubberies into the lawn. Beautiful again, when the scythe and mowing-machine have destroyed this beauty, and substituted that of the smooth, well-kept velvet sward. Beautiful, growing in the meadows, and deepening for hay; a sweet close under-growth of white or dull pink clover; of orange-flowered trefoil; of purple self-heal; of bright yellow-rattle; of small red orchis; of orchis pale lilac specked with dark; and, more desultory and thinner, above these the tall grass and flower-stalks: “all grass of silky feather”; bright rose ragged-robin; white ox-eye daisy; brimstone toad-flax; tall buttercups; pale pink centaury; numberless varieties of fringed flowers, all yellow; and bobbing myriads of the ribwort plantain, to which we are all, when children, very Henry VIII.’s; tall slight sorrel; tougher dock. Beautiful, when the scythe has laid all this in broad, lowly lines upon the whole face of the field; and the mowers advance yet steadily upon the long yielding ranks. Beautiful when the green has turned grey, and the brighter colours of the flowers are dull, the clover not yet brown, only faded, the yellow tassels showing, as they droop, the paler under-wing of the closing flower, the buttercups spoiled of their square varnished petals, and showing only the green spiked ball, the miniature head of Gog or Magog’s mace. Beautiful to lie in the grey mounds of the soft, fragrant, new-made hay, dying, if this be to die, so graciously, and sweetly, and blessingly; lovely in life, and sweet in death. Beautiful when even this bloom-grey has gone, and we shake out from their close-pressed sleep the loose masses of the yellow hay, and brown leaves and flowers, all, however, still fragrant, and full of hints in Winter days, of the warm Summer. Beautiful when the last cart is carried, and the rick is being thatched, and a pale bright under-growth has given to the dry hot field, in the parched Summer-time, something of a faint imitation of the early green of Spring.
So I lean, listless, idle, and examine my couch. Much I find to examine in it; besides the embalmed flowers, there is a small zoological garden—brown ants climbing up the pole of an upright grass-stem; leopard-spotted lady-birds; alligator grasshoppers; woolly-bear caterpillars; bird-of-paradise butterflies. I am left alone with these, and so can be quite quiet; for I am in the rear of the haymakers.
“All in a row
Advancing broad, or wheeling round the field,
While, as they rake the green-appearing ground,
And drive the dusky wave along the mead,
The russet haycock rises thick behind.”
And my couch is one of these same pale hills that they have done with. My wife is away with the children: I shall not therefore run the risk of being buried, with shouts, under the piled heaps of the hay. My servant has gone out for a walk: I thus escape the apprehension of seeing her advance into my field steering among the haycocks, and, with hand shading her eyes, looking about all over its wide glare for me. I can lean on this arm until it is tired, then change to the other, then lie on my back and watch the fleecy blue, with handkerchief spread for fear of insects; then turn over again, and resume my inspection of the grass. I am thus particular in description, because I would fain carry my hay-field into hot London. A few distinct details may help out many a memory; and the clerk really in the baking, staring London street may yet, if his imagination be my ally, lean back among the yielding warm-breathed hay to muse with me upon the grass and its teachings.
