For it is, after all, impossible to be absolutely doing nothing. The mind, that busy alchemist, works on and works on in the worn laboratory of the body, and transmutes gold into earth, or earth into gold, as the case may be, in its peculiar crucible. And so, since I cannot but muse on the hay into which I am closely peering, I may as well also jot my musings down.
* * * * *
Flesh, and grass: how natural the now common-place connection between the short-lived beauty of the two! It is one of those commonplaces, however, which new thoughts could not easily better. The hay-fields, with their life and glee, and loveliness of flowers just now, and now these faded mounds! The generations of men in the gaiety or toil of the world, and then the churchyard with its “shadowed swells”! Half a year for the one growth, and sometimes less, sometimes more, for the other; but all lying in the bending swathes at last. Take the extreme case:
“All the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years.”
Was flesh like grass then? What! a thousand years akin to the life of a few months? Yes, closely akin; banded together by the last words of the life of both; for how ends the short history of the longest liver of mortal men?
“——and he died.”
Yea, the growth, the ripening was longer in progress, but the scythe came at last:
“The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry?
All flesh is grass,—and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field;
The grass withereth, the flower fadeth.”
And again:
“Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble.
He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down:
He fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.”