“I grudged myself the lightsome air,
That makes men cheerful unaware;
When comfort came, I did not care
To take it in, to feel it stir.”
After that devastating flood you did not care to take in the dove with the olive-leaf; you had rather sit moodily alone. Very well for a time, but “will you nill you,” the second crop begins to cover the scars. And soon you can tranquilly and thankfully say,
“But I have learned, though this I had,
’Tis sometimes natural to be glad,
And no man can be always sad,
Unless he wills to have it so.”
For it is an ordinance of God that the grass shall keep on growing.
* * * * *
But, of course, especially, and above all, the analogy before indicated is that which connects this brief life of ours with the grass of the field. We are, above all, alike in our frailty and evanescence.
“All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass.
The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away.”
How exquisitely Archbishop Leighton comments upon this text! An idea so anciently true as almost to have become, in our ordinary speech, common-place, blossoms into new beauty under his holy thought. So, however, do what seem to ordinary thinkers bare rods in the teaching of the Bible, yet bloom and bear fruit abundantly in the shrine of a congenial heart. “All flesh is as grass.” Yes, he expands it, and “grass hath its root in the earth, and is fed by the moisture of it for awhile; but, besides that, it is under the hazard of such weather as favours it not, or of the scythe that cuts it down, give it all the forbearance that may be, let it be free from both those, yet how quickly will it wither of itself! Set aside those many accidents, the smallest of which is able to destroy our natural life, the diseases of our own bodies and outward violences, and casualties that cut down many in their greenness, in the flower of their youth, the utmost term is not long; in the course of nature it will wither. Our life indeed is a lighted torch, either blown out by some stroke or some wind; or, if spared, yet within awhile it burns away, and will die out of itself.”
A new idea is here given us as to the mowing. This poet makes the scythe to be the sweeping of disease or accident or violence that every day prostrate their thousands; accidents or violence represent the mowing; and there is, beside these, the withering too. As though a field of deep grass should be left unmown; yet how soon then would its life and light and laughter depart, and a skeleton array of thin, sere, shivering yellow stalks meet the October winds. Even if unmown, we must wither, and either will at times seem saddest to us, until we remember that this field is but the field of Time, and that the eternal God is ordering all.