But Leighton proceeds to develope another exquisite thought, which to many would lie hidden and unperceived in the short and simple word of God—“All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass.” On the hint of this latter member of the sentence he speaks:
“There is indeed a great deal of seeming difference betwixt the outward conditions of life amongst men. Shall the rich and honourable and beautiful and healthful go in together, under the same name, with the baser and unhappier part, the poor, wretched sort of the world, who seem to be born for nothing but sufferings and miseries? At least, hath the wise no advantage beyond the fools? Is all grass? Make you no distinction? No; all is grass, or if you will have some other name, be it so; once this is true, that all flesh is grass; and if that glory which shines so much in your eyes must have a difference, then this is all it can have—it is but the flower of that same grass; somewhat above the common grass in gayness, a little comelier and better apparelled than it, but partaker of its frail and fading nature; it hath no privilege nor immunity that way; yea, of the two, is the less durable, and usually shorter lived; at the best, it decays with it—The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away.”
Yes, grass and its flower—loveliness, might, wisdom: Helen of Troy shared the fate of the meanest weed; Julius Cæsar and Napoleon lie with the rank and file; Solomon in his glorious wisdom is at last now equalled with those lilies of the field, that grass which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven. We in the lower rank, we mere grass of the field, look at and admire the glory above us, the flower of the grass, the choice gifts of intellect, of power, of beauty: but even as we gaze, and before the scythe can come, or the sun can wither it, we miss it—“The flower thereof fadeth, and the grace of the fashion of it perisheth”:
“The wind passeth over it, and it is gone.
And the place thereof shall know it no more.”
“The instances are not few, of those who have on a sudden fallen from the top of honour into the foulest disgraces, not by degrees coming down the stair they went up, but tumbled down headlong. And the most vigorous beauty and strength of body, how doth a few days’ sickness, or, if it escape that, a few years’ time, blast that flower!”
And, sadder still, we must feel it to be, the ornaments of the mind are as short-lived; and we watch, with the keenest regret, great intellects quenched by decay or death, and minds that are the most stored with knowledge and learning cut off in a day.
“Yea, those higher advantages which have somewhat both of truer and more lasting beauty in them, the endowments of wit, and learning, and eloquence, yea, and of moral goodness and virtue, yet they cannot rise above this world, they are still, in all their glory, but the flower of grass; their root is in the earth. When men have endured the toil of study night and day, it is but a small parcel of knowledge they can attend to, and they are forced to lie down in the dust in the midst of their pursuit of it; that head that lodges most sciences shall within a while be disfurnished of them all; and the tongue that speaks most languages be silenced.”
Yes, and again I look at the jumble of common grass and flower of grass, and bright blossoms all withered, in which I am reclining, and think how our bright days and our commonplace days, our ordinary life and our pageants, fade into dulness even as we live on, and are all swept down at last, as it seems to a superficial thinker, into one common oblivion by Death. “What is become of all the pompous solemnities of kings and princes at their births and marriages, coronations and triumphs? They are now as a dream.” And so with our first flushes of success, our earliest tastes of fame, our new ecstasies of love, our wonders and admirations when life was young—where are they very soon? Lying in the mown ranks, void of their living movement and vivid lustre; numbered with the heap of every-day events and emotions; still distinguished from these, still marked as flowers, but the glory of them dried out under the air of use and the sun of experience. Precious they are still, and dear, but the dreams of youth are not to Age what Youth imagined them; the hay is valuable and sweet, but it is not that field which the least air could stir into a sea of silky light and shade, and a tossing of myriad colours. It was the Flower of grass, and it cannot be, on earth, but that “the grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away.”
“Would we consider this, in the midst of those varieties that toss our light minds to and fro, it would give us wiser thoughts, and ballast our hearts; make them more solid and stedfast in those spiritual endeavours which concern a durable condition, a being that abides for ever; in comparison of which the longest term of natural life is less than a moment, and the happiest estate is but a heap of miseries. Were all of us more constantly prosperous than any one of us is, yet that one thing were enough to cry down the price we put upon this life, that it continues not. As he answered to one who had a mind to flatter him in the midst of a pompous triumph, by saying, What is wanting here? Continuance, said he.”