The Harvest of a Quiet Eye: Leisure Thoughts for Busy Lives

by John Richard Vernon

And I love these twilight studies, that are much like the paintings, so Robert Browning tells us, of Andrea del Sarto, the faultless painter. Pictures in which—

“A common greyness silvers everything,
All in a twilight.”

This is essentially a twilight poem I always think; silver-grey; a quiet calmed heart that has settled down into a deep still sadness and disappointment. He longs for those higher aspirations which can here be but imperfectly expressed, knowing that it is not well unless we hold an ideal far above our fulfilment here; and that, if we have attained all we sought in our pursuit of the beautiful and the good, we have not intended nobly enough:—

“There’s the bell clinking from the chapel-top;
That length of convent wall across the way
Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside;
The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease
And Autumn grows, Autumn in everything.
Eh? the whole seems to fall into a shape
As if I saw alike my work and self,
And all that I was born to be and do,
A twilight piece.”

Is not the tone of thought here expressed one natural to us all at certain times, when for us life’s vivid lights and deep shadows have all toned into a uniform half tint? We all have such twilight hours: times when the sun has sunk, and our heart has gone down with it, and a grey depression settles gradually upon the soul. Times when we feel that our life is little, and low, and mean: when we yearn for a sympathy that earth has not to give; when we turn away disheartened and disgusted from our life and from ourselves, and turn the faces of what seemed our most faultless works to the wall, and care not if we never saw them again. Times when we go about to cause our heart to despair of all the labour which we took under the sun. Times when the failures of others seem better than our successes; times when we lament over the lowness of our aim, the meanness of our intention, the winglessness of our soul; and yet times when our very discontent with all that we are and have accomplished, our very disgust at our grovelling minds, prove our affinity with higher things than any of these that we have grasped here. Those anguished yearnings to be nobler prove that we are something nobler than we hold ourselves to be. The depression of the twilight marks our kindred with the golden glory of the sun. Thus may we cheer our hearts, that in their dull hours are wont to judge our aims by our attainments, and from the inadequacy of the performance, to conclude the lowness of the intention. The workman’s dissatisfaction with his own life’s work is the clear proof that his inmost self is nobler, not only than his attainments, but often even than his endeavours.

I awake from my abstraction, however, and look around. The twilight has deepened, the flowers are losing their colour, the surrounding objects their distinctness. One peculiar property, sometimes a charm, sometimes a dread, of this light neither clear nor dark, begins to be developed. I mean the uncertainty, the indefiniteness, the illusions of twilight. And how many analogies occur to my mind as I sit here musing on the twilight, and comparing with it the indistinctness and the ænigma in which we are living here.

And first I think of God’s ancient people: how many of God’s promises to them were misconceived because of the twilight in which they were seen. And we might, thinking shallowly, wonder that the light of prophecy was such twilight, so dim, and the objects seen in it so undefined and uncertain. For instance, how obscure and almost confusing seems to us the light given to the Jews as to the spiritual nature of the Messiah’s kingdom. Through the twilight of prophecy we may very well fancy that a grand earthly kingdom of power and conquest loomed upon the hope and imagination of the people of Israel. Because of the hardness of their hearts, indeed, and the lowness of their spiritual standard, spiritual revelations had to be clothed for them in a body of flesh. The people that could worship the golden calf under the very cloud that rested upon Sinai, would have ill-received, we may be sure, a clear revelation of the manner of the Messiah’s kingdom. A kingdom not of this world, with no outward show of pomp and glory; a King despised and rejected of men, and nailed upon the accursed tree: how would those carnal hearts have received such a programme? Nay, how did this people, even in the Messiah’s time, receive it? Behold the shouting crowds, one preceding, one following the King of the Jews! Behold the waving palms, the strewn cloaks! Hear the “Hosannas” ring out as the concourse arrives in sight of the royal city; and the enthusiastic burst, “Blessed is the King of Israel that cometh in the name of the Lord!” What visions, we perceive, were seething and working in their minds—visions of restored freedom, and rule, and power, and the sway of Israel restored, as in those old glorious days, from the river even unto the sea. Grand, and splendid, and indistinct, that promised kingdom towered before them in the twilight; they threw loose reins on their imagination, and let it carry them whither it would.

But when the truth which they had so misconceived and misinterpreted stood close to them, and they perceived its entire difference from their excited dreams, mark the change—the revulsion. The King is crowned; His kingdom is proclaimed as being not of this world: the crowd are shouting still; but the cry is now, “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” Nay further yet. The discovery of the real proportions and character of that fabric which had appeared so majestic and superb through the twilight: this discovery had proved too much even for their faith who had formed the chosen court of the King Messiah. “We trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel”; but, lo! the Shepherd is smitten, and the sheep are scattered.

Now, as it has been pointed out before this, an illusion of the twilight was converted by the impatience and the carnal hearts of the Jews, into a delusion. It was true that a mighty King was coming, that He should set up a kingdom great and glorious, one which should crumble widest kingdoms into the dust. It was true that the enemies of God’s people should fall before this kingdom which should have no end; true that this King was He which should redeem Israel. All this which was prophesied was no delusion: all was true: all came to pass.