"Life is astir beneath dead Nature's snows
Spring's quickened pulse is bounding through the earth.
Lo, in the wakened heart a life-stream flows:
Old things are dead; behold a second birth."
TIME passed on. Months had slipped away since the mind of Miles Lawson had awakened to the consciousness of the past. But the recovery of his bodily powers had not kept pace with the renewal of the mental. A low fever, the natural rebound of the death-like chill, had been lying heavily upon him, completely prostrating his strength, and refining his rude manly frame into something too ethereal and shadow-like for a young mountaineer.
His brown and sinewy hands had become white and almost transparent; his cheek hollow and pale, save for the small bright spot which lighted it up, while his eyes looked prominent and lustrous as lamps. But the expression of his whole countenance and manner had as decidedly changed for the better as his health had altered for the worse: the countenance was now open, winning, and thoughtfully intelligent, instead of sullen and unhappy: the manner was gentle and deferential, instead of capricious and intolerant.
No one who knew anything of the changing signs of the moral seasons—seed-time and harvest, winter and spring—could doubt these outward evidences of the inward work of grace. That change had been going on which is described in Scripture language as the turning from darkness to light, from the power of Satan unto God. The depths of repentance had been passed through, not once only, but again and again; the sweetness of reconciliation had been known with a justly offended God through the free and full atonement offered for sinners by the Son sent by the Father: and thus delivered from the bondage of sin and Satan, the new creature in Christ Jesus was seeking to live a new life through the power of the sanctifying Spirit.
But Miles Lawson, after his many slips and wanderings, had found it good for his soul's health to linger long in the "valley of humiliation," and he found it to be such as John Bunyan describes it, "as fruitful a place as any the crows fly over."
"I have known many laboring men," says Bunyan, "that have got good estates in the valley; for indeed, it is very fruitful soil, and doth bring forth by handfuls."
A beautiful change in the outward aspect of the dale, and in the habits of dale life, had been going on during the same period. It is scarcely like the same region. True, the noble outlines remain immovable—the mountains drawing their fine forms against the sky; the lower fells crossing each other in those graceful intersecting lines which the eye so loves to follow; the valley biding with such shy and shady reserve under the glooms of the projecting crags; and the stream finding its way with its lovely curves and bends, forever humming its mountain melodies.
But everything else has changed: the coppice wood at the mouth of the glen is one sheet of varied and delicate greens; the rough leaves of the hazels are intermixed with the silver stems and small bright foliage of the birch; sycamores are shaking out their broad leaves, creased and puckered with their tight foldings in the buds, the oaks are sunning their finely-cut leaves; and the ashes, last to come and first to go, are waving their sprays in the breeze; while the larches have long ago hung out their light green tassels, and are now creeping up the sides of the mountain with pointed crests, and in close array.
All color has changed, saving the dull dark hues of the time-worn pines, and the grand and sombre masses of the ancestral yews: what is the short summer of the dales to them? It may be a fleeting joy for the ephemeral foliage around them. It may make a holiday for the golden brooms, and the hedges of snowy thorn, and the festal plumes of the bird cherry. It may cause a flutter of excitement in the sensitive sprays of the aspen, and make the green moss-beds first all silvery with snowdrops, then all golden with nodding daffodils and starry primroses, and again all blue with bell-hung hyacinths, and pearly with the shy wood anemone. But to them—to these dignified sires of vegetable life, what is the fleeting influence of season? Hoary winter, song-resounding spring, festal summer, golden autumn—these can scarcely impart an added furrow, or wreathe their stately brows with any passing glory.
Everything else, however, seems young and jubilant. Look at the lambs upon the springy turf of the fells. They are playing like kittens. No, better than that they are getting up regular games of their own. There is system in that fun of theirs. That fat, saucy fellow, white as snow, save for his black nose and his legs, which seem to dance all the lighter for their little black worsted stockings—he is evidently master of the revels. He marshals his band on the top of that old gray rock that bares its forehead from amidst the elastic turf on the mountainside. There are some of the young rebels who are determined to scale the height from beneath in a wholly unauthorized way. That will never do; the leader and his lambs line the ramparts, and butt and push at every black nose that aspires upwards. The aspirants are beaten back; and then down comes the whole garrison, leaping, bounding up in the air "all fours" at once; and sweeping away the opposing force, the whole lamb community careers away in one troop down the green slope of the fell.