He has no language in which to re-express what he learns from Nature; but he knows her. The modern poetaster who writes volumes on the sea and stars, who would die of terror if left out alone for one night with those very stars and the God of stars that he adores in verse, and for whom the sea is only endurable seen from a fashionable parade with bands and much-dressed women to save him from the awful oppression of being alone with it; it is not he, but the Chaldean shepherd who rejoices when the night comes that he may lie beside his sheep, and with his head on a stone watch the hosts march past above; it was he who named them for us and loved them, as a man loves his fellows. As it is the rough sailor, who amid all the joys of shore longs simply to be out again and to feel the night spray on his cheek, who loves and knows the voice of the sea. And when the old Boer tells you simply how many a young porcupine has at birth, and which bird points the way to a honey nest, and gives you the names and uses of the bushes you walk over, his knowledge speaks of a closer union than the poetaster's words.
It is not the girl in delicate attire—such as takes its birth only in vast cities and as the result of much human labour and thought—who with attentive male companions waiting on her glances, climbs an eminence to exclaim loudly over the beauty of the view and the loveliness of nature, who loves nature—it is the man who silently has been contented to live and labour on that Alpine height all his life, and who would die of weariness and thirst if removed from it; it is he who loves it. As the man who writes sonnets to a woman and throws himself in transports of passion at her feet for a moment is not the man who owns her, but he who firmly grasps her hand and walks shoulder to shoulder beside her through dark and light till death divides them; so it is not he who praises Nature, but he who lies continually on her breast and is satisfied who is actually united to her and receives her strength.
No one with keen perception can have lived among the Boers without perceiving how close, though unconscious, is their union with the world about them, and how real the nourishment they draw from it. The little karoo bushes, where they are shooting, the ironstones of the kopje with the sun on them, are beautiful to the Boer.
Standing at the back-door of a farm-house once, and looking out over a little flat filled with mimosa trees in full flower while the afternoon light was filling all the valley with a haze, a powerful Boer woman stood beside us watching the scene. Not one of the most refined of her kind, sharp of tongue, and strong of hand, and unable either to read or write, the thought struck us how little of the infinite beautiful land was probably visible to her—when we looked round the woman was in tears. "Ach," she whispered, "it is a beautiful land the Lord our God has given us! When I look at it so, something swells up and up in my throat—I feel I never will be angry with the servants and children again!"
There is perhaps nothing which shows more the ignorance and limitations of those of us brought up under conditions of modern artificial civilization than the common impression that these silent persons living and labouring always in contact with inanimate nature cannot perceive or comprehend it as we with larger powers of expression are able to. A man (not a Boer this time, but an English settler of the same type, a silent, uncultured hard-working man) who for thirty years had lived on the banks of a certain little stream, planting his fruit trees and ploughing his lands, was attacked at sixty by an incurable disease. Placed in an ox-wagon to be taken to the nearest hospital, his friends and neighbours accompanied him for a short distance. As the oxen's feet passed down into the little African stream which he had crossed and recrossed, and on whose banks he had laboured for thirty years, he passed his hard horned hands over his face and burst into tears and, to the astonishment of all about him, broke forth into the words of Tennyson's song:—
Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea,
Thy tribute wave deliver;
No more by thee my step shall be
For ever and for ever,
repeating all the verses; a song which his children had doubtless sung about the house when they came home from school.