Some five or six years ago I heard a speech about birds delivered by Sir Edward Grey, in which he said that the love and appreciation and study of birds was something fresher and brighter than the second-hand interests and conventional amusements in which so many in this day try to live; that the pleasure of seeing and listening to them was purer and more lasting than any pleasures of excitement, and, in the long-run, "happier than personal success." That was a saying to stick in the mind, and it is probable that some who listened failed to understand. Let us imagine that in addition to this miraculous faculty of the brain of storing innumerable brilliant images of things seen and heard, to be reproduced at call to the inner sense, there existed in a few gifted persons a correlated faculty by means of which these treasured images could be thrown at will into the mind of another; let us further imagine that some one in the audience who had wondered at that saying, finding it both dark and hard, had asked me to explain it; and that in response I had shown him, as by a swift succession of lightning flashes a score or a hundred images of birds at their best—the unimaginable loveliness, the sunlit colour, the grace of form and of motion, and the melody—how great the effect of even that brief glance into a new unknown world would have been! And if I had then said: All that you have seen—the pictures in one small room in a house of many rooms—is not after all the main thing; that it would be idle to speak of, since you cannot know what you do not feel, though it should be told you many times; this only can be told—the enduring images are but an incidental result of a feeling which existed already; they were never looked for, and are a free gift from nature to her worshipper;—if I had said this to him, the words of the speech which has seemed almost sheer insanity a little while before would have acquired a meaning and an appearance of truth.
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It has curiously happened that while writing these concluding sentences some old long-forgotten lines which I read in my youth came suddenly into my mind, as if some person sitting invisible at my side and thinking them apposite to the subject had whispered them into my ear. They are lines addressed to the Merrimac River by an American poet—whether a major or minor I do not know, having forgotten his name. In one stanza he mentions the fact that "young Brissot" looked upon this stream in its bright flow—
And bore its image o'er the deep
To soothe a martyr's sadness,
And fresco in his troubled sleep
His prison walls with gladness.
Brissot is not generally looked upon as a "martyr" on this side of the Atlantic, nor was he allowed to enjoy his "troubled sleep" too long after his fellow-citizens (especially the great and sea-green Incorruptible) had begun in their fraternal fashion to thirst for his blood; but we can easily believe that during those dark days in the Bastille the image and vision of the beautiful river thousands of miles away was more to him than all his varied stores of knowledge, all his schemes for the benefit of suffering humanity, and perhaps even a better consolation than his philosophy.
It is indeed this "gladness" of old sunshine stored within us—if we have had the habit of seeing beauty everywhere and of viewing all beautiful things with appreciation—this incalculable wealth of images of vanished scenes, which is one of our best and dearest possessions, and a joy for ever.
"What asketh man to have?" cried Chaucer, and goes on to say in bitterest words that "now with his love" he must soon lie in "the coldë grave—alone, withouten any companie."
What he asketh to have, I suppose, is a blue diamond—some unattainable good; and in the meantime, just to go on with, certain pleasant things which perish in the using.
These same pleasant things are not to be despised, but they leave nothing for the mind in hungry days to feed upon, and can be of no comfort to one who is shut up within himself by age and bodily infirmities and the decay of the senses; on the contrary, the recollection of them at such times, as has been said, can but serve to make a present misery more poignantly felt.
It was the nobly expressed consolation of an American poet, now dead, when standing in the summer sunshine amid a fine prospect of woods and hills, to think, when he remembered the darkness of decay and the grave, that he had beheld in nature, though but for a moment,