"Nature is now at her evening prayers, kneeling before the red hills. On the steps of her great altar she is praying for a fair night for mariners at sea, for travellers in lonely deserts, for lambs on moors and for unfledged little birds in their nests. She appears to me as a Titanic woman, her robe of blue air spread to the outskirts of the heath; a veil white as an avalanche extends from her head to her feet with arabesques of lightning flame on its borders. Under her breasts is seen her purple zone, and through its blush shines the evening star. Her eyes are clear and deep as lakes, and are lifted and full of worship and tremble with the softness of love and the lustre of prayer."
Very curiously in this the only poetic passage I could recall the author's religion has mixed itself with the sense of a living and intelligent principle in nature—that which at times makes nature seem a person to us. The person may be interested in or indifferent to us, but is all-knowing and all-powerful and cannot be an intercessor. There is no doubt that this sense or feeling in us, when strong, is disturbing to the religious mind, producing as it does the notion of a something unknown and uncanny (probably the devil) in nature—something which is ever trying in all solitary places to seduce the soul from a jealous and watchful God. It was, I think, a religious poet and an American who wrote of the "dreadful wilderness of mind"—I read it when a boy:
There is a wilderness more dark
Than groves of fir on Huron's shore.
Many of us have just such visions of the person that nature is on occasions to us: a woman-Titan, a beautiful female, the mother of men and of all life, all breathing sentient things, and of grass and flowers; a being in whom all beauty in the visible world and all sweetness and love and compassion in a mother's heart and in all hearts are concentrated and intensified. But it is a personification of a reclaimed and softened nature and of the soft conditions of life in which we are nursed. My vision of nature as a person that night had no softness or beauty in it and was not woman. Standing on the hills I saw him coming up from the illimitable moaning sea, riding on the blast as on a chariot, and he was himself wind and cloud and sea and land. He towered above the granite hills, blotting out the stars with his streaming hair which covered the heavens like a cloud. I saw his face, dark as granite, as he rose up before me and passed over the stony desolate hills, and his eyes gazing straight before him were like two immense round shields of grey ice and had no speculation in them. This indeed was to my mind the most dreadful thing, that this being, all-powerful and everlasting, creator and slayer of all things that live, of all beauty and sweetness and compassion, was himself without knowledge or thought or emotion, and that that which he had made and would unmake was without significance to him.
If there be nothing but this mechanical world, and if the pure materialist even in spite of his materialism should invent for himself or imagine a god, it would be such a one as I beheld on that windy night.
So passed the miserable darkling hours, "as I lay a-thynkinge," and saw no hope until I slept, and when I woke and the grey morning was come, the wind had fallen and the cold was not so intense.
The frost continued that day and the next, and although very cold with occasional storms of sleet and snow, it was getting milder all the time. The change was so gradual one could hardly feel it, but it had a great effect on the birds; they were recovering very rapidly, and on the morning of the 27th, when the ground had once more grown soft except in shady places, my birds did not turn up at feeding-time in the morning: they were back in the fields getting their natural food, which no doubt tasted best after their long abstinence. It was a pleasure to go out again to see the thrush standing up stiff and alert on the green turf in the old way, and the speckled starlings scattered about and once more busily prodding the turf. The daws rose up with the old insolent ring in their clamouring voices, and the wren was himself again, briskly hopping out of his hiding-place in the stones for a moment or two just to fling that sharp little note of indignation at you for disturbing him—"Go away—mind your own business!"
The mortality had undoubtedly been very great, but a majority of the birds died in the night-time, dropping from their perches in the close bushes and dying in holes in the hedges, where their bodies remained hidden. But they had died in the daytime too, and I found their remains all about the fields, mostly starlings, but dead redwings and thrushes were also plentiful.