Ten thousand blessings on this day, the friend of man and beast. The bigot would rob it of its healthful freedom, on the one hand, and coop man up in his work-a-day dungeons, and cause him to walk with downcast eyes and demure steps; and the libertine would desecrate all its sober decorum on the other. God, and the sound heart and sterling sense of Englishmen, preserve it from both these evils! Let us still avoid Puritan rigidity, and French dissipation. Let our children and our servants, and those who toil for us in vaults, and shops, and factories, between the intervals of solemn worship have freedom to walk in the face of heaven and the beauty of earth, for in the great temple of nature stand together, Health and Piety. For myself, I speak from experience, it has always been my delight to go out on a Sunday, and like Isaac, meditate in the fields, and especially, in the sweet tranquillity and amid the gathering shadows of evening; and never in temple or in closet, did more hallowed influences fall upon my heart. With the twilight and the hush of earth, a tenderness has stolen upon me; a desire for every thing pure and holy; a love for every creature on which God has stamped the wonder of his handiwork; but especially for every child of humanity; and then have I been made to feel that there is no Oratory like that which has heaven itself for its roof, and no teaching like the teaching of the Spirit which created, and still overshadows the world with its Infinite wings.
CHAPTER XV.
CHEAP PLEASURES OF COUNTRY LIFE.
To the real lover of the country there needs no great events, no exciting circumstances to effect his happiness. The freshness of the country, and the profoundness of its quiet, are to him full of happiness. The whole round of the seasons, the passage of every day, the still walk amongst fields and woods, and by running waters, are to him sources of perpetual pleasures. When “the winter is over and gone,” he sees with joy the increased light amongst the breaking clouds and dispersing fogs; he feels with delight the milder temperature; he passes by, and observes the first bursting from the warm southern banks of green, luxuriant plants,—the arum, the mercury, the crisp chervil, the wrinkled leaves of the primrose, the blossomed branch of the apricot and peach on the sunny walls of the cottage, and the almond in the garden and shrubbery, like a tree of rosy sunshine, ere a leaf is yet seen; these things he sees with a feeling that has more true delight in it than ever was known to city drawing-room or palace. To me, the most ordinary walk in the country is, and always has been a luxury. I remember what joy these things gave me when a boy, and now they give me again a boy’s heart. I remember the enjoyment I experienced, when an old sportsman used to take his gun on his arm on a Saturday afternoon, when my village school made holiday, and led me up long lanes, between high mossy banks, where the little runnels come rushing and chiming along, between high, overhanging hedges; and through wide, still, shady woods; and across fields deep with greenest grass, and bright with sunshine, and all the glory of spring; and everywhere pointed out to me the nests of birds, each built in its peculiar situation; the robin and the yellow-hammer on the bank; blackbirds and throstles in the hedges, or under the roots of some old tree overhanging a stream, or set amongst the boughs of the young fir-trees in the plantations. I remember how I used to delight in the depth of rich grass and flowery weeds in the open fields and along the sunshiny hedges; in the hedges themselves, all clad in their young leaves, sprinkled with glittering morning dews, and perhaps waving with the utmost prodigality of hawthorn bloom. I remember too, with what earnest delight I used to gaze on the bushes of the wild-rose briar, and admire the singular beauty of its finely-cut and emerald-green leaves, amongst which the whitethroat framed its gauzy nest. All this I remember: and while I think of it, I seem to hear the lark singing in the clear air above me, as he used to do, with a
Joy we never can come near:
and I now see more clearly what it was that produced such an effect upon me. It was that beauty, that wide-spreading, cheering, heart-strengthening beauty—which God hath showered on the face of the earth, to make us feel his presence in his works; and to learn to love him as we go along the most solitary paths, and to rejoice in his goodness, where the world comes not between us and the perception of it. It was that beauty, which is indeed a revelation from heaven, that then made itself felt in my young heart, and has only grown more dear to me every year and every day, and I trust has not been wanting of all that good effect which it is intended it should produce, by weaning us from worldly pleasures, by bringing us to feel habitually the presence of love, and providence, and divine purity, as we go along in solitude and thought; in short, in keeping alive in our hearts the freshness of their feelings and the strength of their better hopes. All this I remember, and it is like the light of a perpetual summer morning in the far-off horizon of memory; and I say, all these delicious feelings have gone with me through life, and do, and will, go with all those who love nature with a filial love.
The first glimpses of spring have in our eyes and hearts an indescribable charm. There is a freshness and a mellowness in the earth then, after the frosts and rains of winter, that give a beauty to it that it possesses at no other period of the year. I never see it, and smell the odour of the upturned soil, without seeming to feel renewed our ancient kinship with the earth whence we sprung, which gives us such manifold blessings all our natural lives, and takes us to its peaceful bosom when we lie down wearied, wasted, and heart-worn. When the labourer cuts his ditches, and piles up his banks anew, there is a beauty in the dark, clear, smooth earth, which his spade cleaves so shiningly. As the children of the village hunt over the steep banks for violets or snail-shells, or the early robin’s nest, your eye is made conscious of the beauty of those banks, with their crumbling mould and springing plants. As the drainer cuts his drain in the greensward of the meadows; as the ploughman turns up the broad lea, all is rich and beautiful. And then, as the hedges and trees clothe themselves in their new and delicate foliage; as the winds come singing sonorously; as the grass and flowers spring beneath your feet; as April now smiles out joyously and bright, and now broods still and beneficent, with a gloom in its sky so unlike the gloom of autumn or winter—a gloom casting a dark shade on the distant landscape, while, in other quarters, the light comes bursting and gushing through the thinner places of the clouds; and fields lie hushed amid light mists, and scattered with a silvery dew in such a living, prolific greenness, that you feel that the birth of millions of flowers is rapidly maturing; that violets must be springing in legions along the hedges and in the copses; and that the old, yellow English daffodil is nodding in tufts in village crofts, and over the margins of mossy wells.
At such times, so deeply do we feel the entrancing influence of spring, that we cannot help breaking out into an affectionate apostrophe in praise of her:
All sadness from my heart is gone—
All sadness, and all fears,
Till I forget that thou art one
Who metest out our years.