The Harvest of a Quiet Eye

down and feeling the soft cushion give, until it has attained consistency enough to resist me. I have been busy, very busy, all this week, and the week before that, and indeed severa

busy day will chase busy day like the sails of a windmill; and we hardly dare stop, because we foreknow how we shall then have a long bill to pay, all the arrears of those fatigues and that weariness that we bade stand aside as we laboured on; and we know that if we once stop to give them a hearing, it will be hard work to set the heavy machinery going again. For myself, I often feel that to go on working, is to be able to work; to pause is to collapse, and to feel incapable. Still, in fact, we make life go farther by careful trading, than by spending all our capital at once. And both for purposes of devotional retirement and of necessary recreation, it is well sometimes just "to sport our oak" (to speak in Oxford phrase) upon the noisy and importunate throng of things clamorous to be done, and yet which, if discharged, would but give pla

e the tall grass and flower-stalks: "all grass of silky feather"; bright rose ragged-robin; white ox-eye daisy; brimstone toad-flax; tall buttercups; pale pink centaury; numberless varieties of fringed flowers, all yellow; and bobbing myriads of the ribwort plantain, to which we are all, when children, very Henry VIII.'s; tall slight sorrel; tougher dock. Beautiful, when the scythe has laid all this in broad, lowly lines upon the whole face of the field; and the mowers advance yet steadily upon the long yielding ranks. Beautiful when the green has turned grey, and the brighter colours of the flowers are dull,130 the clover not yet brown, only faded, the yellow tassels showing, as they droop, the paler under-wing of the closing flower, the buttercups spoil

al garden-brown ants climbing up the pole of an upright grass-stem; leopard-spotted lady-birds; alligator grasshoppers; woolly-bear ca

ile, as they rake the green-appearing ground, And drive the du

the haycocks, and, with hand shading her eyes, looking about all over its wide glare for me. I can lean on this arm until it is tired, then change to the other, then lie on my back and watch the fleecy blue, with handkerchief spread for fear of insects; then turn over again, and resume my inspection of the grass. I am thus p

he worn laboratory of the body, and transmutes gold into earth, or earth into gold, as the case may be, in its peculiar cr

*

er. The hay-fields, with their life and glee, and loveliness of flowers just now, and now these faded mounds! The generations of men in the gaiety or toil of the world, and134 then the ch

huselah were nine hundre

w months? Yes, closely akin; banded together by the last words of the life

d he

ng was longer in progress,

lesh is grass,-and all the goodliness thereof is as the fl

ag

of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut

ag

eld, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and

3

ag

h up; In the morning it flourisheth and groweth

ite and work, I look at these limbs which can rise and go, I consider the brain which can busily toil:-and from these I turn to regard the dry heap that once was liv

s face, that two hours since hath died;

ial long line of mown grass

y, is now perished; neither have they any more a port

ese ever-succeeding generations;-how th

eth away, and anothe

knows no pause. Ever and ever the tall grass and the sweet flowers bend before that industrious scythe. Where is the glad growth of fifty years ago; and where the life that preceded that; and so on, back to Adam? In long fallen ranks they

m that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not; as is the good, so is the sinner; and he that sweareth, as he t

rue. True while we consider the field after the scythe; true while we look on Death, but not applying any longer when we imagine the Resurrection

*

u will find already the tender green of a new growth appearing to clothe the scarred137 meadow. A constant succession, ever mown and still growing; every year and often in the year a fresh attire, however the heart, when that common-place desolation was new to it, refused in dismay to believe

t pleased-I wished to go Mourning adown thi

e of a hypochondriac. In healthy l

ld never more Feel any

ag

es men cheerful unaware; When comfort came, I

you had rather sit moodily alone. Very well for a time, but "will you nill you," the

sometimes natural to be glad, And no man can

3

of God that the grass

*

ted is that which connects this brief life of ours with the grass of

f man as the flower of grass. The grass wit

e expands it, and "grass hath its root in the earth, and is fed by the moisture of it for awhile; but, besides that, it is under the hazard of such weather as favours it not, or of the scythe that cuts it down, give it all the forbearance that may be, let it be free from both those, yet how quickly will it wither of itself! Set aside those many accidents, the smallest of which is able to

; and there is, beside these, the withering too. As though a field of deep grass should be left unmown; yet how soon then would its life and light and laughter depart, and a skeleton array of thin, sere, shivering

and unperceived in the short and simple word of God-"All flesh is as grass, and all the glor

t, hath the wise no advantage beyond the fools? Is all grass? Make you no distinction? No; all is grass, or if you will have some other name, be it so; once this is true, that all flesh is grass; and if that glory which shines so much in your eyes must have a difference, then this is all it can have-it is but the flower of that same grass

with those lilies of the field, that grass which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven. We in the lower rank, we mere grass of the field, look at and admire the glory above us, the flower of the grass, th

d it is gone. And the place t

es, not by degrees coming down the stair they went up, but tumbled down headlong. And the most vigorous beauty a

ed; and we watch, with the keenest regret, great intellects quenched by decay or dea

this world, they are still, in all their glory, but the flower of grass; their root is in the earth. When men have endured the toil of study night and day, it is but a small parcel of knowledge they can attend to, and

births and marriages, coronations and triumphs? They are now as a dream." And so with our first flushes of success, our earliest tastes of fame, our new ecstasies of love, our wonders and admirations when life was young-where are they very soon? Lying in the mown ranks, void of their living movement and vivid lustre; numbered with the heap of every-day events and emotions; still distinguished from these, still marked as flowers, but the glory

condition, a being that abides for ever; in comparison of which the longest term of natural life is less than a moment, and the happiest estate is but a heap of miseries. Were all of us more constantly prosperous than any one of us is, yet

lly, of the fading and dying growth from all earth's sowings, is not really trying to sadden, but rather to cheer us. For he has been telling but j

f the Lord endu

this vanity. In the former it is but a wind which comes with a blight and passes away with a wail. In the latter, some better thing is ever held before us, to which our heart's yearning tendrils, gen

eth away, and t

s;

he will of God a

t, in the end, be found to be, upon the whole, good and useful hay! Yes; but here the life of man outruns the analogy, for the days that are passed are not done with: they remain dried and stored, either to rise and revive their flowers in far more than their pristine beauty; or to be burnt as rubbish and waste. Nothing that

ts, and a cool air fans me, to quiet my heart wit