The Harvest of a Quiet Eye

y I pen that word in the right-hand corner of my letters, a great gap seems to have opened between the Summer and me. Autumn days are here: the gladn

nkle on the grass, late into the morning, with a thick dew that has not yet quite made up its mind to be frost. The partridges whirr up from under your feet as you throw your leg over that164 stile; the rooks wheel home much earlier to bed. The fungus tribe begins to look up, and after a shower you come suddenly, as you cross the meadow, upon a clus

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with gold, and with a visage sunny brown; And he laughed for very joy, and he danced fr

seemed thoughtful in their absolute repose; And I saw the woods consuming in a many-co

silence the nuts sharply rattling down; And I saw the long dark hedges all alight with

xpecting attitude of nature, the absolute repose of the year, which rests by its work done,

suit a calmer grief, And only through the fade

very bulb and upon every branch-a promise of future life amid universal death: just as He put that green promise-bud into the heart of Adam and Eve, wh

bruise t

mid our blackbirds and thrushes and blackcaps and nightingales; for he is very humble-hearted, and content to be set aside when we can do without him. But Autumn days come, and the nightingale has fled, and the blackcap is far away, and the lark and the thrush and the blackbird are silent;-then the robin draws near. Close to our houses he comes, with his cheery warm breast, and kind bright eye, and his message from God. And then he interprets the Autumn to us, in those broken, tenderly-glad thrills of song, that, simple though they be, can sometimes disturb the heart with beauty that it cannot fathom, but that agitates and shakes it even to the sudden brimmin

et th' autumnal breeze has stirred the grove, Faded, yet full, a paler green S

till bent to find or make the best, In thee and in this quiet mead, Th

ing so thankful to the dreary blast, Though gone and spent its joyous prime, A

watchman true, Waiting

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about God. On the Sunday evenings, therefore, I like to sit there, under a tree may be, with some peaceful heavenly book, sometimes to read, and sometimes

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in the early mornin

e dew, like frost, is on the pane, The year begins, though fair, to wane: T

en and now yellow-touched leaves, that harmonise well with the pale sky against which you see them. The beech in the sh

and there A fiery fi

box-trees undernea

fair, Ray round with f

ng. That apple-tree, bending down to the lawn with rosy apples, it seems so perfectly still and169 resting, that it quite makes you start to hear one of its red apples drop upon the path. The hurry and bustle and eager growth of the year has all gone by: these roses, that used to send out crowding bud after bud;-for some weeks a pause, a waiting, has come over them. This one purely white blossom, you watched it developing, unfolding so slowly, that it never seemed to change, taking a week for what would have taken no more

ly frost i

ling with still wings overhead across the pale sky, to give you even the poorer encouragement of his mere stoic caw. Why are you depr

is sad for Life to contemplate;170 and we are so much akin to all this decay, that this quiet tells us of it almost more than the heavy bell that now and then stirs the air of the Summer morning. The coming

o fade as

r sadness and depression. Death in its beauty, in a tender love

ife that breathes with human breat

t, Oh life, not death, for which we pan

go, one who had less cause tha

rdened; not for that we would be unclothed, but clothe

ears very near our eyes. "Sin entered into the world, and death by sin": and the child of such a parent cannot bring joy as his attendant. Still

loped even before the leaves, the old leaves, have fallen away. Look on the ground in the shrubberies. What are these little green points that begin just to break the mould? Ah, they are indeed the myriad white constellations of snowdrops already beginning to dawn, and the frail flower will sleep warm and safe in the bulb

ound appear The lil

e us that there is one for man. But God has told us in the Book of His Word, the meaning of what we read in the Book of His Works. And we know now what the robin meant, in his small song without words,172 and

nd this mortal must put on immortality. O death,

e assembling for prayer. Let us pass round this walk, with hearts c

-trees bending to our reach, And rose-beds wi

that this is such a tender, sweet sadness, and not a dark, deadly gloom-the shade of a solemn grove, not the blackness of a vault. Death is indeed a vall

h giveth us the victory thr

ving fields, collecting just the last gleanings for our Master. Our larks are silent in the fallows, our thrushes and blackbirds voiceless in the groves; the rich flood of the nightingale's thrilling song has long been lost to our hearts. The withered leaves sail down about us, the mists sleep on the hills, the dew lies thick in the valleys. But we are very happy and peaceful; even here there is a stray flower or two, and the Autumn crocus droops on the garden beds; and the berries are bright in the hedges

ealis, into the twilight sky. There is a sadness, no doubt-there must be-in the coming shade of death which deepens on the path. But the bud of life in the very heart of174 death; of this we are more

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." No more wild dreams, it is true, of what life is going to be, but then no sad wakings, and, lo, it was a dream! No more quick blood coursing in the veins, no more excess of animal life making stillness impossible and silence torture; no more young devotion and quick enthusiasm, warming the heart even to tinder, ready to flare at the first spark of friendship or love. No more glow of poetry cast

nd the years so short, instead of so long; to lose the wonder and the thrill at the first snowdrop, the first cowslip; the first nest low in the bushes with five blue eggs;176 the first excursion round the park wall for violets, or into the wood for nuts. To lose

sferred to Heaven. It was sad, at first, when the glamour, and the magic, and the glow, passed away from this world, which, to youth's heart seemed so exceedingly, inexpressibly glorious and fair. But it is better so. A mirage gave, indeed, a certain sweet mysterious light to life's horizon, and he could not but feel dashed at first to find little but bare sand where the unreal brightness had been. But he journeyed on, learning, somewhat sadly, in manhood, God's loving lesson, that we are st

and reverence and mild serenity; the rocking waves of the passions asleep about the tossed heart, and the glittering thoughts of heaven reflected instead from the calm soul; and its speechless infinite depths gradually mirroring themselves in the being! Happy days, when life's feverish, exciting n

est gleaning of its late months. For else, how sad to watch the sun setting, the only sun we know of, and to hope for no long day beyond. Think of what a wise heathen said of old age. Cicero wrote a treatise, a wonderfully beautiful treatise, in praise of it. But all this was but playing with his own sadness, in his old age; pleading the cause of a client, in w

y can do, and has done.

part in peace, According to Thy word:

exhorting the younger warriors who are leading on that war, that he soon

ery aged man, ending the Bible and his life with

ings saith, Surely I come quickly

ild of God, their sadness, we have seen, is gentle, peaceful sadness, a tender hush more than counterbalanced by the p

thereth, the

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and decay of the loveliness and beauty around us, to be able to rest our heart quietly upon a land beyond earth's horizon; and to look fo