A Summer Morning

I do not understand how any one who has watched the breaking of a summer day can question the noblest faiths of man. William Blake, with that integrity of insight which is often the possession of the true mystic, declared that when he was asked if he saw anything more in a sunset than a round disk of fire, he could only answer that he saw an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying "Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God Almighty!" The birth of a day is a diviner miracle even than its death. They were true poets who wrote the old Vedic hymns and sang those wonderful adorations when the last stars were fading in the splendour of the dawn. Beside the glory of the sun's announcement all royal progresses are tawdry and mean; beside the beauty of the dawn, slowly unveiling the day while the heavens wait in silent worship, all poetry is idle and empty. It is the divinest of all the visible processes of Nature, and the sublimest of all her marvellous symbolism.

On such a morning as this, twelve years ago, Amiel wrote in his diary: "The whole atmosphere has a luminous serenity, a limpid clearness. The islands are like swans swimming in a golden stream. Peace, splendour, boundless space! . . . I long to catch the wild bird, happiness, and tame it. These mornings impress me indescribably. They intoxicate me, they carry me away. I feel beguiled out of myself, dissolved in sunbeams, breezes, perfumes, and sudden impulses of joy. And yet all the time I pine for I know not what intangible Eden." In these few words this master of poetic meditation suggests without expressing the indescribable impression which a summer carries into every sensitive nature.

Last night the world was sorrowful, worn, and dulled; but lo! the new day has but touched it and all the invisible choirs are heard again; the old hope returns like a tide, and out of the unseen depths a new life breaks soundless upon the unseen shores and sends its hidden currents into every dried and empty channel and pool. The worn old world has been created anew, and God has spoken again the word out of which all living things grow. In the silence and peace and freshness of this morning hour one feels the inspiration of nature as a direct and personal gift; the inbreathing, which has renewed the beauty and fertility about him, renews his spirit also. He responds to the fresh and invigorating atmosphere with a soul sensitive with sudden return of zest to every beautiful sight and sound. No longer an alien in this world which has never known human care and regret, he enters by right of citizenship into all its privileges of unwatched freedom and unclouded serenity. One is not absorbed by the glory of the morning, but set free by it. There are times when Nature permits no rivalry; she claims every thought and gives herself to us only as we give ourselves to her. She effaces us and takes complete possession of our souls. Not so, however, does she usurp the throne of our own personal life in those early hours when the sun, the master artist, whose touch has coloured every leaf and tinted every flower, demands her adoration. Then it is, perhaps, that she turns her thoughts from all lesser companionships and, rapt in universal worship, suffers us to pass and repass as unnoticed as the idlers in the cathedral by those who kneel at the chancel rail.

I confess I never find myself quite unmoved in this sacred hour, announced only by the stars veiling their faces and the birds breaking the silence with their tumultuous song. The universal faith becomes mine also, and from the common worship I am not debarred. My thought rises whither the mists, parted from the unseen censers, are rising: I feel within me the revival of aspirations and faiths that were fast overclouding; the stir of old hopes is in my heart; the thrill of old purposes is in my soul. Once more Nature is serving me in an hour of need; serving me not by drawing me to herself, but by setting me free from a world that was beginning to master and make me its slave.

Now all that insensibly growing servitude slips from me; once more I am free and my own. The inexhaustible life that is behind all visible things, constantly flowing in upon us when we keep the channels open, recreates whatever was noblest and truest in me. With Nature, I believe; and believing, I also share in the universal worship.

Emerson somewhere says, writing about the most difficult of Plato's dialogues, that one must often wait long for the hour when one is strong enough to grapple with and master it, but sooner or later the fitting morning will come. It is the morning which gives us faith in the most arduous achievements, and invigorates us to undertake them. In the morning all things are possible because the heavens and the earth are so visibly united in the fellowship of common life; the one pouring down a measureless and penetrating tide of vitality, the other eagerly, worshipfully receptive. Nature has no more inspiring truth for us than this constant and complete enfolding of our life by a higher and vaster life, this unbroken play of a diviner purpose and force through us. Nothing is lost, nothing really dies; all things are conserved by an energy which transforms, reorganises, and perpetuates in new and finer forms all visible things. The silence of winter counterfeits the repose of death, but it is not even a pause of life; invisibly to us the great movement goes on in the earth under our feet. While we watch by our household fires, the unseen architects are planning the summer, and the sublime march of the stars is noiselessly bringing back the bloom and the perfume that seem to have vanished forever. Every morning restores something we thought lost, recalls some charm that seemed to have escaped.

In all noble natures there is an ineradicable idealism which constantly interprets life in its higher aspects. In the dust of the road the mountains sometimes disappear from our vision, but we know that they still loom in undiminished majesty against the horizon; the gods sometimes hide themselves, but there is something within which affirms that we shall again look on their serene faces, calm amid our turbulence and unchanging amid our vicissitudes. It is this heavenly inheritance of insight and faith which makes Nature so divinely significant to us, and matches all its forms and phenomena with spiritual realities not to be taken from us by time or change or by that mysterious angel of the last great transformation which we call death. The morning is always breaking over the low horizon lines of some sea or continent; voices of birds are always "carolling against the gates of day;" and so, through unbroken light and song, our life is solemnly and sublimely moved onward to the dawn in which all the faint stars of our hope shall melt into the eternal day.