Chapter XVII

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A Summer Noon

The stir of the morning has given place to a silence broken only by the shrill whir of the locust. The distant shore lines that ran clear and white against the low background of green have become dim and indistinct; all things are touched by a soft haze which changes the sentiment of the landscape from movement to repose, from swift and multitudinous activity to the hush of sleep. The intense blue of the morning sky is dimmed and the great masses of trees are motionless. The distant harvest fields where the rhythmic lines of the mowers have moved alert and harmonious through the morning hours are deserted. On earth silence and rest, and in the great arch of the sky a sea of light so full and splendid that it seems almost to dim the fiery effluence of the sun itself. In such an hour one stretches himself under the trees, and in a moment the spell is on him, and he cares neither to think nor act; he rejoices to lose himself in the universal repose with which Nature refreshes herself. The heat of the day is at its height, but for an hour the burden slips from the shoulders of care, and the rest comes in which the gains of work are garnered.

The whir of the locust high overhead, by some earlier association, always recalls that matchless singer, some of whose notes Nature has never regained in all these later years. The whir of the cicada and the white light on the remote country road are real to us today, though one went silent and the other faded out of Sicilian skies two thousand years and more ago, because both are preserved in the verse of Theocritus. The poet was something more than a mere observer of Nature, and the beautiful repose of his art more than the native grace and ease of one to whom life meant nothing more strenuous than a dream of a blue sea and fair sky. He had known the din of the crowded street as well as the silence of the country road, the forms and shows of a royal court as well as the simplicity and sincerity of tangled vines and gnarled olives on the hillside. He had seen, with those eyes which overlooked nothing, the pomps and vanities of power, the fret and fever of ambition, the impotence and barrenness of much of that activity in which multitudes of men spend their lives under the delusion that mere stir and bustle mean progress and achievement. Out of Syracuse, with its petty court about a petty tyrant, Theocritus had come back to the sea and the sky and the hardy pastoral life with a joy which touches some of his lines with penetrating tenderness. Better a thousand times for him and for us the long, tranquil days under the pine and the olive than a great position under Hiero's hand and the weary intrigue and activity which made the melancholy semblance of a successful life for men less wise and genuine. The lines which the hand of Theocritus has left on the past are few and marvellously delicate, but they seem to gain distinctness from the remorseless years that have almost obliterated the features of the age in which he lived. It is better to see clearly one or two things in life than to move confused and blinded in the dust of an impotent activity; it is better to hear one or two notes sung in the overshadowing trees than to spend one's years amid a murmur in which nothing is distinctly audible. Theocritus, shunning courts and cities, sought to assuage the pain of life at the heart of Nature, and did not seek in vain. He gave himself calmly and sincerely to the sweet and natural life which surrounded him, and in his tranquil self-surrender he gained, unsuspecting, the immortality denied his eager and restless cotemporaries [Transcriber's note: contemporaries?]. Life is so vast, so unspeakably rich, that to have reported accurately one swift glimpse, or to have preserved the melody of one rarely heard note, is to have mastered a part of the secret of the Immortals.

Struggle and anguish have their place in every genuine life, but they are the stages through which it advances to a strength which is full of repose. The bursting of the calyx announces the flower; but the beauty of the perfect blossoming obliterated the very memory of its earlier growth. The climb upward is often a long anguish, but the dust and weariness are forgotten when once the eye rests on the vast outlook. "On every height there lies repose" is the sublime declaration of one who had looked into most things deeper than his fellows, and had learned much of the profounder processes of life. Emerson long ago noted that even in action the forms of the Greek heroes are always in repose; the crudity of passion, the distorting agony of half-mastered purpose, are lost in a self-forgetfulness which borrows from Olympus something of the repose of the gods. The sublime calm which imparts to great works of art a hint of eternity is born of complete mastery of life; all the stages of evolution have been accomplished, the whole movement of growth has been fulfilled, before the hand of art sets the seal of perfection on the thing that is done. Shadow and light, heat and cold, tempest and quiet days, have all wrought together before the blooming of the flower which in its perfect grace and beauty gives no hint of its troubled growth. As the consummation of all toil and struggle and anguish, there comes at last that deep repose, born not of idleness and indifference, but of the harmony of all the elements in their last and finest form.

In the unbroken silence of the noon-tide such thoughts come unbidden and almost unnoticed to one who surrenders himself to the hour and the scene. Nature has her tempests, but her harvests are gathered amid the calm of days that often seem filled with the peace of heaven, and the mighty and irresistible movement of her life goes on in unbroken silence. The deepest thoughts are always tranquillising, the greatest minds are always full of calm, the richest lives have always at heart an unshaken repose.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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