Nature's Constancy in Variety

Irish Jesuit Province

Nature's Constancy in VarietyAuthor(s): Hannah LynchSource: The Irish Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 122 (Aug., 1883), pp. 439-444Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20497021 .

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( 439 )

NATURE'S CONSTANCY IN VARIETY.

BY HANNAH LYNCH

ONE must have watched nature long and unconsciously to be able to feel to the full the power of that beauty which never plays one

false; one must have wondered at her mutely and tenderly to realise how thrillingly and vividly the hidden growths of each day may pierce when one's mind has become attuned to her sad and minor moods as well as to her brilliant moods. Then such love becomes a passion, purer, keener, possessing more splendid capacity for a fall and gene rous return than any human love. Only those who have rambled

aimlessly among green wild hills and delicately sloping valleys, by broad, placid river-sides, and listened to the mutinous gurgle of a well known brook leaping over stones and playing among rushes and water weeds, in sounds as free and sweet as childhood's laughter; dreaming solitary youth's vague dreams and solacing youth's vague sorrows with such surroundings, deepening a love of earth's quiet places and a dis tastefor what is called life, can know how colour and perfume may pene trate. Our hearts beat in unison with the seasons. The strong charm of hope throbs eagerly and in fond and indefinite expectation in the

mild February sunlight, as our ears catch the clear bird-notes, and the dark purple hues lie richly over fields and bare branches; like the soft gray mists which sometimes enshroud the young beautyt of the earth, the future stretches onwards in swift changing lights and vague aspiration. In the rich and indolent flush of summer brilliance promises begin to die out like so many sweet illusions of our childhood, and, as thestarry blossoms ripen into fruit and meet the general doom-dull decay-we recognise the fitness of our autumn sadness and slow pulsations, and we prepare to see the hopes, born so gladly in the spring time, buried in the snows of winter, only to make way for the children of the coming year.

The way to care for Nature, and tounderstand her as she deserves to be understood, is to linger long and tranquilly in her midst; to forget yourself in the silent lanes filled with early blossoms and fleeting fragrance; to wander among familiar foliage and flowers, well-re

membered fieles and hills, and bird-notes, taking in the subtle charm of a capricious sky. These things feed the imagination, and in the after years, laden heavily with mingled memories, thrill us by deep and delicate associations. But to rush imnetuously out into the country, exhausted with the eagerness and mixed passions of city life, and perhaps find yourself flung, into a transient ecstasy by a soft spring day, a cloudless drowsy summer noon, running riot among fields and



440 N a au re's Conistancy in Vartety.

flowers in butterfly fashion, and returning to your old life, to expatiate spasmodically and rhapsodically to an admiring circle on the " beauties of nature," is certainly very far from the sentiment which her true lovers entertain. It is this most common and sentimental admiration that exasperates those who have gathered a fine, true, and permanent knowledge of her value. To these the stolid indifference of the city bird of passage, and what is worse, the shallow insipidity of the effusive tourist, are terrible bores, a source of grave vexation and savage disgust. One could conceive the unpleasantness of looking with

Dr. Johnson across one's favourite stretch of laindscape, with whose every change one has become familiar, and hearing his bearish deci sion, that "1 one green field is precisely like another green field, sir," and on the whole, exceedingly dull to look at ! But perhaps that would be less disagreeable than the borror of listening to an admirer of the gush ing or wsthetic school, "so cbarniing! so perfectly lovely! such an awfully pretty place!-quite idyllic, you know," with proportionate looks of exclamation by way of accompaniment. Such sentimentality is admirably calculated to call out the latent intolerance of finer, more

nervous feeling.

But if you really want to merge mere acquaintance into perfect companionship, you will remain silent and linger among the shades and touches and changes of country life. From day to day the fulness of its charm increases; from day to day you become more attuned to its exquisite influence. You grow to know all its expressions, its thousand indescribable aspects; you tlhink it more interesting in its joyous moods, until you have seen it on its sad days, and then you fancy you must like the sad ones best, until the sunlight, breaking suddenly over the hill-tops and sea, again upsets your decision; you become enamoured of the slightest detail, the vaguest alteration; you watch for them, and they become, with your growing love, a part of your life, as they form a part of Nature's. An immense depth of personal acquaintance with colour, tint, leaf, and shape is gradually established, and what before would have been to you a mere accident is now the happy and perfect part of a whole full of interest and keen delight. You grow to love your new mistress alike in sunlight and shadow, inrain and dew, in twilight and moonlight and starlight: her stormy and sullen moods are as varied, as touching, as lovable, as peculiarly her own, as her sunny and smiling moods. What more changeable? She is gray or red, warm or cold, brilliant or dull, nervous or placid, stormy or tranquil, fresh or tired: she changes colour and aspect within each hour-and which one to select and caress and

make one's own ? There is a dazzling silvery or azure presence, a rose gray softness, or a golden mellowness; there are dreamy opal and

mystic violet depths; pink and white smile as softly as dimpled infarncy; winter snows can give new depth of colour; and there is



Nature's Constancy in Variety. 441

the solemn pathos of autumnal tinges: which to choose ? The period of tender bud, or plumy blossoming spray and starlike petal, or

slumberous, heavily-fruited days, when the woods in a lotos-eating indolence lie hushed and warm, and bending trees cast their long tired shadows on the thirsty grasses and plants, creating a grateful dusk in the midst of weary light.

And here in Ireland we have no need to turn abroad in search of the beautiful or the picturesque. We can show fields of golden corn,

murmuring brooks, ancd sun-caressed rivers, rich pastures, lovely old ruins, blue hills outlined against a sky as fair, if not fairer, than any other. We, too, have deep valleys with sylvan haunts and clustering blossoms; we have smiling plains, relieved by thick underwoods, lazy trout-streams and hedges starred with flower-heads, dusky and changing foliage, a delicate and vivid mingling of hues and perfumes as

a-ay to be seen in foreign countries or among broad and tropic splendours. No sunsets more glowing, no mountains more purple and lonely, no lakes bluer, or rivers bathed in a tenderer transiency of colour and

motion; no white flower-petals more diaphanous, no hills more invigorating, no scenery, however far we travel, more soothing or more exquisite. When I first saw the dark blue of the Pyrenees lying under its tranislucent veil of brilliant sparkling snow, resting high up against a sky of lighter blue, I looked in speechless wonder and de light; but when, years later, I caught a glimpse of the Commeragh

Mountains, one clear February day, I saw no difference in the beauty, notwithstanding the immensity and impressiveness of the Spanish range (I was young then and but an indifferent traveller). Here also was an underland, rising from green meadowland, of rich dark blue with an overworld in the shape of mountain-tops, of purest crystalline snow: but instead of a southern light blue sky there was our own, lovelier because more varied. Over the mountains lay a huge opaque bank of white clouds mingling with the tops, and you could only distinguish their merging point in the difference of the whiteness of each. The clouds fell in graceful, soft, and downy folds like the breast of some fluffy,

white-coated animal; thetopsglistened pure andpiercinglybrilliant, but proud, like an imperial maiden who shuns no scrutiny, fears no glances, arrayed as she is in her radiant and fearless robes of maidenliness and conscious superiority: the one grandly and impressively beautiful, the other full of infantine and appealing graces and curves.

There is a line of hills running down to the sea by Woodstown and lying along the coast of Wexford, in a narrow, gently sloping edging of deep and faint purple heather, which to-day are steeped in a tender

mist, veiling the meadows in a green-gray tint. These hills are neither grand nor impressive, but hold in their tranquil bosom all the charm and influence of home; all the quiet blessedness of strong, firm, unde monstrative love; all the delicate shades and variations of some nervous



442 Nature's Constancy in Variety.

woman's beauty, to which our eyes have become familiarised by long and fond and unconscious study; just as vividly as on her face the emotions play, do the tones of sunlight and shade, of gloom and storm, of heat and cold, of rain and dew, play on those homely friendly hills of rich purple or pale violet with their touches of green fields and dark furze, their mist, and shadow-making trees, their brown and golden patches. One sees the shadows of the clouds above coming and going from them like the colour coming and going in deepening bloom or faint rose on the sensitive face we love; one may read the signs of rain in their tell-tale look as we detect the first lustre of tears in the

widening and softening of a girl's eyes, and the downward drooping quiver of her lips. And then the soothing charm of those pleasant Irish scenes !-what tropic lusciousness or strangeness can equal it? The fairy-like transciency of glow and colour and tint in sky ! you watch a vivid pomegranate line become orange, then golden, gradually getting dimmer, until it assumes the palest yellow hue, and finally lo&es itself in some vague white cloud. And the delight of piercing through the tangled confusion of the blues and greens flung here and there, in seeming recklessness, but in a lovely profusion, on a very decided red or a less striking rose cloud, or on a self-assertive amber or im perial purple patch, and defining form in all that world of shapeless ness.

Or if it happens to be one of those minor-toned days, which the writer is at present enjoying, when a wan silver-gray is the prevail ing tint in sky and sea, and the only relief to the monotony above is perhaps a dim suspicion of dusky orange somewhere westward, and an occasional bank of violet-gray, with not a show of sunshine to exhila rate, scarcely a breeze to remind you of the storms of the heart and the winter they have left behind; nothing in the sky or under the sky beautiful enough to make us forget the weariness, the troubles, and folly of life; nor yet anything to recall the wide track of regrets and baffled efforts we have traced on its broad path. The influence of such a day, gazing across a broad sheet of light-gray sea, almost immovable, except where the dull tiny ripples crawl in a duskier gray to the brown and slate-coloured beach and recede, still more indolently in low, plaintive, plashing cadences, and the dark rocks edging the coast stand out in solemn gravity, and the wide-apart houses on the lonely hill-tops lie dimly against the horizon, looking down here on a hazy bluish plain, there on a pale misty green, or perhaps on a darker, clearer green looking, for its very vividness amidst so much tonelessness, all the

more desolate with its striking brown or blackish foliage, is sad, in describably sad; but there is no pain, no strong emotion conveyed in that sadness. There is even a certain amount of pleasure to be derived from its indulgence, if you are able to forget the outward details of your own life and calmly enjoy it. Is there not something weird and



Nature's Constancy in Variety. 443

pleasant in the mournful sound of a solitary sea-bird 1? And the harmony

of such a scene is increased by the graceful flight and motionless poise mid-air of an ash-coloured or slatish-blue winged seagull when the gleam of anything so brilliant as a white bird would jar on one's sense

of the fitness of things; and the dreary cry of the curlew adds effec tively to Nature's silent and sorrowful humouir.

Leaving the shore you perhaps walk leisurely-hurry on such a day would be unseemly-through country lanes, where the odour of

young wooobine and sweet-smelling hawthorn stars from the hedge rows lazily floods the air; where the wild convolvulus raises its most delicate petals above the grassy borders, and with the blossoms of the pale-pink dogroses lie like jewels in the silvery air; the birds, as they flutter from tree to tree, from white and mossy stems to flowers, seem

demure and gravelycognisant of the weight and responsibility of exist

ence, for their songs are not so thrilling but softer and more subdued, and the lonely, monotonous cawing of the rooks is heard above all. The weary horses, ploughing the earth into deep, even furrows, with sadness and overwork imprisoned in their long dark gaze and imprinted on their drooping heads, go slowlier and wearier than ever, and over the

wide-stretching fields and trees lies that same dull gray mist. And then the day verges on to evening: the preliminary signs of sunset are showing themselves in the west, where the sky is beginning to assume all those pale exquisite hues we see in the opal stone. Soon the rose will flush out, and just there, where the gold is getting ready to glimmer, there will be a sea of colour, and the gray uniformity of day will lovingly merge into the calm blue depths of twilight, with a

promise of clearer radiance on towards night, by the responsive ap

pearance of a few early stars eagerly peeping through the veil of clouds. Already the haze which has so long lingered in silver delight over the hills and meadows is commencing to lift itself up to meet the evening dews, and soon will have melted away. The general effect of the atmosphere is no longer sad, but nature is most luminous. The amethyst-tinted hill-tops lie steeped in living light, and the trees, suffused in the deep mellow trance of sunset, cross confusedly the aerial opal depths, gleaming radiantly througo,h their branches. In

this vast sea of dreamland float still dreamier islands of violet-gray, rose and mystic purple, mingling with patches of soft ethereal azure, as still and tranquil as the bosom of some summer lake, as sad as

memory, as mysterious as death. Those things, those pictures with their subtle power of penetra

tion are worth living for, even if we have ceased to care for men and

women, and have outlived all our illusions about humanity, and are indifferent to its struggles, its petty passions, falsities, and sorrows great as they are; even though the hopes and dreams of youth have

lain for years forgotten in the deep, deep well of memory, starting



444 Nature's Cozstancy zn Variety.

up now and then in ghostlike form, in answer to a siidden look, a per fume, or a familiar strain of music, and as quickly hustled back with a momentary throb of anguish, and a careless smile. In our bitter reflections on life's deceptions and worthlessness, we are apt to forget that we have still sunlight, tenderly tinted skies, the song of birds childhood's gleeful laugh, its fresh round glance and sweet dimples;

we have spring softness, sunrmmer vividness, autumn tinges, and winter snows. And if the early promise of life has not been fulfilled for us, do not the stars still shine in the night dews in the same tran quil beauty ? In the lovely shimmer of moonlight have we not been touched strangely by its pale soft glinmmer on the harsh angular contours of buildings, mingling its poetry with the foot-worn street stones, and clothing some old well-known city church or hall with a

dimly spiritual or historic beauty ? You have only to call to memory some half-forgotten walk through the solemn silence of a forest, or through the sleepy lovelinesses of woodlan.d or valley, when the dark

motionless leaves glistened in silver radiance, and you watched in hushed delight the half-closed dells of lustre, hidden in the grasses; when your eyes rested wistfully on a stream of still dark water, quivering here and there into silver-tipped ripples in the steady shim

mer of that bright maiden's light, and when your young and vivid imagination pictured naiads and dryads and wood nymphs, playing between the delicate shadows of the moon-kissed branches. And then the flowers! They smell just as sweetly, and bloom as abundantly in their many-hued charms as when hope and faith shed their rays of transient " rose-misted " beauty " on life's dull stream." The thrills of association these unpurchasable things convey, a glimpse of lhillside, sloping down to a soft valley, nestling in mingled light andshade; warm sunshine, the sound of a brook gushing and laughing continuously through its stones and humid banks and rain-freshened grasses; the

words of writers we have loved and reverenced in years gone by; woman's beauty, and that admiration tinged with sadness with which we view that period of innocent, thoughtless youth, when laughter comes right out from the heart, and the mind is untouched by any emotion beyond the mere animal gladness of being: these joys leave no sting behind, and however far we may have travelled on the road of life, we have found none sweeter, purer, more lasting.



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Nature's Constancy in Variety