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Updated: June 5, 2025
Gaspier and gaspier in each lulling tree-top, in each hushing bird-song, in each drooping grass-blade, the whole torrid earth seemed to be sucking in its breath as if it meant never, never to exhale it again.
Among other unromantic and disagreeable things, it asserts and proves its assertions by still more disagreeable, because incontrovertible statistics, that, for all the sylvan delights of lawn and bower, and the exquisite sensation of eating your own hams, the largest class of patients in insane asylums comes from the "jolly boys" and their wives and daughters; but better watch a grass-blade struggling up under the curb-stone of the sidewalk than view the fairest landscape in the world from behind a grated window.
The grass-blade and the moutain, the moonlit water and the peony, are lit from within and utterly adorable: not because God made them; not as reminding you of the Topmost of any Hierarchy of Being; but, if you really go to the bottom of it, because there is no personality in them, and so nothing to hinder the eternal wonder, impersonal Tao, from shining through.
Every green thing, from tiniest grass-blade lying lowest, to highest waving tips of elms, also set thick with the water-pearls; all tossing and catching, and tossing and catching, in fairy game with the wind, and with the rain itself, always losing, always gaining, changing shape and place and number every moment, till the twinkling and shifting dazzle all eyes.
Meanwhile Mother Partridge skimmed in a great circle and came by a roundabout way back to the little fuzz-balls she had left hidden in the woods. With a wild bird's keen memory for places, she went to the very grass-blade she last trod on, and stood for a moment fondly to admire the perfect stillness of her children. The sun was hot now.
At the feet of the dying man he halted, and took the grass-blade from his mouth. "Sir," he said, "are you a Christian?" At that moment, in that light, sudden though it was, the question seemed beautifully fitting. "All men are when they are dying," came the quiet reply. "They must be. As the world-tide ebbs, the Christ-tide flows. That is the Law."
A heavy fall of damp snow covered every twig and grass-blade. They walked slowly down the winding path till they reached the open lawn just before the western gate. "Wait a moment, Bradley," said Ida. They turned to look back.
For a while they ran along the edge of the great ravine, appearing and disappearing as they dived into some chasm and again emerged from it. At last they stretched out upon the broad prairie, a plain nearly flat and almost devoid of verdure, for every short grass-blade was dried and shriveled by the glaring sun.
Everything which we call organization that spots the landscape of Nature is a revelation of secret force that has been wedded to matter, and if the spiritual powers that have thus domesticated themselves around us should be canceled, the whole planet would be a huge Desert of Sahara a bleak sand-ball, without shrub, grass-blade or moss.
But every grass-blade and flower-stalk is a mausoleum of vanished summer, itself crumbling to dust, never to rise again. Each child of June, scarce distinguishable in November against the background of moss and rocks and bushes, is brought into final prominence in December by the white snow which imbeds it.
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