30 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. 



and decay, and one simple thread of related harmony rung through 

 all its metamorphoses. 



The leaves that brown now, and fill the forest paths with pliant 

 matting, from which, as we tread the solitude, a moist odour arises, 

 were in their day rife with life and luxuriance, and having acccom- 

 plished their work, go back to the soil whence they sprang to 

 supply the nourishment of another generation. All things change 

 together as the autumn air creeps over the fields. The sun sinks 

 slanting to an early bed ; and the day, like the human heart after the 

 shadows of many years have gathered upon it, is less merry than of 

 yore. The golden corn becomes a grey stubble, the green tree a 

 naked brush of branches, and death comes up from the grave to 

 breathe a freezing air upon the world, and to usher in the days of 

 silence. Yet these leaves, which flutter into autumn graves ; this 

 grey stubble, which stands where waved the green before, are the 

 harbingers of spring-life yet to come, and the types of an unceasing 

 series of renewals which eternity may develope but cannot exhaust. 

 Man gathers the harvests, and survives many generations of falling 

 leaves ; and the very wind that beats the trees iu their waning life, 

 is to him as a breath from that blooming summer beyond, in which 

 the growths of these years shall still strive for completion. He looks 

 complacently on this flowing of the ages, and as these shadows of 

 destruction weave around him, he sees the rainbow of hope spanning 

 the dark gulf between the summer here and the summer there, and 

 borrows from the joy of this the glory of his future years. What is 

 this, then, but the law of progress, of development for ever of those 

 possibilities which are locked up within the soul of man, and whiclj 

 the changes of the seasons teach and the cycles of the ages help to 

 perfect ? Let it once be known that the soul of man is capable of 

 never-ending youth, and this browning of tlie leaf is a lesson of hope 

 rather than fear ; and the story of JEon is seen to be repeated for 

 ever and ever. When tiie spring of the world was here, and the 

 creatures were creeping up to higher forms by the same law of de- 

 velopment, tlie grey mosses, sown on barren rocks by singing winds, 

 crept up and down the sea-beat solitudes, and there was no man to 

 watch their growth, no man to appreciate their beauty. The grasses 

 came and waved their silken tassels, and the forests followed with 

 their great brown arms and leafy fingers, and when the turf rippled 

 into waves of green and gold,_ the master of the wild appeared, 



