THE SEASON OF BROWN LEAVES. 31 



breaking the silence of the desert, and singing the story of the world. 

 The civilization which now puts out its buds and shoots of moral 

 beauty is but a part of the same series of unfoldings which in the 

 primal age covered the granite with greenness, and now begets the 

 consciousness that man, like the world on which he lives, is made to 

 grow — to grow. 



In this partial life, in which shreds and patches of existence get 

 mistaken for the full completion of being, the browning of the leaf is 

 fraught with sadness, and the death which follows seems a thing of 

 gloom. Yet in nature, death is as beautiful as life, as needful, and 

 for that reason as good. The decaying leaves form odorous mounds 

 from which, in the spring, new generations of things beautiful will burst, 

 and without which no troops of flowers would arise to sweeten the 

 breath of another summer. The dead bird, the dead insect, are each 

 fitted to form the nourishment for other forms of life, and fill a place 

 in the world which they could not occupy when living. From out 

 of all tiiis death and destruction, nature weaves the warp and woof 

 of future fabrications, and new races spring, phcenix-like, from the 

 ashes of those which have expired. "Why then fill the house with 

 mourning and the eyes with tears when Death shows his presence in 

 the home ? Is he not also one of God's ministering angels, sent to 

 bless rather than to ban, and like other ministrants, filling a plaee in 

 a series of changes which shall never end? Look at the tree, it 

 stands upright in the sun, and confronts heaven as if worthy of the 

 light which drops down from the blue, while man creeps into towns 

 and hides his head from the daylight, too conscious as he is, that the 

 tree shames him. The tree has filled its place, has developed all its 

 energies to their full possibility ; while in man the will has usurped 

 the instinct, and the faculties remain unfolded. Therefore the tree 

 fears not death, while man weeps before the falling of the leaf, and 

 surrounds the death of his kindred with emblems of contrition and 

 sorrow. But in nature man is no better than the tree, and the indi- 

 vidual, of whatever tribe, is of no value but as a fragment of the 

 type on which the race is built. Hence the tree has all the elements 

 of growth within and around it, and as it has no will to draw it aside, 

 it grows up to the limit of these possibilities. When, as a member 

 of its race its work is done, it falls, rots, and becomes the food of 

 successive plants and creatures, and there is no weeping in the wood, 

 no weeds of sorrow in the solitude. 



