34 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. 



If there were no browning of the leaf, how lost to hope and 

 heart would be the fate of man ! If the bud, once unfolded, had an 

 individual life for ever, how localized, cramped, dwarfed, were those 

 energies which now climb higher and higher on this ladder of created 

 souls, to reach heaven at last by that upward growth which death 

 entails as a beautiful necessity ! If the primal earth, with its un- 

 formed soil, its dreary swamps, and creatures in the first stage of 

 development still revolved in sunlight and darkness, how aimless, 

 hopeless, and stagnant, were the frame of Nature ! Yet, the moment 

 that succession supplants this stationary life, every pulse of the 

 world, every change of the seasons, becomes an item in the uni- 

 versal progress, and Nature stands in the presence of the Deity as a 

 being endowed with hopes and aspirations which, throughout eternity, 

 shall be ever developing, and at every phase claiming kindred with 

 the Divine. What to man this death, but a pledge of his eternal 

 endurance, and a warning of the duties of the ** eternal Now." As 

 the ages have passed through phases, to higher and higher growths, 

 so shall the individual, so shall the social circle, so shall the nation 

 and the race. Every age and every man has lived to represent a 

 thought, and the universal man is embodied in the growth of all the 

 individuals through all the ages of their life-time. It is but the 

 browning of the leaf. When Nature has attained perfection in one 

 type, she will not tolerate less perfection in another, but raises each 

 creature, step by step, into new perfections ; and as forests fall that 

 more stately forests may flourish upon their decay, so the conditions 

 of humanity pass and change, that others more noble may be raised 

 above them, and so on for ever. Greece built her temples upon the 

 ashes of Persian and Egyptian magnificence, Rome caught up and 

 diffused the fire which had burned upon the altars in the fanes of 

 Greece, and Europe lias risen with its civilization, its poetry, its moral 

 grandeur, upon the ruins of the nations of the past. Where blood 

 flowed, and thrones crumbled to dust, the green grass waves, and the 

 man of science learns, from its flexile sprays, the dependence of man 

 and nature upon God, and the necessity of both to grow, to grow. 

 It is only the browning of the leaf. Autumn decay, and Spring re- 

 vival ; the perishing of one tribe for the prosperity of the next ; the 

 transmission of the same sap, blood, body, and soul, through endless 

 tribes of creatures, of which man is one, growing and growing through 

 thtse multiform developments to a perfection which shall never cease. 



