THE GOINGS OF THE WINDS 



IKE many another word freighted with 

 beauty, this word "goings" comes from 

 the Bible. Those old King James trans- 

 lators were poets to a man, which accounts 

 for our Bible being both the classic of 

 Hebrew literature and English literature. 

 One translator gets the sense in a cold 

 ; literality like a dead tree trunk; another 

 suffuses his translation with poetry, as a 

 tree is shaded by its own leaves. "When 

 thou hearest the goings in the tops of 

 the mulberry-trees" is a poet's way of 

 telling a wind is blowing through tree 

 tops. "Goings" are sound mixed with 

 movement, the marching of the wind's 



feet along the pathways of the tree tops; and what is or can be sweeter! 

 I have often wondered if God could forget; whether he ever had 

 obliviscent moods; whether any syllable ever fell out of his words as 

 they do from ours; whether he ever could forget anything belonging 

 to the calendar of beauty. I think he does not. Else how is every 

 beautiful possibility present? In making the world God thought of 

 everything ministrant to a blessed life. Can we think of any omitted 

 mercy? Did he not put beauty in the green sward and in the blue 

 sky? What colors could have been devised to rest the eyes and com- 

 fort the heart like this bewildering green upon the earth and this 

 bewildering blue in the sky? Did he forget grace when he was 

 making the cypress or pine, or the larch, or the quivering aspen, or 

 the doughty oak, or the leaning willow? He could have made all 



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