214 



THE OLIVE LEAF. CHAP. 



is so grateful, that we care not if the one element 

 of permanence be secured even at the expense of all 

 that makes permanence desirable. We, whose gourd 

 grows up in a night and withers in a night, fancy 

 that we should be perfectly happy in fields of immor- 

 tal asphodels, and under the shadow of amaranthine 

 bowers. 



But can permanence beautiful sculpture of life as it 

 were, placed safe and changeless in Elysian bowers 

 in reality satisfy this "nature of ours which we would 

 transfer to eternity ? That nature has been formed and 

 educated amid perpetual change, and all its conscious- 

 ness is built upon and interlaced with it. We owe to 

 the death that is always with us half the beauty of every 

 scene, and more than half the enjoyments we derive 

 from life. How then should we like to live here in a 

 world where the only flowers were immortelles, and the 

 only trees cypresses and yews, pines and evergreens ? 

 And is the idea any more tolerable because we place the 

 scene beyond the grave ? We enjoy these permanent 

 and unchangeable forms of vegetation by way of contrast 

 to the deciduous and fading forms that awaken the ten- 

 derest and deepest feelings of our hearts by the vernal 

 and autumnal changes they undergo, and for the sake of 

 the needed lesson which they teach of permanence in 

 the midst of change, raising our thoughts from a scene 

 of fleeting shadows to a scene of enduring realities. 

 But were the woods formed of, and the fields decked 

 with, such unfading objects alone, our eye would weary 

 of the eternal monotony, and our minds would grow 



