silver along the grey encampments of the The Clans 



rocks. ° f the 



Orass 

 Often I have thought of this when lying in 



the mountain-grass beside one of those ancient 

 lichened boulders which strew our hillsides. 

 The lichen is the least of the grasses — and let 

 us use the term in its poetic sense — but how 

 lovely a thing it is ; almost as lovely in endless 

 variety of form as the frost-flower. In a sense 

 they are strangely akin, these two ; the frost- 

 flower, which is the breath of Beauty itself, 

 lasting a briefer hour than the noontide dew, 

 and the moss-flower which the barren rock 

 sustains through all the changing seasons. 



Who is that Artificer who has subtly and 

 diversely hidden the secret of rhythm in the 

 lichen of the rock and in the rock's heart 

 itself; in the frost-flower, so perfect in beauty 

 that a sunbeam breathes it away ; in the falling 

 star, a snowflake in the abyss, yet with the 

 miraculous curve in flight which the wave has 

 had, which the bent poplar has had, which the 

 rainbow has had, since the world began ? The 

 grey immemorial stone and the vanishing 

 meteor are one. Both are the offspring of 

 the Eternal Passion, and it may be that 

 between the aeon of the one and the less than 

 a minute of the other there shall not, in the 

 divine reckoning, be more than the throb of 



35 



