MEADOW THOUGHTS, 71 



screen off the light and in that darkness everything 

 was easily arranged, this thing here, and that yonder. 

 But nature grants no assumptions, and the books were 

 put out. There is something beyond the philosophies 

 in the light, in the grass-blades, the leaf, the grass- 

 hopper, the sparrow on the wall. Some day the great 

 and beautiful thought which hovers on the confines of 

 the mind will at last alight. In that is hope, the 

 whole sky is full of abounding hope. Something 

 beyond the books, that is consolation. 



The little lawn beside the strawberry bed, burned 

 brown there, and green towards the house shadow, 

 holds how many myriad grass-blades ? Here they are 

 all matted together, long, and dragging each other 

 down. Part them, and beneath them are still more, 

 overhung and hidden. The fibres are intertangled, 

 woven in an endless basket-work and chaos of green 

 and dried threads. A blamable profusion this ; a fifth 

 as many would be enough ; altogether a wilful waste 

 here. As for these insects that spring out of it as I 

 press the grass, a hundredth part of them would suffice. 

 The American crab tree is a snowy mount in spring ; 

 the flakes of bloom, when they fall, cover the grass 

 with a film a bushel of bloom, which the wind takes 

 and scatters afar. The extravagance is sublime. The 

 two little cherry trees are as wasteful ; they throw 

 away handfuls of flower; but in the meadows the 

 careless, spendthrift ways of grass and flower and all 

 things are not to be expressed. Seeds by the hundred 

 million float with absolute indifference on the air. 

 The oak has a hundred thousand more leaves than 

 necessary, and never hides a single acorn. Nothing 



