LAST ESSAYS 301 



forest and by running streams. She expressed in loveli- 

 ness of form the colour and light of sunny days ; she 

 expressed the deep aspiring desire of the soul for the 

 perfection of the frame in which it is encased, for the 

 perfection of its own existence. . . . Though I cannot 

 name the ideal good, it seems to me that it will be in 

 some way closely associated with the ideal beauty of 

 Nature.'* 



It is, in fact, beauty that he so hardily loves — beauty 

 somehow associated in his mind with physical strength, 

 with sincerity and truth. Impermanent as mist breathed 

 on the mirror of eternity, he perceives that the steam- 

 plough, like the old Sussex plough, the new Austrahan 

 chpper, and the crank caravels of old time, are good 

 and divine because they are fearless expressions of the 

 one energy that propagates and slays. ' The earth is 

 right and the tree is right,' he says ; ' trim either, and 

 all is wrong.' Of poppies he says : * There is genius in 

 them, the genius of colour, and they are saved '; of the 

 sweetness of the bird's song in an early morning of 

 spring : ' Genius is nature, and his lay, hke the sap in 

 the bough from which he sings, rises without thought.' 



These last words are from one of the finest of his essays 

 in the personal and poetic class. It was written during 

 illness and exile from the fields, when he saw the lark 

 through the windows-pane. It was, it is said, the last 

 essay written with his own hand, some time in the spring 

 of 1886. He thought of the bloom of the gorse outside, 

 ' shut like a book,' but soon to open ; of the sunlight 

 and wind at their work. ' I wonder to myself,' he says, 

 ' how they can all get on without me — how they manage, 

 bird and flower, without me to keep the calendar for 

 them.' 



' All the grasses,' he continues — ' all the grasses of the 

 meadow were my pets : I loved them all ; and perhaps 

 that was why I never had a " pet," never cultivated a 

 flower, never kept a caged bird, or any creature. Why 



* ' Nature in the Louvre,' Field and Hedgerow. 



