186 
BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. 
usher in the days of silence. Yet these leaves, which 
flutter into autumn graves; this grey stubble, which 
stands where waved the green before, are the harbingers 
of spring-life yet to come, and the types of an unceasing 
series of renewals which eternity may develop, but 
cannot exhaust. Man gathers the harvests, and survives 
many generations of falling leaves; and the very wind 
that beats the trees in their waning life, is to him as a 
breath from that blooming summer beyond, in which the 
growths of these years shall still strive for completion. 
He looks complacently on this flowing of the ages, and 
as these shadows of destruction weave around him, he 
sees the rainbow of hope spanning the dark gulf between 
the summer here and the summer there, and borrows 
from the joy of this the glory of his future years. What 
is this, then, but the law of progress, of development for 
ever of those possibilities which are locked up within the 
soul of man, and which the changes of the seasons teach 
and the cycles of the ages help to perfect ? Let it once 
be known that the soul of man is capable of never-end¬ 
ing youth, and this browming of the leaf is a lesson of 
hope rather than fear, and the story of iEon is seen to 
be repeated for ever and ever. When the spring of the 
world was here, and the creatures were creeping up to 
higher forms by the same law of development, the grey 
mosses, sown on barren rocks by singing winds, crept up 
and down the sea-beat solitudes, and there was no man 
to watch their growth, no man to appreciate their beauty. 
The grasses came and waved their silken tassels, and the 
forests followed with their great brown arms and leafy 
fingers; and when the turf rippled into waves of green 
