THE SEASON OE BROWN LEAVES. 
187 
and gold, the master of the wild appeared, breaking the 
silence of the desert, and singing the story of the ages. 
The civilization which now puts out its buds and shoots 
of moral beauty is but a part of the same series of un¬ 
foldings which in the primal age covered the granite 
with greenness, and now begets the consciousness that 
man, like the world on which he lives, is made to grow 
—to grow. 
In this partial life, in which shreds and patches of 
existence get mistaken for the full completion of being, 
the browning of the leaf is fraught with sadness, and the 
death w r hich follows seems a thing of gloom. Yet, in 
nature, death is as beautiful as life, as needful, and for 
that reason as good. The decaying leaves form odorous 
mounds from which, in the spring, new generations of 
things beautiful will burst, and without which no troops 
of flowers would arise to sweeten the breath of another 
summer. The dead bird, the dead insect, are each fitted 
to form the nourishment for other forms of life, and fill 
a place in the world which they could not occupy when 
living. Prom out of all this death and destruction, 
nature weaves the warp and w r oof of future fabrications, 
and new races spring, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of 
those which have expired. Why, then, fill the house with 
mourning and the eyes with tears when Death shows his 
presence in the home ? Is he not also one of God^s minis¬ 
tering angels, sent to bless rather than to ban, and, like 
other ministrants, filling a place in a series of changes 
which shall never end ? Look at the tree, it stands 
upright in the sun, and confronts heaven as if worthy of 
the light which drops down from the blue; while man 
