-*-'/> ^5^5 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES GIFT OF CAPT. AND MRS. PAUL MCBRIDE PERIGORD 6X^ UNIVERSITY of CALlFUKnu. AT LOS ANGELES LIBRARY A YEAR OF MIRACLE A POEM IN FOUR SERMONS. BY W. C. GANNETT. BOSTOX: Geo. H. Ellis, 141 Franklin Street. iSSS. 136481 Copyright, 1881, By W. C. Gannett. ^ ^ ^s;, TO, Foji UNITY CHURCH, St. Paul. CONTENTS. PAGB I. Treasures of the Snow 9 II. Resurrection ^ - 39 III. Flowers 63 IV. The Harvest-Secret ^"^ TREASURES OF THE SNOW, TREASURES OF THE SNOW. If a sunset were as rare as a comet, the people would all be out upon the hill-tops — astrono- mers Avith their telescopes, poets Avith their pens, artists with their brushes — to captu.-e what they could of it, and give it immortality. Or, if only once in a year the eastern skies held sunrise, Ave should be out of bed betimes that morning to Avatch the gold and crimson pa- geant passing up the sky. But because these glories face us every day, Ave are color-blind to them. Still worse Avith glories that are near as well as frequent. We envy a friend starting for Europe, going Avhere there is " so much to see," Ave say,— Alps, cathedrals, and old art: as if a year spent in the nearest pasture Avould not crowd our mind Avith miracles, if only Ave had eyes to see Avith ! "Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snoAV?" Probably not: for he Avho asked the 10 A YEAR OF MIRACLE. question spoke of a treasure-chamber, rare in Bible lands, but opened to us anew with each December; open all the winter long; oj^ened in every door-yard and at every window-j^ane : and a palace so common and so near as that is not a palace to eyes that chiefly love the far things and the rare. But, if only once in many years those wondrous treasure-chambers were unlocked, hoAV we should hand down the tradi- tion, — like men who, having caught one glimpse of some new Mexico, should prattle of an El Dorado all their lives ! At Beaufort in South Carolina, the whole population, black and white, turned out one winter's day to see — a frozen pond ! A northern teacher, dying on one of the Sea Islands there in slavery-time, was en- shrined in the memory of her southern friends by a snow-fall, that happened to float down on the north wind just after the stranger had been laid in her fresh grave : it seemed like a flight of friendly angels from her home-land, because, like angels' visits, its comings were so few and far between. The Siamese prince heard of "solid water" with complete unfaith, — a mira- cle too great for even Oriental credence. And in Abyssinia, far under the troj^ic sky, Bruce, TREASURES OF THE SNOW. 11 the hunter for the sources of the Nile, came to a village Avhere " An old man told him, with a grave surprise Which made his childlike wonder almost grand How, in his youth, there fell from out the skies A feathery whiteness over all the land, — A strange, soft, spotless something, pure as light, For which their questioned language had no name, — That shone and sparkled for a day and night, Then vanished all as Aveirdly as it came ; Leaving no vestige, gleam, or hue or scent On the round hill or in the purple air, To certify their mute bewilderment That such a presence had indeed been there ! " And they had named their village from that one unprecedented snow-fall. Thus, men stand in awe before the snow where its treasures are rare. In the Hebrew land it was by no means so unheard of. It glistens on the top of Hermon, and lies deep in the high ravines of Lebanon, until the summer is far advanced ; and, unless the climate be changed, Jesus, when a boy, had chances to make snow-balls now and then on the hill-tops around Kazareth. Yet, in that grand drama of Job in which God asks the man our question. '-Hast vhou. sniered into the treas- 12 A YEAR OF MIRACLE. iires of the snow?" it is ranked among the major wonders. — with the morning stars and the sea, with the lightnings and Leviathan and death. Majestic grouping, is it not ? But, after all, the morning-stars and the lightnings and death belong to the every-days; and the writer mentions also the dew and the rain and the Avild goats, and the young ravens hungry in the win- ter, — things small and common enough. Per- haps in his case it was not so much the rareness that made the appreciation, but that he had poet's eyes to see with. The poet is the man with double vision, one who is at once near- sighted and far-sighted, who sees the closer things as wonders because he sees their far re- lations too. Wliere we say " poet," we might say simply " seer." At all events, this Bible- poet, phrasing a question for God's lips, phrases it fitly for the God of Nature to ask. I hear it uttered thus : " Thou seest the pebble, the rain- drop, the grass-blade, the dust-mote, the snow- flake: hast thou entered into their treasures? I make my worlds out of them ! " To-day, again, the question lies written on the ground in our fresh snow-fall. We will accept its invitation, and try to enter in a little way. TREASURES OF THE SNOW. 13 The colors of the sprmg dawn slowly, the color of the winter in an hour,— when all is ready. Not until all is ready. A night, away back in October, sets a frosty seal upon the grass and trees; and Nature know^s the sign and begins to unrobe her for the sleep. Her colors, dropping back from green through yel- low, orange, and the reds, fade at last to browns and russets; and then she rustles into naked- ness. Just when she is lying down, the Indian season comes, and with a gentle dream of sum- mer she drowses into death. The birds have flown; the flowers, too. The ferns and vines, the little children of the woodlands, have van- ished to their secret nurseries underground. The hills grow bleak and bare; the fields roughen into ridge and furrow; and broken stalks, and the stones, hidden since the May-days, stand stiffly out again in sight. The trees now stand forlorn with empty nests, — "bare, ruined choirs, wdicre late the sweet birds sang." Their toss- ing arms lash the ground with wild, black shad- ows through the Avindy, moonlit nights. The cold increases; the winds search and whistle and sting; the pools skim over of a morning; the cattle huddle in the field ; the fowls stand 14 A YEAR OF MIRACLE. drearily in the lee of tlie bush 3 faces redden on the street; and, under the stars, fire-light gleams through the window-panes. Meanwhile, the home-life deej^ens. As a friend once said to me, the seasons indoors seem to just reverse the order of the outward seasons. As the leaves are fading in the fall, Ave feel within our bodies and our minds a brac- ing spring ; plans gather vigor, and we bend ourselves for the hard work of the year. The winter brings heart and mind to tlieir full force of growth. Nature's winter is the human sum- mer-time. Then, spring begins to make us lan- guid. And the busy summer of earth-life brings to ourselves a pause and rest and comparative inaction, like an inward winter. Reckoning this way by the spirit's calendar. Thanksgiving Day is Easter ; and the Easter is Thanksgiving Day for a waiter's inward harvests ; for then we shall have gathered in and barned away in memory what Ave haA'e read and thought and done in our groAving hours, Avhile the snow lay outside on the ground. So, as Nature is getting ready for Avhat may happen out of doors, indoors it is all astir. Hands oftener meet other hands in Avorks of TREASURES OF THE SNOW. 15 service, and hearts are closer drawn to hearts. The books come forth in the long evenings, the story-telling begins, the fathers and mothers gather the children around their knees by the cheerful blaze, — that blaze itself the sunshine of old springs and summers in the far-off past. Over all within, w^ithout, is God, who careth for us thus; who made those summers of old and stored their heat, who is j^reparing now the seasons of our immortality. At last, all is ready. As we sit and w^ork, or sit and dream, a day comes in which a stillness falls. A hush is on. the earth ; a gray sky is overspread above ; an uneasiness is in the air which is not wind. Go to the window and watch. A few heralds clad ill white come floating down, turning this way, turning that way, like scouts seeking for paths and camj^ing-places. Then, of a sudden, the thick, dull sky is alive with troojDing forms! The ways of the air are filled with the army of the Snow ! Their tread is not with sound, but second by second they arrive, and alight, and possess themselves of the hills and the hollows. The fields grow silent and white with their gleaming camp. Whole States are changed in 16 A YEAR OF MIRACLE. a few liuslied moments ; and no stone, no twig, no cranny, is forgotten. Only the all-enclosing air could do it ; and the air has done it ! The signs of human parting and property are blotted out in indiscriminate conquest as Nature seizes again on her old j^atrimony of the earth, ignor- ing man who has marked out his farms upon it. All the men of the land in armies could not work such uniform obliteration in a year. All the men of the land, as builders, could not fash- ion in a century such rare and universal archi- tecture as the hurrying wind and snow build up together on tree and house and rock and fence and everything that offers niche or pedestal. How they come trooping down ! Hour after hour we watch, and still the host comes march- ing in, — now in steady, downright phalanxes, — now swerving, whole solid columns, in rapid flanking movements, — now in little whirling charojes dashino- in from this side and from that in furious melee. And each of the mighty army is clad in crys- tal panoply. Let us waylay some of the strag- glers, and examine them. That crystal panoply is our first " treasure." The captives are by no means clad alike, however. Upwards of a thou- TREASURES OF THE SXOW. 17 sand differing forms of snow-flakes have been ob- served. I have seen a book containing some two hnndred of them figured. Here arc simple prisms, three-sided or six-sided. Here are some tiny pyramids one-thirtieth of an inch in height, yet as mathematically perfect in their lines as the Great Pyramid of Egypt in its best estate. And here are prisms capped with the pyramids. More familiar to us are these star-like forms ; but verily, as witli the stars above, one differ- €th from another in its glory. The simplest is this Avherein six prisms radiate from a centre, like wheel-spokes from a hub. Then, on both spokes and hub Nature sets to work to J^lay her variations. Each ray, beset on either side with tinier prisms, takes on the semblance of a fern- leaf; and the species seem to vary in outline as the fern-sj^ecies A'ary in the summer woods. That centre, Avhich I ignobly called the " hub," ■enlarges to a six-sided plate, or often is itself a star Avhose glittering arms stem off to be tipped with little trefoils or rosettes. Here lies a star within a star, and that within an- other star, and all within a fourth ! Some of these centres are wrought in finest open-work, others are filled white to the rim ; but under the 18 A YEAR OF MIRACLE. microscope we could see these last all fretted over with fairy hieroglyphics, silvery mosaics marked off in triangles and hexagons. In one variety the crossing prisms make you think of the child's j^uzzle, where the little wooden blocks lock together into a tight nest. An- other form seems different from all the rest: it is a star set at each end of a prism like the two wheels on an axle-tree. Up in the Polar seas, Dr. Scoresby one day found his shij^'s deck covered three inches deep with such little air-chariots. But these dainty forms, and this variety in their daintiness, are not the only treasures of the snow-flake. Through all that variety runs identity. The flakes are akin in their deeper being, as negro and Esquimaux, cannibal and Quaker, are yet all one in human nature. Snow- nature is bound by a law of sixes. The sides of every prism and pyramid meet at one angle, — that of 60°, — or its multiiDles : the rays of every star diverge at that one angle : every vein upon those little fern-leaves joins its stem at that one angle, or its multiples. The stars are all six- rayed, or rarely twelve ; the centres all hexag- onal. Watch the flakes of a whole winter's TREASURES OF THE SXOW. 19 storms, climb Chimborazo, go to the Pole, or make your mimic snow-storm for yourself inside a chemist's bottle, — never will you find a fin- ished star with five rays or with seven, or with that law of the angles broken. The rays them- selves are broken, but never that creative law. Bruised, shattered, huddled together, the snow- flakes reach us ; but through all bruise and shatter that law of " sixes " lies j^lain upon them. By that they are born and live and die. Is it not very impressive and awe-f ul, — these mathematics carried down to the microscopic measurements, these " ethics of the dust," as Ruskin calls them, — the grand legislation of the universe laid thus upon its invisible atoms ! Now, who can explain such wondrous birth and fashioning? Shall we answer for the snow- flake what George MacDonald makes the baby answer for itself? — " AVhere did you come from, baby dear 1 Out of the everywhere into here! " How did it all just come to be you 1 God thought about me, — and so I grew! " Where did you get that pearly ear ? God spoke, and it came out to hear ! " 20 A yp:ar of miracle. Did God look, and the snow-flake come out to be looked at ? Somewhat so would the old Genesis and Psalm-writers of the eastern land have solved the problem. The answer thea was simple, — "He saith to the snow, Be thou iipon the earth." Somewhat thus would the 13oets and the religious feeling of every land and time solve it, our own as much as all the rest. Did Ave wish to be a little more knowings we might answer, " The air was full of va- por, and the thermometer fell to 32°, and so, of course, it snowed." Of course, it did; but did you ever think of it ? — " of course " is our appeal to the unsolved mystery, the Course of Nature. The scientific men, however, who go dredging in those deeps of mystery bring up, at least, a guess. They tell us that all substances (solid granite and hard iron as well as lightest gas) consist of atoms suspended in an ether, an ether that is ever thrilling with invisible vibrations of heat and light and electricity. To their eyes> the universe, through and through, is in unceas- ing motion. And when we say, "the thermom- eter falls," what Ave mean, in brief, is this : the water-atoms, Avhile the Avater is in the form TKKASURES OF THE SXOW. 21 of vapor, move loosely, freely, distantly ; but, as the cold increases, this heat-dance slackens, and the atoms gradually close together, until the vapor, changing form, becomes a " liquid " ; with still greater cold, the atoms keep on ap- proaching one another, imtil by a second trans- formation they are — not fast-locked, by any means — but faster-locked, into what ^VQ call the " solid " form, — ^and thus the snow is born ! And it is by a measured march that the vapor- atoms have thus closed and coalesced. Each LilliiDutian knows his j^lace, and like a veteran soldier moves in rhythms to his post Avithin the flake. Ill rhythms : the Egyptian sculptures show us pictures of the way in which the great stones of their pyramids Avere dragged, in that day before the engines had appeared. Five hundred men are seen tugging at the ropes and rollers ; but, to secure the pull together which alone would move the block, there stands among them a musician playing on an instrument. And the stones are thus drawn by music to their courses in the pyramid. Kow fancy the water- vapor atoms marching in, — through the billionth of an inch, invisible hosts to inaudible music, — to build up the snoAV-flake ! What time they keep ! 22 A yi:ar of miracle. But whence comes th would probably be larger than shot, and probably smaller than cricket-balls! When you have taken this in thoroughly, then remember that each molecule of water is itself compounded of atoms more minute of oxygen and hydrogen. Did I not rightly say "hosts," to hint the census of the snow-flake ? To watch a dew-drop gather on a grass-blade, and whiten into frost, is as if one standing on a mountain-top were watching the muster of a mighty army in the dim lands far below. Even if this atomic theory were known to be certain fact, instead of being merely to-day's wisest guess, have we explained the snow-flake 2-1 A YEAR OF MIRACLE. yet ? Hardly more than by our bare thermom- eter statement. We have only moved our " of course" a little farther back, where still the mystery remains. What, and Avhence, are the atoms ? How came each to know its place and be able to move in rhythms to it ? And by what force impelled ! Remember that no particle of moisture is debarred this transfiguration. The broad ocean and the land-locked pond and the roadside pool may all be one in destiny, because one in their origin. 'No ditch so grimy with reeking poison but its vapor, mounting, may take on the form of stars and become a pure and white-winged wonder of the air. However poor its earth-lot, this heaA^en awaits it. Could we question every flake that wanders to our window-ledge about its past, we should hear a mingled song like that the Christians fancy of the hosts before the throne of God : — I came from off mid-ocean, I in a wild-flower lay, I came from a brook on a mountain-side, And I from Niagara's spray ; And I was a tear in a motlier's eyes For a little one gone aAvay. TREASURES OF THE SXOW. 25 What histories they could tell, what gospels of beauty preach, these little stars, if they could " sing together" to our hearing ! And all share in the glory and the song, whether destined for the slow-dying glacier, or born to flutter for an instant, light upon the stream, and A-anish. We have entered only one of the treasure- chambers. We will not go through all. The Pope's j^alace, the Vatican, has over four thou- sand rooms. I know not how many Ave might exjoect to find in this tiny house not made Avith hands. But let us linger a moment to think of tlie physical jjoicer inA^olved in an inch-deep snow- storm. The amount of heat absorbed and lib- erated Avould Avork the engines of the Avorld. First, think Avhat masses of Avater haA-e to be raised as vapor from the ocean-top, and drifted far and Avide across the lands, to prepare that CA'en gray sky Avhich made us say, " It is going to snow," — and try to conceiA'e or calculate the heat absorbed in that operation. Then think of the snoAV that covers all the State an inch deep in an hour, and try to conceive or calculate the amount of heat liberated in this reverse opera- tion as the vapor falls back not only to the 26 A YEAR OF MIRACLE. liquid, but the solid state. Let me state it thus, ■calculating from some of Tyndall's figures: A hoy grasps a handful from the fence-top and pats it to a hall, Aveighing half a pound, — intending it for his friend a few yards off. But the force employed to make from water-vapor that snow of which he made his ball, would fling a ball weighing one hundred j^ounds two-thirds of a mile into the air. The force employed to make the half-i^ound of water-vapor out of the original oxygen and hydrogen would fling a hundred- pound ball nearly five miles into the air! That force summoned to make one half-pound of snow ! Then think of the engines at work to make the whole snow-storm ! Think of the might, as well as tenderness, it took to press those few frost-flowers upon your window-panes! You did not dream what strong hands lurked in your bed-chamber through the winter night. The color of the snow is another of its treas- ures. To enter into that, we must oj^en the door of the rainbow chamber, where we should see, besides the snow, such things as the white clouds and the ocean spray and the crests of breaking waves, and learn how in all of them the ravelled prism-colors are woven into white again. It is TREASURES OF THE SNOW. 27 the mingling of the infinitely many reflections that flash from the sides and angles of the tiny l^risms and pyramids and stars that make the dazzling whiteness. Crush the transparent ice, and its grains will whiten also, for the same reason. And w^e will crush it, for we ought not to pass by the w^ondrous structure of the ice without a word of awe. Ice is simply a solid firmament,, so to speak, of snow-stars ; a fossil forest, as it Avere, of the snow-fern leaves, of that silvery foliage Avith which by Avinter moonlight every w^indow grows to a leafy bower of air-plants, A!sk Tyndall to send a beam of sunlight through a block of ice, and place a lens in front, so as to catch a magnified image of what happens on his screen. As in the night-heavens, when a wind sweeps the clouds away, suddenly the stars ap- pear, so here within the ice-slab first one star^ then another, looks out at us ; then the constel- lations thicken ; and, as the process goes on, the rays begin to change to petals, and presently the screen is covered with the fern-leaves. As if some night, while we watched those old con- stellations in the sky, they should begin to ar- rano-e themselves in blossom-forms before our 28 A YEAR OF MIRACLE. eyes. It is only melting ice. What has hap- pened ? Let Tyndall himself tell: "Silently and symmetrically the crystallizing force built the atoms up, silently and symmetrically the sunbeam has taken them down. What beauty latent in a block of common ice ! And only think of lavish Nature operating thus through- out the world. Every atom of the solid ice which sheets the frozen lakes of the north has been fixed according to this law. Nature ' lays her beams in music,' and it is the function of science to j^urify our organs, so as to enable us to hear the strain." Will you step once more to the window, and watch the snow come down? How the Hakes drift and whirl and dart and light and whirl again ! If ever chance, if ever chaos, then here. And yet Ave know it must be fact that not one motion of the little Arabs but happens under eternal law ; that not one flies or loiters save as the steady forces guide it ; that every one is poised to its final place as surely as if angel- hands had set out with it from heaven. Like the kindred host above, God calleth them all by name, and appointeth each its place. No wind blows but God knows ; No atom falls but God calls. TREASURES OF THE SNOW. 29 The storm looks like riot : it is a kind of quiet. It looks like chaos : it is perfect cosmos. It makes us think of chance ; and chance, when we really think of it, resolves itself into unknown depths on depths of law ! I have spoken of a few of the treasures which we careless ones seldom think of as Ivinsc hidden in our common snow : of the gradual preparation of the seasons for it ; of the beauty of the flakes, and their variety of forms, and of the identity running through all that variety ; of their secret architecture, guessed at, never seen ; of the power necessary to bring and build the atoms so ; of the careful glory thus in waiting for all waters, although the transfiguration may not outlast an instant ; of the kinshij) of the ice to the heaven-spaces ; and of tlie order in the riot of the storm. The story would grow long, if we should try to even hint the 2(,ses of the snow : to tell how glaciers have j^laned and moulded and ground the continents into readiness for man ; how the polar snows send us out the air and water-currents, those mighty vehicles on which the seasons go riding around the planet ; how the snow-mountains are the nurseries of the rivers; how the winter-lands have been in Ms- 30 A YEAR OF MIRACLE. tory the homesteads of strong, young races, that from time to thne freshened the earth with, men ; and how the snow-storms take care of all our northern vegetation, Avrapping it from cold, while the hidden life within gets ready for its resurrection. But all this we j^ass by. Sight-seeing, as every traveller knows, is about the hardest work a man can do. Let us draw ourselves away, and for a moment think over two or three thoughts that the treasures thus far seen arouse of him who is their Lord. The first thought of all must needs be, — Then there is nothing coinmon^ nothing trifling, noth- ing un-iconderfulin this universe! Beauty far off! Sights in Europe! Why, here, now, all around us, under our feet, in the air, the weed springing up unbidden in our flower-j^ot, the bit of spar or sea-shell on our mantel-piece, the paving stone we rattle over, the most familiar, unsightliest, deadest thing that we can name, has more of God in it than we can ever see. Explain it away, and Ave have only explained a Avay through it to deeper marvels beyond. *' Nothing common or unclean ! " we may well TREASURES OF THE SNOW. 31 say, taught by the wonder of the great sheet, let down, like Peter's in the vision, through the winter air. Clustered around the old cathedrals abroad,, you often see old wooden houses leaning up against the sculptured walls, like ragged children about the knees of a great, beautiful saint. We say well that the slianty is unfair compared with the cathedral. But that is only true so far as man's part is concerned. Look at God's part in each : the wood-cells and fibres in the shanty's walls, grown by the laws of plant-life, show structure even more com23lex and marvellous than the white crystals built up into the shining temple. Nothing common or unclean! Truly see the contents of any bit of time or space, and we feel with William Blake that "We see a World in a grain of sand, And a Heaven in a wild-flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of our hand, And Eternity in an hour !" To this thought, that nothing is insignificant when really seen, joins on a second, — of the large place in the universe which the little things hold. N^ay, when we think of it, every- thing resolves itself to littles. Nature is noth- 32 A YEAR OF MIRACLE. ing but little things. The mountain becomes motes of silex and calcium, the ocean single drops of water, the prairie single grains of alumina, the human body single cells, human life single thoughts and feelings and impulses. And earth, air, fire, water, become, in turn, atoms of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and the rest. There is no stopping-place. When you have summed up what God does by means of his " little things," and, for the most part, in utter silence, there will be nothing left to think of. The Malioraetans have a story that once, when Al)raham had been wronged by the hunter, Nimrod, Jehovah befriended the patri- arch, and told him to select the animal that should be sent to punish his enemy. Abraham chose the fly. And Jehovah said, " If Abraham had not chosen the fly, I should have sent a creature, of whom a thousand would not weigh as much as a fly's wing." We often say that God is infinitely great. We instinctively look up to heaven when we pray. And doubts often beset us, because, to our thought, he seems too large and too remote to be our God, — to care for me. That is true : God is the infinitely great and infinitely remote ; TREASURES OF THE SNOW. 33 but every whit as truly he is the infinitely little, and so the infinitely close. God the infinitely little ! Pray to him ! I do not mean that we can find out him ; but I think it does hel]:) to make us feel that the Great Life is near. Think of the crystals in which the sap of your trees is lying locked through all this win- try weather, — sap-crystals locked in cells which are themselves invisible to the unaided eye. God stands inside those crystals, holding their atoms fast, — just as much as in the stars! Think how that sap will be running through the hidden channels next June, and out to the tips of waving leaves, and, in its mimic tides, sweeping round and round the grains of green chlorophyl ; so that, when we pluck a leaf and hold it in our hand, we shall really hold a little sea with throbbing life in it. God stands and listens to the dashings of those hidden tides ! Does not that help us a little to imagine one who "measures the water in the hollow of his hand," and listens to " the music of the spheres " ? Think of the corpuscles in our human blood, of which it is calculated that seventy billions (some seventy times the population of. the globe) lie in a cubic inch: — the Power has counted 34 A YEAR OF MIRACLE. them! Does it not help a little to make real the thought of One who " sitteth on the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoj^pers, and the nations as the small dust of the earth; who calleth the stars by names, and not one faileth " ? Or, once more, think of the creatures that play in a single drop of ditch-water as the whales play in the Atlantic. Each one of those creatures has its perfect structure, its finished anatomy, its instincts and its wants, and those wants provided for, its little hungers and rages, its fatigues and rests, its j^ains and pleasures, and at last its death, — who knows but its im- mortality also? Thinking of such things, we begin to feel that perhaps the truth is God is not too far off, but too near for us to see. And God in all, God through all, becomes the living fact. And the more the universe has widened to us by the aid of those curved bits of glass that we call telescope and microscojie, and the more the unknown has become the known, always and everywhere Order, Beauty, Law we find. Always Cosmos, never a sign of Chaos, never an atom fallen out of the All-Ruling Hands! TREASURES OF THE SNOW. 35 No chance anywhere, not even in the seeming riot of the storm. No "miracle" anywhere, no breaking of a law; but all a miracle more real by being law. Oneness everywhere ! The laws that round the planets rounding the dew- drop : gravitation in the snow-flake's flutter and in the rush of suns. All the recent discoveries and guesses of science are but different 2:)aths by which we approach grander points of view, whence we can look and see what it means to say that God is One. This is the unity of Nat- ure, that " one God," to whose recognition the prophets of science are gladly leading us. One- ness from rims to centre of the universe, — rims that are nowhere, centre that is everywhere! And nothing little, nothing trifling; for all is full of Gocl ! It is hard to prove a God; harder to prove him our God; harder still, perhaps, to prove our immortality. Yet a sense as if there were nothing but God everywhere deepens in us, as we enter into the treasures of the snow. Like snow, we, too, become a moment's vision, then we melt and vanish ; but I am willing to trust for life and love while I know that the Power and Beauty which moulds the snow-flake is around me and is in me. 36 A YEAR OF MIRACLE. Verily, as we watch the white star that has fluttered from the heavens to our hand, we may say, " The Lord is in liis holy temi^le : let our hearts keep silence before him! " RESURRECTION. 136481 n, RESURRECTION. It is the Resurrection season, and the glad word itself shall be our theme to-day. We will simply say it over and over, and listen to the echoes Avhich it raises among our thoughts. It is the Avord in which the twins. Death and Life, declare themselves to be not two, but one ; and the echoes, although vague, must needs be strong and musical, and they will bring us hints from far. Not all from afar, however: the echo which reaches us first, from the hills and fields, sounds near. Very beautiful, was it not ? that picture of the opening spring-time which I gathered from our Bible, catching here a glimpse and there a glimpse as it lies reflected in the song of psalm- ist and prophet, and of Jesus, who had so often watched it as a boy on the hills of Galilee. Doubtless he used to go out to gather early lilies and note the green garments of the fresh young grass. Ten million million tiny strug- iO A YEAR OF MIRACLE. glers on our hills and in our fields to-day are trying to show us that ours, too, is Holy Land. The flowers have begun to greet us in our walks, — dumb angels, with faces all a-shine with the glad tidings that the Savior-season hath arisen. Winter we call the death of the year. Its white suggests the shroud ; its silence the hush of the saddened house ; its evenness of aspect the blank uniformity of loss ; its cold and voice- less, yet potent, influence the spell that absence of things dear and wonted lays on us. Yet to what a miracle of life does all this tend! The swathing and the silence and the rest only hide the inward j^rocesses by which the earth, in its white chrysalis, is preparing itself for motion and color and sound. How certain it is, this Resurrection of the spring! Some one reminds us that, as the har- vest approaches, the world is annually Avithin a month or two of actual starvation. Let one single spring-time drop from out the roll of seasons, and another would look on an earth full of silent cities and very quiet villages, wait- ing for new populations, — for some j^rovident Noah to wander by that way and settle with his family. RESURRECTION. 41 How punctual, too ! Winter may be cold or warm, may linger or haste away, or turn back and growl us out a snowy good-bye a month after we were thinking he had gone, — but it makes little difference, after all. The heralds soon arrive, and then the gay procession of life marches in in order. We can jDredict the com- ing banners, can date the j^assing weeks by flower-arrivals and departures, can count the quick hours by flower-wakings and flower-clos- ings. Emerson is but a trifle too precise : — " The calendar Of the painted race of flowers, Exact to days, exact to hours, Is faithful through a thousand years ; And the pretty almanac Shows the punctual coming back On their due days of the birds." And how nearly universal the Resurrection is ! The green tide comes j^ouring up from the south, pressing over the hills and running through the river-valleys, and presently not one inch that can wear green but is bathed in the living glory. The trees, swelling with buds, set their brown nets in its path, and soon the meshes are full of crinkled leafao:e and the 42 A YEAR OF MIRACLE. white and crimson of the blossoms ; and mosses wake and steal into their rooty arms, and the vines creep up their bodies. No secret place is left unvisited by Spring. The lone plant in a desert, the seed buried under a dead leaf in the wood or prisoned in the crevice of a city pave- ment, the stick-dry bush we hung up in the cel- lar last November out of sight, the very pota- toes in the barrel, — all hear the whisper and feel the touch and turn to life again. Within the room of a sick girl, in a foul city-garret, stands a solitary rose in an earthen pitcher, cut off, like a caged bird, from the companionship of kin. The Spring, flying over, knows the spot, stops, and bids the plant and the sick one turn again to life and beauty. She works for no eyes. She works for all eyes. The green deep of the forest, the deep of your little parlor- fernery, turning now to a tropical jungle, — both are alike to her; and all her work is finished with equal exquisiteness. Where she cannot go in one shape, she startles in another. Here, among us, her presence is an even leafing of the temperate zone, beneath a brightening sun. Northward, closer to the pole, there comes a rapid dash of day and spring and RESURRECTION. 43 summer all in one, as she watches her chance to fling green among the snows. Elsewhere, it needs a dimming sun to bring her. In inner California, through long, rainless months of heat, the roots and bulbs lie dormant underneath the earth's burnt crust, just as with us they hide beneath the frozen earth of winter, while only thick-rinded, juicy evergreens linger above the desert's surface, — matching the firs and j^ines amid our snows. There the Resurrection season comes as the coolest of the year. The rain sets in, the desert-crust grows cool and soft, and suddenly, as if the rain had touched them with a magic torch, the plains are lit with color ! In the still drier tropics, she will come, if she can come no other way, down the sun-baked channel of an empty river, — the spring-time that the traveller, Baker, saw far up one of the great branches of the Nile. He tells us how his j^arty had been travelling weary days through the plains of Upper Egyj^t. Everything was death-stricken with the heat : no grass, no green ; the water of the river had shrunken to little lakes, a mile or two long, lying scattered here and there along the dry bed. And these pools swarmed and throbbed with the concen- 44 A YEAR OP^ MIPwACLE. trated life of the big river ; the fish, the croco- diles and hij^popotamuses crowding there to- gether in nnhappy families. One night, when the men were camped as usual in the sandy channel, he heard a dull and distant noise. It 2:rew loud and louder. It woke the Arabs up, Avho knew the sound and sprang to their feet shouting, " The river ! The river ! " and scram- bled for the banks. And then they heard the River come, — marching down through the night on its journey to the sea! When the morning broke, a yellow flood, hundreds of yards across, rolled at their feet m what at night had been a dry and sunken pathway through the desert. Far away, uj) in the mountains, the rainy season had begun, and thus sent greeting to the plains. In two days, the face of the whole country had changed around the travellers. Water was all that the solitary place needed to make it blos- som like a garden. The mimosa-trees budded on the banks, the birds found their way with singing to the branches, the deer came down in companies to drink, the green spread and deep- ened like a dye ; and it was spring ! Thus, everywhere, in one form or another, — under ground, dissolving minerals for the suck- RESURRECTION. 45 ing rootlets, — mounting through a million secret tubes inside young stems and solid trees, — • de- scending from the skies in sunshine and in show- ers, — riding on the rivers, — comes Spring, the Savior-season in the gladness of the Resurrection. We will turn from the fields and listen to an- other echo of that word, — one that comes from the heavens that bend above them. What makes this miracle of spring ? Where does the spring- force come from? And whither go, when the leaves drop and the flowers pass away ? How explain this steady swing of seasons by which alternate life and death sweej) like a rising, then an ebbing, tide over the planet, so certainly, so punctuall}^, so universally? In Greece, six hundred years before Christ's day, still earlier farther east, wise men perceived something like the truth, that matter and force are eternal, that the words " creation" and " an- nihilation" have no meaning. They said that something never 'comes from nothing, never ends in nothing; and they framed philosophies ac- cordingly. But for ages this remained a philos- opher's idea. Not till within a century of our own time have the chemists proved by experi- 46 A YEAR OF MIRACLE. ments with weight and measure that no atom of matter is ever really lost ; that everything which vanishes only vanishes from sigJd^ to enter into new combinations and exist as truly as before. And not till within the last few years has an- other fact begun to secure its proof, — that not only what we call " matter " is thus inde- structible, but also what avc call " force " is imperishable; since heat and light, electricity and magnetism, chemic and vital force, are all of them but varying forms of one and the same great force. The " correlation of forces," — so its discoverers have named the mighty secret which at last reveals to us the depths of meaning in man's old word, "uni-verse," Correlated forces, — that is to say, eacJi one dies into the others when it disappears as itself: one sole Force abiding as the "I AM." In uttering that, we stand in the very heart, the inmost miracle, of the Resurrec- tion process ! Take any common movement that we have ceased to wonder at, thinking we know all about it ; trace it back and see the dyings of force from one form and its rebirths in another. You have a clock on the mantel-piece in your parlor. Whence get the hands of the clock their mo- RESURRECTION. 47 tion ? From the force of gravitation in the leaden weights or of ehisticity in the steel spring. Whence came that force into the weights or spring? Out of your contracting muscles as they wound it up. So the power is already outside of the clock, and in your arm. Whence came this vital, muscular force into your arm ? It is the chemic force that lurked in the beef you eat for dinner. The butcher and the baker brought it to you, the farmer sent it. And before it was you, that meat was ox ; before it was ox, it was grass ; before it was grass, it was mineral in the earth, and gas in the air, and w^ater. But what so marvellously wrought up the chemic force in gas and mineral to chemic force in me ? The sun's heat did it ! ISTay, that chemic force, it is supposed, is itself the sun's ray, transformed from the jDower that darts through space to that which holds the atoms of the elements fast-locked together. Somewhat thus the men of science tell the story. The busy creeping of the clock's hands round their little circle is traced out of the clock, out of me w^ho wind it up, out of the food that made me, out of the earth which 2^i*oduced the food, back, back, to the great time-measurer in 48 A YEAR OF MIRACLE. the heavens. The sun winds up our watches! And whence got the sun its heat ? Perhaps by the constant condensation of its vast body, pos- sibly by the striking of vast hordes of whirling meteors on its surface. Both theories may be doubted, and be supplanted by new theories; but, on any theory, we have now to follow our clock's creejD beyond our sun to the vast interstellar spaces where the world-systems gather themselves together from nebula3, and myriads of suns charm their planets to attentive courses. Is it not very wonderful? Forever and for- ever, — there is no stopping in the vast journey, if we ask the wherefore of the simplest motion that our eyes i:>erceive. Nothing wasted, noth- ing lost ; each particle accounted for ; each j^ulse of light or heat or electricity forever doing its appointed work in ceaseless resurrections ; at each birth exactly reproducing in new forms that which had ceased in old ones. And, if we could watch with eyes all-seeing, we should expect to watch those world-systems themselves coming and going like the leaves upon our trees, like tlie human generations, — systems evolving, and dissolving, and then RESURRECTIOX. 49 again evolving, in endless cycles of cosmic re- production. Such is the great Resurrection Psalm which modern science reverently sings. We find its noble verso in such chapters as Tyndall and Spencer Avrite. To go back, then, to the fields and answer our question, What makes the spring-force? That which is true of the clock upon the mantel is but more magnificently true of our spring-time on the earth. The mo- tion of our May, vast as it is and beautiful, is but a little stir in the eternal Resurrection proc- ess by which the sun mothers all motion on the earth. A little more, a little less of sun- light, — that is all tliat makes the play of sea- sons. The earth, in its round, phaces itself so that tlie rays fall more vertically on its surface, and the deed is done ! Only that and nothing^ more, and, lo ! the south winds blow ; the rivers run ; the frozen ground turns into flowers ; the trees break forth at every inch into leaf-life ; the pilgrim birds arrive, singing and mating; the children are shouting in the street; the young men and maidens are marrying ; the old people are thanking God that tlie rheumatism has left their bones ; the jioor are easy and hope- 50 A YEAR OF MIRACLE. f ul again ; the armies are moving ; the wars be- gin again; and all the comedies and tragedies of plant and animal and human life are in full play once more. Sun's heat, — that is all that has done it ! And each transformation of the force, from the time it issues from the sun in lightning tlirills to the time it quickens the pulsing of a sick child's blood, or stirs as nerve- force in the cells of the poet's brain, — what i& it but a vanishing to reappear, a dying into a Resurrection ? Let us leave the world of fields and skies, and enter that of man. Here, if we si:)eak our word and listen, it will echo for us from every part of human experience. We hear it grandly in the fate of nations. One blots out another by conquest, then that vanisher rises again by the slow absorption of its civilization. The old cultures of the race are thus secured and handed down in cycles of rhythmic history. Hebrew absorbs Canaanite^ and Persia absorbs Babylon, Egypt and Asia Minor and Persia yield to Greece, and Greece to Rome, and Rome to barbarous Goth and Prank; and throughout the process Man saves. KESURRECTION. 51 his own, and the forces, mental and moral, are guided to the finer issues of modern Europe and America. The brains that planned the pyramids, the bravery of the warriors at Troy, the enthusiasm of the Crusader, are hoarded in the broadened intellect and nobler ideals and fairer instincts of the children of to-day. We hear another echo, another series of echoes, repeated from every individual life. One death we die? Why, we die from one day to another. We only live by dying. The doctors say our very bodies are changed, atom by atom, every few years; that you are not quite the same j^ersons you were when }'ou met here the last time. And do not all mothers know what it is to lose their children's faces, not by a death-day, but by the swift birthday circling round ? In mind, in character, who doubts our fact? A young man grasps, at last, the real pur230se of his life, a girl leaves her school and enters on home duties ; what is that but a dying of the boy and girl, a Resurrection to the man, the woman ? Then, perhajDS, they awake to the feel- ing that they are living lives of busy selfishness and uselessness and sin; and with deep heart- 52 A YEAR OF MIRACLE. « searching and repenting, with prayer and tow and earnest struggle, they consecrate themselves to something better. It is the fairest of all the Kesurrections, — a dying of the poor self, a rising to the nobler self. Friends well name it the revival, the new birth. Half-way between their birthday and their death-day, this man and this Avoman stand side by side before the minister. They call it " wed- ding-day " : it is their Resurrection-day ! What dies? Two separate selves. Two separate homes, that now are breaking up. What comes to birth ? Two lives in one. A new home. A new family. A new starting-pomt for births and deaths, for joys and tragedies, for obedi- ence to laws of love and life, and nobler growth thereby, or for breaking of those laws and thereby growing ruin. Can tliey fully know, these two, the solemn act of Life-in-Death in which they join, so brimful with consequence? N'ot they ! While they are finding out, the years pass on, and our man and woman are, once more, two, — for one of them is here, one gone. And again there is a Resurrection to be watched. A Aoice is gone, vet, hark! its tones are "rising" in those RESURRECTION. 53 children's voices ringing out at play. A smile is gone ; yet there it lurks around the fresh young lips and eyes. The pose of the head, the motion of the body, the habits of the hands still linger in the home. The mother or the father is dead, but the mother's love or the father's honor has " risen " in the form of fam- ily-ideals to shape new lives of gentle deeds and manly ways. Is it ever otherwise ? We read of Theodore Parker, that, as he lay on his death-bed in Flor- ence, in a wandering mood he grasj^ed the hand of a friend, and said eagerly : " I have something to tell you: there are two Theodore Parkers now. One is dying here in Italy ; the other I have planted in America. He will live there and finish my work." Many a wanderer from the beaten creed-paths has found that "other" Parker sown through the wide land, and blessed the risen messenger that showed him God afresh. I think it is never otherwise. Truly, the chem ists of history cannot weigh and count and prove ; but, seeing what we do of the laws of Life-in-Death, we have a faith to say that in the world of mind, as in that of matter, l^ature gathers uj) the fragments so that nothing is 54 A YEAR OF MIRACLE. lost, — no thought or feeling or ideal perish- ing utterly, any more than atoms or vibrations physical. But there is borne to us, thinking of such van- ished friends, one echo more, the rhost mys- terious of all. Let us listen to it quietly and reverently. Ah ! if we could interpret tliat word " Resur- rection " fully^ and not in dim, far hints, we should fathom the depths of consciousness and unconsciousness. " Birth " and " Death " would be new words to us ; not events of beginning and ending, but instants in an eternal process of Becoming. If we could interpret that word fully, it would explain not only the mystery beyond, but that mystery which is past. We should find out the whence and the how of this body's Resurrection to its present form. Where was our body " In the beautiful repose That it had before its birth, "With the ruby, with the rose, With the harvest, earth in earth " ? How came it that our dust was not the ruby, was not rose, was not part of some golden har- RESURRECTION-. 55 vest ? How came it that, when we rose, we rose as baby-man and baby-woman, as Nellie, John and Willie? " The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting. And Cometh from afar." O that we had some angel of the Resurrection to tell us what we were in the immortality that lies behind us ! And how we came from that to this ; what death we died to reach this life ; what forgotten jDains we have passed through, and what joys ; and how much of that old ex- perience we have brought with us ! Have we, buried in us, like the trees, rings of many sea- sons of rebirths and redeaths? And does our hope of immortality lie rooted in a memory? Is the seed's dream of the flower it will be a dim consciousness of blossom-tints that have enfolded it, and of free winds it once knew uj^on the tree-top ? Have we come up, or come down, to this new life on earth ; been some time more than we are now ; and are we limping Lucifers fallen by some j^renatal sin to human incarnation, or stand we now upon the topmost step of being we have ever touched ? Are we as wakers to our past, and is that the reason 56 A YEAR OF MIRACLE. that it lies so vague and diin? Are we as sleeping dreamers to our future, and is that the reason that it lies so dim? Are we always passing from a niglit into a morning, Avhich is still but night to the brighter days that lie be- yond? It is question upon question, and no answer ! At least, the only angels that give answer are this same curious mind in us that asks the question, — this thirsting aspiration to be yet more, — this love that clings, — this sense of duty that seems as if it never could be born and never die, but always must have been to always be, — this inward voice of " Life ! Life ! " that haunts us so forever. Ko answer more than that. But, I think, it helps us, in doubts we have about our future life, to remember how almost completely the two mysteries are one, — that which shrouds the Resurrection which has been at birth to make us what Ave are, and that around the Resurrection that shall be. Solve the first, and you have solved the last. Nay, tell me ichat I can to-day, and you have proba- bly solved both. The deep secret is not the secret of the future, but the secret of becoming one thing from having been another. Deeper RESURRECTION. yet, tlie mystery of being at all. But that " be- coming one tiling from having been another," — it is the common mystery of growth. The processes Avhich we cease to wonder at because they go on all the time under our eyes, by which a few pounds of soft and wdnking baby- hood become the Napoleon or Daniel Webster Avho shape the nations ; these processes by whicli we differ to-day from wdiat we w^ere when the last flowers w^ere in the fields, — are part of that same miracle of growth, of becoming, of which birth and death, whatever they may be, are cer- tainly but other parts. We can trace the process, one little inch of it. But that is a Avholly differ- ent thing from explaining even that inch. If I could but exylain myself as I am, or the dif- ference betw^cen myself of to-day and myself of yesterday, I should doubtless have a stronger aro-ument for my immortality than any that the thinkers yet have framed. Why do we, then, concentrate our Avonder on one moment in the horizon of our time-view, and sorrowfully call that narrowed wonder " doubt about our immortality " ? Look be- hind, and explain the moment when you rose on the verge of the horizon in that direction. 58 A TEAR OF MIRACLE. A daily, momently rising has made us the be- ings that now stand in our footprints. That instantly recurring Resurrection will go on till, again, what they call us will go below the strain- ing vision of our friends. And what then? Why comes then the doubt for the first time with a startling horror, " What if there be no resurrection of the dead ? " Kay : standing nmid tiie greatness of this Resurrection thought, we begin to feel, in spite of all our ignorance, that there is no meaning in that word " dead ! " Nothing in death can he stranger than every- tiling in life. The " argument " for all we want in immortality is unattaining : it falls far short of the questions to which we long to have an answer. But nearly every man who thinks mnid his trust, and yet knows that he does trust and is happy amid his thinking, comes 2:>robably to two convictions as his final state- ments, — this for one: All of me there is, has evsr been, and all will ever be, each atom and each impulse of me, whatever new form atom or impulse take. And this, too, one feels sure of with a mighty sureness, — that the facts about that unknown future form, whatever they may be, lie within the Eternal Goodness, and are, RESURRECTION. 5^ therefore, surely better tlirni our best hope about them„ My brightest hope is ignorance stilL My trust in Goodness — to me that does not seem like ignorance. That trust, and the Res- urrection at my birth, so strange, so unremem- bered, hinting at so much life unknown behind^ are, as it were, God's affidavit that I need not fear about the Resurrections to come. Thank God, then, friends, for the Resurrection thoughts which the spring months bring to us I We die to live again. We die that ice may live again. Nothing is quickened save it die. Mortality is the condition of all immortality. What echoes we have wakened of this truth 1 The opening spring prints it off on every hillside in illuminated text of leaf and flower. The suns in the heaven are blazing it. The nations in their history repeat it. The sin-experience in which we first And God reveals it. The passing moment of each man's and woman's life is ring- ing gladly Avith it. Our dead friend's memory re- calls it. The mystery of each instant's life flashes it far backward through the past, far forward through the future. We find, as always with these central facts of Nature, that the best and 60 A YEAR OF MIRACLE. highest meaning of the truth belongs to our- selves, — so completely is Man a part of all, so completely is all represented in Man. Our word ^' Resurrection " seems to concentrate the history of the universe, to whisper the secret of the life of God ! And as we think of all these things, those words which I read you awhile ago fill and throb with their tides of meaning : — Praise ye the Lord, all things that die! Ye die that ye may live again. Praise ye him, sun and moon, that yet shall fade! Praise him all ye stars of light, whose light shall yet be quenched ! Praise the Lord, O earth, so full of changing deaths! Praise him, fire and hail, snow and vapors, and stormy winds, each vanishing as ye fulfil his word ! Praise him, mountains and all liills, that yet shall melt! Praise him, beasts and all birds ! Praise him, young men and maidens, old men and children ! Let everything that hath the breath of life praise the Lord ; for all shall die, that all may live again! Praise ye the Lord 1 FLOWERS. III. FLOWERS. " Consider the lilies, how they grow," said Jesus ; " they toil not, they spin not, — yet Solo- mon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." One summer clay I happened into a flower ex- hibition. A placard gave notice that the subject of the day's discussion was to be " The Lily " ; and relying on the word of Jesus as a pass, I went in obediently to hear the garden-men "con- sider the lilies, how they grow." The Japan lily was the special subject of the talk: how could the strano-er best be made to o-row amono^ ourselves ? One man told of his greenhouse luck, and another of liis pot-luck, and the next one talked of soils, and so on, round the circle. And all the while the superb things stood upon their stalks and looked at us, no king in all his glory arrayed like one of them ! That word of Jesus is almost the only tender 64 A YEAR OF MIRACLE. word about flowers in all the Bible. In the books of the Apocrypha and in the Song of Solo- mon, roses and lilies are mentioned twice or thrice in the lover's way ; but the Hebrew feel- ing for Nature was rather a feeling of its sub- limity than of its beauty. The sun and stars, the mountains and the desert and the sea, the rains, the lightning and the earthquake, these stand forth in the Old Testament imagery. And trees were loved, and fruit was jjraised. But grass and leaves are scarcely spoken of save as the emblem of withering, — "All flesh is grass," •" We all do fade as a leaf." When the Hebrew thought of fragrance, he thought of myi-rli and frankincense rather than of roses; and when he thought of beauty, a gem rather than a blossom was the wonder to his eye. Many a flash of ruby and sapphire and emerald gleams from the Bible Images. The wall of the New Jerusalem is built up of them, and its twelve gates are twelve pearls. In that city is a tree of life, and it has twelve fruits indeed, — but never a word of flowers in the heaven on earth that was to be. Paul was too earnest in his gosj^el of repentance, and too deop in the revelation of the mystery of the love of God in Christ to think of the love of FLOWERS. 65 Ood to the hillsides and the good news revealed in wild-flowers. So this little word of Jesus stands almost alone to make ns knoAV that there Avas, at least, one pair of eyes in Palestine that saw the Father everywhere. It is one of the verses that show that Jesus was no common man. Yet Jesus " considered " the outside beauty only, I suppose. Those garden-men I spoke of, •who knew of the tireless toil by which the plant- cells are built up from the soil, and the w^on-