The result from the standpoint of conventional art is indeed
disastrous; but my sympathy and gratitude are with the painter. I
see, as he saw, the far-reaching robe of living ineffable green, of
whose brilliance the eye never has too much, and in whose weft no
two threads are alike; and shrink as he did from the
conventionalising of that windswept glory.
The sea has its crested waves of recognisable form; the river its
eddy and swirl and separate vortices; but the grass! The wind
bloweth where it listeth and the grass bows as the wind blows--
"thou canst not tell whither it goeth." It takes no pattern, it
obeys no recognised law; it is like a beautiful creature of a
thousand wayward moods, and its voice is like nothing else in the
wide world. It bids you rest and bury your tired face in the green
coolness, and breathe of its breath and of the breath of the good
earth from which man was taken and to which he will one day return.
Then, if you lend your ear and are silent minded, you may hear
wondrous things of the deep places of the earth; of life in mineral
and stone as well as in pulsing sap; of a green world as the stars
saw it before man trod it under foot--of the emerald which has its
place with the rest in the City of God.
"What if earth
Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein,
Each to each other like, more than on earth to thought?"
It is a natural part of civilisation's lust of re-arrangement that
we should be so ready to conventionalise the beauty of this world
into decorative patterns for our pilgrim tents.
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