Yes, it is greatness.

X

THE MOWING

“Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons, It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.”

This is a well earned Sunday morning.  My chores were all done long ago, and I am sitting down here after a late and leisurely breakfast with that luxurious feeling of irresponsible restfulness and comfort which comes only upon a clean, still Sunday morning like this—­after a week of hard work—­a clean Sunday morning, with clean clothes, and a clean chin, and clean thoughts, and the June airs stirring the clean white curtains at my windows.  From across the hills I can hear very faintly the drowsy sounds of early church bells, never indeed to be heard here except on a morning of surpassing tranquillity.  And in the barnyard back of the house Harriet’s hens are cackling triumphantly:  they are impiously unobservant of the Sabbath day.

I turned out my mare for a run in the pasture.  She has rolled herself again and again in the warm earth and shaken herself after each roll with an equine delight most pleasant to see.  Now, from time to time, I can hear her gossipy whickerings as she calls across the fields to my neighbour Horace’s young bay colts.

When I first woke up this morning I said to myself: 

“Well, nothing happened yesterday.”

Then I lay quiet for some time—­it being Sunday morning—­and I turned over in my mind all that I had heard or seen or felt or thought about in that one day.  And presently I said aloud to myself: 

“Why, nearly everything happened yesterday.”

And the more I thought of it the more interesting, the more wonderful, the more explanatory of high things, appeared the common doings of that June Saturday.  I had walked among unusual events—­and had not known the wonder of them!  I had eyes, but I did not see—­and ears, but I heard not.  It may be, it may be, that the Future Life of which we have had such confusing but wistful prophecies is only the reliving with a full understanding, of this marvellous Life that we now know.  To a full understanding this day, this moment even—­here in this quiet room—­would contain enough to crowd an eternity.  Oh, we are children yet—­playing with things much too large for us—­much too full of meaning.

* * * * *

Yesterday I cut my field of early clover.  I should have been at it a full week earlier if it had not been for the frequent and sousing spring showers.  Already half the blossoms of the clover had turned brown and were shriveling away into inconspicuous seediness.  The leaves underneath on the lower parts of the stems were curling up and fading; many of them had already dropped away.  There is a tide also in the affairs of clover and if a farmer would profit by his crop, it must be taken at its flood.