For my own part, I am no victim of the “pathetic fallacy” by which people in all ages have persuaded themselves that Nature sympathized with their joys and sorrows.  Even if that dream had not been dispelled, in prose by Walter Scott, and in verse by Matthew Arnold, one’s own experience, would have proved it false.

“Alas! what are we, that the laws of Nature should correspond in their march with our ephemeral deeds or sufferings?” The Heart of Midlothian.

  “Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends;
  Nature and man can never be fast friends."[*]

[Footnote *:  In Harmony with Nature.]

A funeral under the sapphire sky and blazing sun of June loses nothing of its sadness—­perhaps is made more sad—­by the unsympathetic aspect of the visible world.  December does not suspend its habitual gloom because all men of goodwill are trying to rejoice in the Birthday of the Prince of Peace.  We all can recall disasters and disappointments which have overcast the spring, and tidings of achievement or deliverance which have been happily out of keeping with the melancholy beauty of autumn.

In short, Nature cares nothing for the acts and sufferings of human kind; yet, with a strange sort of affectionate obstinacy, men insist on trying to sympathize with Nature, who declines to sympathize with them; and now, when she spreads before our enchanted eyes all the sweetness and promise of the land in spring, we try to bring our thoughts into harmony with the things we see, and to forget, though it be only for a moment, alike regrets and forebodings.

And surely the effort is salutary.  With Tom Hughes, jovial yet thoughtful patriot, for our guide, we make our way to the summit of some well-remembered hill, which has perhaps already won a name in history, and find it “a place to open a man’s soul and make him prophesy, as he looks down on the great vale spread out, as the Garden of the Lord, before him”:  wide tracts of woodland, and fat meadows and winding streams, and snug homesteads embowered in trees, and miles on miles of what will soon be cornfields.  Far away in the distance, a thin cloud of smoke floats over some laborious town, and whichever way we look, church after church is dotted over the whole surface of the country, like knots in network.

Such, or something like it, is the traditional aspect of our fair English land; but to-day she wears her beauty with a difference.  The saw is at work in the woodlands; and individual trees, which were not only the landmarks, but also the friends and companions of one’s childhood, have disappeared for ever.  The rich meadows by the tranquil streams, and the grazing cattle, which used to remind us only of Cuyp’s peaceful landscapes, now suggest the sterner thought of rations and queues.  The corn-fields, not yet “white to harvest,” acquire new dignity from the thought of all that is involved in “the staff of life.”  The smoke-cloud over the manufacturing town is no longer a mere blur on the horizon, but tells of a prodigality of human effort, directed to the destruction of human life, such as the world has never known.  Even from the towers of the village churches floats the Red Cross of St. George, recalling the war-song of an older patriotism—­“In the name of our God we will set up our banners."[*]