lf.
The fresh green blade of corn is like this--so pellucid, so clear
and pure in its green as to seem to shine with colour. It is not
brilliant--not a surface gleam nor an enamel--it is stained through.
Beside the moist clods the slender flags arise, filled with the
sweetness of the earth. Out of the darkness under--that darkness
which knows no day save when the ploughshare opens its chinks--they
have come to the light. To the light they have brought a colour
which will attract the sunbeams from now till harvest. They fall
more pleasantly on the corn, toned, as if they mingled with it.
Seldom do we realize that the world is practically no thicker to us
than the print of our footsteps on the path. Upon that surface we
walk and act our comedy of life, and what is beneath is nothing to
us. But it is out from that underworld, from the dead and the
unknown, from the cold, moist ground, that these green blades have
sprung. Yonder a steam-plough pants up the hill, groaning with its
own strength, yet all that strength and might of wheels, and piston,
and chains cannot drag from the earth one single blade like these.
Force cannot make it; it must grow--an easy word to speak or write,
in fact full of potency.

It is this mystery--of growth and life, of beauty and sweetness and
colour, and sun-loved ways starting forth from the clods--that gives
the corn its power over me. Somehow I identify myself with it; I
live again as I see it. Year by year it is the same, and when I see
it I feel that I have once more entered on a new life. And to my
fancy, the spring, with its green corn, its violets, and hawthorn
leaves, and increasing song, grows yearly dearer and more dear to
this our ancient earth. So many centuries have flown. Now it is the
manner with all natural things to gather as it were by smallest
particles. The merest grain of sand drifts unseen into a crevice,
and by-and-by another; after a while there is a heap; a century and
it is a mound, and then everyone observes and comments on it. Time
itself has gone on like this; the years have accumulated, first in
drifts, then in heaps, and now a vast mound, to which the mountains
are knolls, rises up and overshadows us. Time lies heavy on the
world. The old, old earth is glad to turn from the cark and care of
driftless centuries to the first sweet blades of green.

There is sunshine to-day, after rain, and every lark is singing.
Across the vale a broad cloud-shadow descends the