Let me gather a thought here and there that seem to come up, like Christmas roses, from the bare beds of Winter days.
The life of man has its November time; a time of sheer, literal, moist decay; no romantic flush of Autumn woods, freaking them with a thousand fancies and poetic hues, and crowning death with an intense, fascinating, dreamy glory. The wild abundant Spring blossoms are over long ago; the achievements of Summer, sobered though they were, have passed away, and the tinge of pleasant dreamy melancholy that touched their first decay has died out; and the heart sinks as we look around us.
“That time of life thou dost in him behold, When yellow leaves, or few or none, do hang Upon the boughs that shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”
The ageing man looks back upon his past life, and on all the works that his hands have wrought, and on the labour that he has laboured to do; and behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun. What we meant to be, and what we are! The bright, soaring, heaven-adorned bubbles that gleamed about us, and the little mess of soapsuds that are sinking into the ground here and there! The crowd, the rush of emerald vivid buds that our boyhood knew; and now the bare, poor black twigs and branches, that drip above the yellow stained heaps below! Hopes, ambition, dreams, love, friendships, aspirations, yearnings, plans, resolves, scattered and lying about the lanes of our life, or here and there heaped in a mass at some well-remembered turn or corner, dead, and sodden, and desolate exceedingly.
“Oh! ’tis sad to lie and reckon All the days of faded youth, All the vows that we believed in, All the words we spoke in truth.”
Well, and what then? Can there be a December to follow upon and beautify those sad chilly hours? I think so. Sometimes it is just when the leaves are all fallen, and the flowers all dead, and the fruits only represented by a straggler lying here and there, and when the bare boughs are strung with trembling tears that gleam with a dull light in the heavy enfolding mist; sometimes it is even then that a wondrous work is wrought. A pinching frost comes with, as it seems, the finishing stroke, and the last sere leaf circles down, and even the fading chrysanthemums blacken, and the little robin lies dead on the iron border. A dim sky overglooms all, and you go your sad way from the scene as night deepens over it. But God wakens you some morning, and bids you look out of the dim-lit room in which your heart was shut; and lo! a strange transformation! His consolations, and His teaching of the deep meaning of things, have descended thick and abundant from heaven, and even earth’s dull ruins and desolations are glorified and transfigured by the beauty of that heavenly snow. You are content now that the earthly foliage should have made way for and given place to that unearthly glory which reclothes earth’s bare boughs; you can think calmly, quietly, without any anguish, of those desolate leaves, and stained flowers, and cold robin, that all sleep undisturbedly under the snow. God’s snow, I think--the snow which He sends down upon hearts desolate and deserted,