Читать книгу A Garden of Peace: A Medley in Quietude - Frank Frankfort Moore - Страница 11

What a pity it seems that people with a reputation for wisdom were for so long content to think of the swallows only as the messengers of a love poem: the “swallow sister—oh, fleet, sweet swallow,” or the “swallow, swallow, flying, flying south”—instead of piling up data respecting the wonder of their ways! The same may be said of the nightingale, and may the Lord have mercy on the souls of those who say it!

Are we to be told to be ready to exchange Itylus for a celluloid tab with a date on It? or Keats's Ode for a corrected notation of the nightingale's trills? At the same time might not a poet now and again take to heart the final lines—the summing up of the next most beautiful Ode in the language—

“Beauty is Truth, Truth beauty?

Every fact in Nature seems to me to lead in the direction of poetry, and to increase the wonder of that of which man is but an insignificant part. We are only beginning to know a little about the part we were designed to play in Nature, but the more we know the more surprised, and, indeed, alarmed, we must be when by a revelation its exact position is made known to us. We have not yet learned to live. We have been fools enough to cultivate the forgetting of how to do things that we were able to do thousands of years ago. The half of our senses have been atrophied. It is many years since we first began to take leave of our senses and we have been at it ever since. It is about time that we started recognising that an acquaintance with the facts of Nature is the beginning of wisdom. We crystallised our ignorance in phrases that have been passed on from father to son, and quoted at every opportunity. We refer to people being “blind as a bat,” and to others being—as “bold as a lion,” or “harmless as a dove.” Did it never strike the inventor of any of these similes that it would be well before scattering them abroad to find out if they were founded on fact? The eyesight of the bat is a miracle. How such a creature can get a living for the whole year during the summer months is amazing. The lion is a cowardly brute that runs away yelling at the sight of a rhinoceros and submits without complaint to the insults of the elephant. A troop of doves will do more harm to a wheat-field in an hour than does a thunderstorm.

And the curious thing is that in those quarters where one would expect to find wisdom respecting such incidents of Nature one finds foolishness. Ten centuries of gamekeepers advertise their ignorance in documentary evidence nailed to the barn doors; they have been slaughtering their best friends all these years and they continue doing so.

After formulating this indictment I opened my Country Life, and found in its pages a confirmation of my evidence by my friend F. C. G., who is proving himself in his maturity as accomplished a Naturalist as, in his adolescence, he was a caricaturist in the Westminster Gazette. These are his lines:—