II “A Twilight Piece”
... “And all that I was born to be
and do, a twilight piece.”
—Robert Browning.
Chapter I The Flame in the Wood
Home again and Tennessee in April! When the train swept over the Highland Rim, the woods, not yet in full leaf, seemed afire with the clustering blooms of the pink azaleas. On both sides, in little sudden and short valleys, and farther off on dwarf-oak hillsides, they blazed. Far beyond their faint, mist-like flush mingled with the sky line in the distant openings, and seemed an arc of soft sunset clouds.
Cream-white dogwoods rose up in open spaces against the blurred, pink backgrounds, clustering like evening stars in rose cloud-banks. Anon they grew in separate groups, down in little dells, and each of these tiny bowls was full of them.
Their odor, soft and fragrant, swept through the train, dew-damp and like old memories in sweetness.
This seems to me to be the main thought about all wild flowers, that they alone are God’s idea of beauty and not those that bloom in gardens and hot houses through the skill of man. If, from any cause, such as the gas from a comet’s tail, men should vanish in a night, none of these last would live to bloom again. Like their makers they would pass from the earth. But like Nature’s Maker the wild sweet things of the wood and meadows and mountains would bloom again, although man were not, mirroring God’s idea of beauty even to the desert.
If it is Nature’s great desire that that which is best shall live, the wild flowers have Nature’s underwriting of approval. Ancient Linnæus said of one unfolding: “I saw God in his glory passing near me and bowed my head in worship.”
Through all the ages those who see, whether poet or planter, think the same great thoughts. Tennyson said of the flower plucked from the crannied wall, that if he could know what it was he should know what God and man were. They bring a larger thought even than that, for they prove that God is Beauty.
Even as I was thinking this the train rushed through what had once been a wood, but was now a burnt and scarred spot, bare of life. The azaleas in their beauty, were the flame in the woods which Nature had kindled: but this desolate spot was the flame which had come from the hand of man...
When the train stopped for water at the little station I got out and gathered a great bunch of flowers for Eloise....
Then as we dropped down into the Middle Basin, filled with the blue grass in its spring glory, whole acres of hepaticas twinkled up at us like fallen fireflies.
At last I was home again, and home with a new mission, new ideas. For four years I had studied trees and flowers in a German university. I had prepared myself to be a forester. Now I was looking out of the car window at the wantonness that had turned hillsides into gullies and rich loam into beds of clay. The little streams that I had remembered running from a familiar wood, now crawled, winding amid sand dunes bare of trees. The folly of it hurt me. I saw that here was work for me to do.