Had any frost ever killed the bud of nature's hope more unexpectedly than
this landscape now lay blackened before him? And had any summer ever cost
so much? What could strike a man as a more mortal wound than to lose the
woman he had loved and in losing her see her lose her loveliness?
As the end of it all, he now found himself sitting on the blasted rock of
his dreams in the depths of the greening woods. He was well again by this
time and conscious of that retightened grasp upon health and redder stir of
life with which the great Mother-nurse, if she but dearly love a man, will
tend him and mend him and set him on his feet again from a bed of wounds or
sickness. It had happened to him also that with this reflushing of his blood
there had reached him the voice of Summer advancing northward to all things
and making all things common in their awakening and their aim.
He knew of old the pipe of this imperious Shepherd; sounding along the inner
vales of his being; herding him toward universal fellowship with seeding
grass and breeding herb and every heart-holding creature of the woods. He
perfectly recognized the sway of the thrilling pipe; he perfectly realized
the joy of the jubilant fellowship. And it was with eyes the more mournful
therefore that he gazed in purity about him at the universal miracle of old
life passing into new life, at the divinely appointed and divinely fulfilled
succession of forms, at the unrent mantle of the generations being visibly
woven around him under the golden goads of the sun. " ...for like as herbs
bring forth fruit and flourish in May, in likewise, every heart that is in
any manner a lover spingeth and flourisheth in lusty deeds." . . . But all
this must come, must spend itself, must pass him by, as a flaming pageant
dies away from a beholder who is forbidden to kindle his own torch and claim
his share of its innocent revels. He too had laid his plans to celebrate his
marriage at the full tide of the Earth's joy, and these plans had failed
him.
But while the school-master thus was gloomily contemplating the end of his
relationship with Amy and her final removal from the future of his life, in
reality another and larger trouble was looming close ahead.
A second landscape had begun to beckon not like his poor little frost-killed
field, not of the earth at all, but lifted unattainable into the air, faint,
clear, elusive--the marriage of another woman. And how different she! He
felt sure that no winter's rasure would ever reach that land; no
instability, no feebleness of nature awaited him there; the loveliness of
its summer, now brooding at flood, would brood unharmed upon it to the
natural end.