The Choir Invisible

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.