At a little
distance to the right a group of cattle stood mid-leg deep in the river;
and a troop of children, bright-eyed and mirthful, were casting pebbles
at them from a projecting shelf of rock. Over all a warm but softened
sunshine melted down from a slumberous autumnal sky.
My revery was disagreeably broken. A low, grunting sound, half bestial,
half human, attracted my attention. I was not alone. Close beside me,
half hidden by a tuft of bushes, lay a human being, stretched out at
full length, with his face literally rooted into the gravel. A little
boy, five or six years of age, clean and healthful, with his fair brown
locks and blue eyes, stood on the bank above, gazing down upon him with
an expression of childhood's simple and unaffected pity.
"What ails you?" asked the boy at length. "What makes you lie there?"
The prostrate groveller struggled half-way up, exhibiting the bloated
and filthy countenance of a drunkard. He made two or three efforts to
get upon his feet, lost his balance, and tumbled forward upon his face.
"What are you doing there?" inquired the boy.
"I'm taking comfort," he muttered, with his mouth in the dirt.
Taking his comfort! There he lay,--squalid and loathsome under the
bright heaven,--an imbruted man. The holy harmonies of Nature, the
sounds of gushing waters, the rustle of the leaves above him, the wild
flowers, the frost-bloom of the woods,--what were they to him?
Insensible, deaf, and blind, in the stupor of a living death, he lay
there, literally realizing that most bitterly significant Eastern
malediction, "May you eat dirt!"
In contrasting the exceeding beauty and harmony of inanimate Nature with
the human degradation and deformity before me, I felt, as I confess I
had never done before, the truth of a remark of a rare thinker, that
"Nature is loved as the city of God, although, or rather because, it has
no citizen.
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