The Harvest of a Quiet Eye: Leisure Thoughts for Busy Lives. John Richard Vernon

Is it calm in that green valley

       Round whose bournes such great hills swell?

       Are there giants in the valley—

       Giants leaving footprints yet?

       Are there angels in the valley?

       Tell me——I forget.”

      But nothing that is beautiful to remember will be forgotten there. And the poet will no more lament a light gone out, a glory faded; our worn-out feelings, and spirits, and appreciations, and hopes, and beliefs, and wonders, and admirations, will be restored to us new. So altogether new, so quite different in nature, as well as in degree, from the old, that they will keep new, and not fade and perish in the using. That world will not pass away, nor the enjoyment thereof. For all there will be in perfect harmony with the will of God, which abideth for ever.

       Everlasting Spring days! Think of that! I mean an everlasting Spring season and freshness in the heart. Oh the sadness which is an undercurrent of all earth’s poetry, from the nightingale’s, upward, will have left our songs then!

      “We look before and after,

       And pine for what is not;

       Our sincerest laughter

       With some pain is fraught;

       Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”

      But this will then and there be no longer the case, for life will no longer be “A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.” Season after season, joy after joy, will indeed dance into light, but will not, after a little brief while of enjoyment, die into the shade. Heaven’s everlasting flowers will not grow dry, and dusty, and colourless; but for ever retain and increase the freshness, and the abundance, and the light, and the exquisite glory of those unimagined Spring Days.