r any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies
Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns
And bowery billows crown'd with summer sea._
You can climb to the highest cliff and look down to where the creek
valley blends with the valley of the river, standing as did Sir
Bedivere where he
_... saw
Straining his eyes, beneath an arch of hand,
Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the king
Down the long water opening on the deep,
Somewhere far off, pass on, and on, and go
From less and less and vanish into light."_
The summer which has just been escorted down the valley shall come
again. You remember that even the mourners after the passing of
Arthur, when the first keen pangs of sorrow were over, took heart
again. This was the verse they carved on his tomb:
_"Hic jacet Arthurus Rex
Quondam Rex, que Futurus."_
And the soul of the summer cannot die. In many a grateful heart it
lives forever as a gentle memory of loveliness and sweetness and of
inspiration to higher and better things. Neither shall it lose its
individuality; for it has bestowed its peculiar charms, its own
enlargements of knowledge, its rare enrichments of faith and hope;
they were fuller and richer than those of any other summer. As the
senses reach farther into the science of each summer, and the mind
lifts the veil of Isis and sees a little farther into the harmony of
her purposes, so the heart draws closer to the heart of the summer and
receives a larger benediction, an essence of immortality, an ambrosial
food richer and more real than that which sustained the ancient gods.
And herein is hope for the race. It cannot be but that each summer,
with its recollections of walks and talks with parents and friends in
the summers long gone by, with its sweetest memories of life and love,
with its mighty tides of growth and splendor, its wistful dreamy skies
in these last days of its loveliness--it cannot be but that each
summer warms many a heart with the thrill divine, lifts many a life to
a plane of fairer vision and nobler purpose, instills a desire for a
life more in keeping with its own strength and cleanliness and beauty.
So does each summer help the world onward to
_"That far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves."_
End of Project Gutenberg's Some Summer Days in Iowa, by Frederick John Lazell
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