Page:The Poet's Chantry pg 076.jpg

76 We will admit that all this is emphatically Ignatian—but it is also emphatically Catholic; it is even the story of every illumined soul. Nature is first a pageant to us, and then a process; until at last we perceive it to be, in Goethe's words, the "garment of God"—and withal, the enveloping mantle of man. This deepening of vision is very noticeable throughout Father Hopkins' work. Yet always the world was fresh to him, as it is fresh to children and to the very mature. At every turn, and by sheer force of his own vivid individuality, he was finding that "something of the unexplored," that "grain of the unknown" which Flaubert so sagely counselled de Maupassant to seek in all things, but which none of us may ever hope to find until we cease looking upon life through the traditional lenses of other eyes. Therefore was Father Hopkins Ignatian in his own very personal way. Few men have loved Nature more rapturously than he; fewer still with such a youthful and perennial curiosity. There is a tender excitement in his attitude toward natural beauty (whether treated incidentally or as a parable) that is very contagious, and the exultation of that early and earthly "Vision" clung to the Churchman almost with life itself. Nature, indeed, was his one secular inspiration; and that even she was not wholly secular is evinced by the characteristic music of his spring song:

Nothing is so beautiful as spring— When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush: Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush Through the echoing timber does so rinse and ring The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing; The glassy pear-tree leaves and blooms, they brush The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush With richness; the racing lambs, too, have fair their fling.