THE BEECH-TREE.
He went to bed, and after a dreamless night, rose
to find the world overflowed with bliss. The
sun was at his best, and every water-drop on the grass
was shining all the colours of the rainbow. Surely
the gems that are dug from the earth have their prototype
in the dew-drops that lie on its surface. One
might in a moment of sweet maundering imagine Nature
hiding those sunless dew-drops of the mines in the
darkness of a sweet sorrow that the youth of the morning
must be so evanescent.
The whole world lay before Richard his inheritance.
The sunlight gave it him, a gift from the height of
his heaven. What was it to Richard that the park,
its trees, its grass, its dew-drops, its cattle, its
shadows, belonged to sir Wilton! He never even
thought of the fact! He felt them his own!
Was the soft, clear, fresh, damp air, with all the
unreachable soul of it, not his, because it was sir
Wilton’s?
The highest property, as Dante tells us, increases
to each by the sharing of it with others. But
the common mind does not care for such property.
Was not the blue, uplifted, hoping sky, that spoke
to the sky inside Richard—was not that
sir Wilton’s? Yes, indeed; for were it not
sir Wilton’s, it could not be Richard’s.
But sir Wilton did not claim it, because he did not
care for it, heard no sound of the speech it uttered.
Happy would it have been for sir Wilton, that anything
he called his, was his as it was Richard’s!
He could not prevent Richard from possessing Mortgrange
in a way he himself did not and would not possess it.
But neither yet were they Richard’s in the full
eternal way. Nature was a noble lady whose long
visit made him glad; she was not yet at her own home
in his house. There were things in the world that
might come in and drive her out. Say rather,
there was yet no chamber in that house in which she
could take up her dwelling all night.
The setting sun had made Richard sad; his resurrection
made him blessed! He dressed in haste, and went
to find his way from the house.
Arrived in the park, and walking in cool delight on
the wet grass, he began to think about the men and
the races whom the greed of other men and races had
pinched and shouldered and squeezed from the world.
He thought of the men who, by preventing others and
refusing to let them share, imagine to increase the
length and breadth and depth of their own possessing;
and thus by degrees he fell into a retributive mood.
What should, what could, what would be done with such
men?
