Not excepting the falling stars — for
they are far less sudden — there is nothing
in nature that so outstrips our unready eyes as the
familiar rain. The rods that thinly stripe our
landscape, long shafts from the clouds, if we had
but agility to make the arrowy downward journey with
them by the glancing of our eyes, would be infinitely
separate, units, an innumerable flight of single things,
and the simple movement of intricate points.
The long stroke of the raindrop, which
is the drop and its path at once, being our impression
of a shower, shows us how certainly our impression
is the effect of the lagging, and not of the haste,
of our senses. What we are apt to call our quick
impression is rather our sensibly tardy, unprepared,
surprised, outrun, lightly bewildered sense of things
that flash and fall, wink, and are overpast and renewed,
while the gentle eyes of man hesitate and mingle the
beginning with the close. These inexpert eyes,
delicately baffled, detain for an instant the image
that puzzles them, and so dally with the bright progress
of a meteor, and part slowly from the slender course
of the already fallen raindrop, whose moments are
not theirs. There seems to be such a difference
of instants as invests all swift movement with mystery
in man’s eyes, and causes the past, a moment
old, to be written, vanishing, upon the skies.
The visible world is etched and engraved
with the signs and records of our halting apprehension;
and the pause between the distant woodman’s
stroke with the axe and its sound upon our ears is
repeated in the impressions of our clinging sight.
The round wheel dazzles it, and the stroke of the
bird’s wing shakes it off like a captivity evaded.
Everywhere the natural haste is impatient of these
timid senses; and their perception, outrun by the
shower, shaken by the light, denied by the shadow,
eluded by the distance, makes the lingering picture
that is all our art. One of the most constant
causes of all the mystery and beauty of that art is
surely not that we see by flashes, but that nature
flashes on our meditative eyes. There is no need
for the impressionist to make haste, nor would haste
avail him, for mobile nature doubles upon him, and
plays with his delays the exquisite game of visibility.
Momently visible in a shower, invisible
within the earth, the ministration of water is so
manifest in the coming rain-cloud that the husbandman
is allowed to see the rain of his own land, yet unclaimed
in the arms of the rainy wind. It is an eager
lien that he binds the shower withal, and the grasp
of his anxiety is on the coming cloud. His sense
of property takes aim and reckons distance and speed,
and even as he shoots a little ahead of the equally
uncertain ground-game, he knows approximately how
to hit the cloud of his possession. So much is
the rain bound to the earth that, unable to compel
it, man has yet found a way, by lying in wait, to
put his price upon it. The exhaustible cloud
“outweeps its rain,” and only the inexhaustible
sun seems to repeat and to enforce his cumulative
fires upon every span of ground, innumerable.
The rain is wasted upon the sea, but only by a fantasy
can the sun’s waste be made a reproach to the
ocean, the desert, or the sealed-up street.
Rossetti’s “vain virtues” are the
virtues of the rain, falling unfruitfully.
Baby of the cloud, rain is carried
long enough within that troubled breast to make all
the multitude of days unlike each other. Rain,
as the end of the cloud, divides light and withholds
it; in its flight warning away the sun, and in its
final fall dismissing shadow. It is a threat
and a reconciliation; it removes mountains compared
with which the Alps are hillocks, and makes a childlike
peace between opposed heights and battlements of heaven.