At the time at which I am writing, a soft shower has just fallen. For months we have had scarcely any rain. Even the massed primrose roots in the hedges, with the last few stragglings of their Easter decorations here and there about them, have drooped their long broad leaves. The grass and the trees have seemed to remain at a standstill, as though waiting for something. The plough-land has stood in great unbroken lumps. The marsh-land has gaped open in huge cracks. The ponds have sunk a foot below their usual mark; the ditches give no savoury smell from their shallow green soup. The roads are like grindstones, wearing down your shoe-leather with myriad-pointed flint-powder, and your patience with loose stones that carry your legs away from your control and supervision. The roofs want washing, the drains want flooding, the butts want filling. When I pour waterpot after waterpot of water about the roots of some favourite or needy plant, the water runs off the caked ground as though it were a duck’s back; or, the mould being loosened, is sucked in, without the chance of collecting into a pool, and, seemingly, without quenching the fever-thirst of the earth. All things and all people want rain: the farmers for their land, the cottager for his garden--a steady three or four hours’ downpour, not only such a slight shower as this, that, scarce having browned the beds, is already drying off from them. Just now, it is certain, rain would be appreciated, but still even now more for its usefulness, than for its beauty. For the beauty of rain is a thing often missed, I think, even by those who do keep, as they pass through this world, a keen eye for the Creator’s thoughts, embodied in beauty about them: poems written on the world’s open page by the Hand of the great _Poet_, or Maker. For, rightly regarded, from the vast epic of the starry heavens, to the simple pastoral of a dewdrop, or the lyric a bird, God’s works are to us the expression of His mind, the language which conveys to us His ideas. Man’s noblest descriptive poetry--what is it but a weak endeavour to interpret to less gifted seers the beautiful thoughts of God? And rain is one of these thoughts--a realised idea of the mind of the Almighty. And since I find, both in men and in books, a general neglect, if not a rooted dislike, with regard to rain--_as such_, and putting out of sight its _usefulness_--I shall devote a few pages to the endeavour to set forth the beauty of this thought of God. [Illustration] Even Tennyson, nature-loving Tennyson, what word has he for the rain? Of Enid we are told-- “She did not weep, But o’er her meek eyes came a happy mist, Like that which kept the heart of Eden green Before the _useful trouble_ of the rain.” Nothing, then, even in the desire to praise it, better than “_useful trouble_”? I do not think that even Wordsworth dwells with much frequency or delight on this friend of mine. Longfellow has--