But man can only be great, so Christ seems to say, in one way, and that is that in the process of becoming great he shall ennoble and bless his fellows; and though the great man in being great cannot help being minister to his time, it is, as Principal Caird once put it, “of the very essence of greatness that it is only obtainable by service.” (p. 169)

But what is greatness?  It is not enough that a man has original thought and clearness of mind above his fellows, but that by having these he makes other men think and other men see.  It is not enough that he is an enthusiast for great things, but that he infuses enthusiasm by his beneficent actions.  It is not enough that he is large-hearted and quickly sympathetic so that he is enabled to understand his fellows and realise the wants and needs of various classes of men, but that he is able to pass over to other men the magnificent attractiveness of this sympathy. (p. 169)

A man to be really great must have a great heart, be magnanimous as we call it; and because in virtue of this great heart he disdains lower motives and petty ambitions, he is rendered absolutely insensible to popular applause, is careless of what men say or think of him, and is so absorbed in the larger object before him as to be unmoved by the near present, or the influence of the world and society and fashion that sway other men.  And this power to be superior to criticism and to the lower motive of praise or blame in his greatness he passes on to other people….  The great man in all he does, or says, or thinks, looks beyond the present and works for his fellows not of his own generation, but for those who are yet for to come. He does not look for immediate results, and differs from the little man in this habit of mind….  And this brings me to the seal of human greatness.  The great man I say is endowed with a sense of his human spirit, being in immediate communion with God, he feels that he is really a fellow-labourer with God.  The truly great man will be found, in other words, to be a man of deep religious earnestness.  He does not profess saintliness but he is a saint.  He does not speak of his religion, but he is constantly aspiring after the eternal righteousness, and in all he does there is about it a sense of duty to the divine will. (p. 169)

And this sense of religious earnestness exerts a marvellous influence on other people.  They are conscious that these great men do really as “towards the silent tomb they go,” walk with a deathless spirit, and feel “that they are greater than they know.”  But I think it will be found that these great men add to their greatness humility.  “Whoever will be great among you, let him be your minister,” and “whoever will be chief among you let him be your servant.”  They have all entered into this saying of Christ, and in their humbleness of heart they are crowned and kings among men. (p. 169)

And what is the sign royal of this greatness when we find it amongst our fellows?  It is that always and everywhere they are thinking not of themselves but of their fellows.  They are planning in all they do for the lifting up of others and not for the crushing of others down.   The princes of the Gentiles counted their greatness and authority to lie in exercising dominion, by oppressing their fellow-men, by mastering their souls, by destroying their freedom.  “But,” said Christ, “it shall not be so with you.”  “Whosoever would be great among you, let him be your minister, and whosoever would be chief among you, let him be your servant.” (p. 169)

And if we could really begin to believe that the essence of true greatness lay in ennobling, in lifting up and in blessing mankind, and not in dominion and subjection of mankind to our power for our own selfish ends, I think we should find that true social reform would have begun, and the dawn of a better day would be at hand. (p. 169)

(Christian World Pulpit, 82 (11 September 1912), 168-71)

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Old Style

Bid by the day they wait for all the year,
Shepherd and swain their gayest colours don,
For race and sinewy wrestling meet upon
The tournay ground beside the shining mere.
For them no high-built seats their circles rear,
Heaven spreads above her pure pavilion,
Sun-tanned Stone-Arthur looks approval on,
And Solva How reiterates the cheer.
No banner-fame they boast, no high emprize;
A brother’s praise the simple meed they ask;
The fullest guerdon of the stubborn task
The love that lights a fluttering maiden’s eyes;
And they who fall turn smilingly away,
Resolved to win the next year’s meeting day.

(Sonnets at the English Lakes, p. 25)

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I was sitting in my study listening to the pied fly-catcher singing one of his seven thousand little songs with which each day he adds to the joy of May, when a new voice came from the woodland near me.  It was not an English voice, it might have been Russian by the constant “tchick” in its vocabulary, and Russian probably it was, for, as I soon learned, the bird was none other than the great spotted-woodpecker, which might have come all the way from Russian woodlands or Siberian steppes to honour my lakeland grove with his presence. (p. 605)….

Happy in the possession of a bride he has to-day, May 14th, fixed upon his abode.  He has found a birch tree whose head was lost in the wind, that stands up like a bare pole to the height of 30 to 40 feet (p. 605)…. Very silently do they work these birds.  It is only when they are away from the tree feeding that they talk Russian at all one to the other.  But there are times when apparently from access of animal spirits and joy in their accomplished work, both Mr. and Mrs. Woodpecker play a kind of tattoo upon the tree, which hallowed out as it is now for the nest, sounds very much as a far-off wooden drum might sound, such as a wild man of the woods in Africa uses. (p. 606)

On Monday the 21^st, the woodcraft ceased, and Mrs. Woodpecker began her task of egg laying.  Then absolute silence fell upon the woodland.  No birds were seen to come to or leave the tree.  As far as appearances went the nest had been deserted.  But my wise fried, the naturalist, said, “Oh that is just part of their dodge.  That is woodpecker artifice.  They want you to believe the nest is deserted.” (p. 606)

The naturalist was right.  In a fortnight’s time, about June 11th, it was quite clear something has happened, for now the birds were seen flying to and fro, noiseless of voice and wing.  There was no crying one to the other, but the undulating flight of the bird in the meadows near by, made it quite certain that the woodpecker was searching for food, and whenever we approached the tree, however hidden we believed ourselves to be, the alarm note “tchick-tra” was given. (p. 606)

Suddenly, about June 18th, the youngsters asserted themselves, and such a continual noise was heard from hungry voices demanding supplies as filled the woodland with sound and wonder.  I could not have believed it possible for any young bird throats to make such whizzing, as of giant grass-hoppers, mixed with the cry of metallic sound as of clock wheels going round and round.  This in turn mingled with screams and squeaks as of elfs in pain—a sound that seemed to possess the whole tree, so that when one approached it one could not say whether it came from the air, the ground, or the tree.  It began at 3-30 in the morning, and did not end till the last caterpillar was delivered at 9-30. (pp. 606-7)

During this time the indefatigable parent birds were constantly working to find food for their insatiable young.  I timed the visits and found that each bird brought a caterpillar in turn every minute, that is to say that during a day not less than eighteen hours in length, the young were fed with 1,080 caterpillars, and knowing as I did that the caterpillar pest was abroad, I should have been glad if there had been bot one, but twenty woodpeckers’ nests in the garden-ground. (p. 607)

On Thursday 21st, about 5-30 in the morning, the culminating cries and whizz ceased, and the old birds must have felt love’s labour rewarded by sight of three little creatures with crimson flush on their heads able to take wing and escape from their prison house.  For the next week we heard five instead of two birds talking Russian in different parts of the garden-grove.  How many eggs were laid I cannot say.  I had no means of examining the nest, short of sawing off a portion of the trunk, and I was unwilling to do this lest in future years these strange and beautiful birds should rebuke me, but I am wondering at this day why they were not content with one hold for their nest.  The woodpeckers had made two.  Is it that like the rabbit, nature has taught them it is wise to have a bolt-hole for escape?  What is certain is, that they used either door-way for their nest, both for access and for egress, though so far as could be observed, they only fed their nestlings from one, and that the lower one.  It was a real sorrow to find a few days later the burying beetles hard at work giving sepulchre to the body of one of the young woodpeckers about 12 feet from the tree.  My gardener tells me he believed it was worried to death by some starlings.  Of this I cannot speak with certainty, but those who have seen an owl mobbed can understand that the starling in mischief would hurt anything looking so ridiculously strange, and anything so apparently defenceless. (p. 607)

A Naturalist friend tells me, he thinks that there were probably six young woodpeckers hatched out and that we were misled as to numbers, by reason of the fact that when the young leave the nest the father and mother-birds divide the brood between them, and take them to different feeding grounds.  He also said that all the young are rosy-headed, but that after the first moult the cock-birds alone retain the scarlet head-dress. (p. 607)

(Parents’ Review, XXVIII (October 1917), 605-7.)

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When the speaker on August 9 of 1906 declared Gowbarrow Fell and Aira Force open to the public for ever, under the direction of the National Trust, he said humorously: “You have all heard, I have no doubt, of how a mountain was once in labour and brought forth a mouse.  On this occasion it is the mice that have been in labour and brought forth a mountain.” (p. 91)

As one of the mice who have laboured to obtain this Fell for the joy of the people, it would be well for me to put on record at once our thanks to the sixteen hundred public-spirited persons who have enabled us of the National Trust to add this noble property to our list of places, to be preserved for the nation in their ancient beauty to all time, and to ask that in future people who feel that they are passing away to the silent land, and who have no heirs and much money to bequeath, shall remember that, in addition to the Bible Society, the Infirmary, and the Homes for Dogs and Cats, there is a Society which, by its work, is doing its best to keep the Book of God’s older Scriptures—the Book of Nature—open for the people, a Society that prevents the need of the Infirmary by ministering to the holiday, the rest and health, of the toilers of the land; and that, at any rate, if the cat be a wild cat, that fast disappearing creature from our English fell-land, the National Trust will give it a chance of home. (pp. 91-92)

We have no wish to divert funds from all these gracious kindly agencies, any more than we have the wish to prevent people leaving large sums or famous pictures to the National Gallery.  But when one remembers that £32,000 was subscribed for the Velasquez “Venus” a year or two ago, and that by the subscription of £12,800 the nation is now possessed of a gallery of such unrivalled pictures as may be found on any part of the Gowbarrow Estate, one does wish that the legacy-leavers, or their trusted attorneys who suggest the leaving of legacies, would have the National Trust in mind, and let their clients feel, ere they close their eyes for ever, that every penny they so leave will go to the obtaining for future generations to all time the privilege of reading of God’s revelation in this oldest Bible, of gaining health in His surest infirmary, and of finding the creatures He has made kept tenderly and with love, for the joy and delight of the wanderer. (pp. 92-93)

(Round the Lake Country, pp. 91-106)

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