, and gird himself with it, it being to him the emblem not only of rest, but of humility under chastisement, the rush (or reed) being the only plant which can grow there;⁠—‘no plant which bears leaves, or hardens its bark, can live on that shore, because it does not yield to the chastisement of its waves.’ It cannot but strike the reader singularly how deep and harmonious a significance runs through all these words of Dante⁠—how every syllable of them, the more we penetrate it, becomes a seed of farther thought! For follow up this image of the girding with the reed, under trial, and see to whose feet it will lead us. As the grass of the earth, thought of as the herb yielding seed, leads us to the place where our Lord commanded the multitude to sit down by companies upon the green grass; so the grass of the waters, thought of as sustaining itself among the waters of affliction, leads us to the place where a stem of it was put into our Lord’s hand for his sceptre; and in the crown of thorns, and the rod of reed, was foreshown the everlasting truth of the Christian ages⁠—that all glory was to be begun in suffering, and all power in humility.”

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