The Silent Isle by A.C. Benson

The great fen to-day was full, far and wide, of little smouldering fires. On fallow after fallow, there lay small burning heaps of roots and fibres, carefully collected, kindled, tended. I tried to learn from an old labourer what it was that he was burning, but I could not understand his explanation, and I am not sure that he knew himself. Perhaps it was the tares, as in the parable, that were at length gathered into heaps and burned! Anyhow, it was a pretty sight to see the white smoke, all at one delicate angle, rising into the clear, cloudless sky on the soft September breeze. The village on the wooded ridge, with the pale, irregular houses rising among the orchards, gained a gentle richness of outline from the drifting smoke. It reminded me, too, of the Isle of Voices, and the little magic fires that rose and were extinguished again, while the phantom voices rang in the sea-breeze.

It made for me, as I passed slowly across the great flat, a soft parable of the seasons of the soul, when gratefully and joyfully it burns its gathered failures when the harvest time is over. Failures in aim, indolence, morbid glooms, doubts of capacity, unwise words, irritable interferences what a vista of mistakes as one looks back! But there come days when, with a grateful, sober joy the joy of feeling thankful that things have not been worse, that one has somehow emerged, and that there is after all a little good grain in the garner one gathers one's faults and misdeeds into heaps for the burning.