Edward Thomas

CHAPTER II
FAUNUS

How nobly the ploughman and the plough and three horses, two chestnuts and a white leader, glide over the broad swelling field in the early morning! Under the dewy, dark-green woodside they wheel, pause and go out into the strong light again, and they seem one and glorious, as if the all-breeding earth had just sent them up out of her womb—mighty, splendid and something grim, with darkness and primitive forces clinging about them, and the night in the horses’ manes.

The ship, the chariot, the plough, these three are, I suppose, the most sovereign beautiful things which man has made in his time, and such that were his race to pass away from the earth, would bring him most worship among his successors.

All are without parallel in nature, wrought out of his own brain by unaided man; and yet, during their life, worthy by their beauty, their purpose and their motion to challenge anything made by the gods on the earth or in the sea; and after their life is done, sublime and full of awe, so that when we come upon them neglected and see their fair, heroic curves, the dirge at their downfall passes inevitably into a pÆan to their majesty. And they are very old. Probably the beasts and the birds, the winds and waves and hills know us as the creatures who make the ship, the chariot and the plough. These three things, as they go about their work, must have become universal symbols, so that when a man comes in sight, the other inhabitants of the earth say: Here is he who sails in ships and drives the chariot and guides the plough. And the greatest of all is the plough. It is without pride and also without vanity. The ship and the chariot have sometimes tried to conceal their ancient simplicity, though they have never done without it. But the plough is the same—in shape like a running hound, with tail uplifted and muzzle bowed to the scent.

Richard the ploughman is worthy of his plough and team. He moves heavily with long strides over the baked yellow field, swaying with the violent motion of the plough as it cuts the stubborn and knotty soil, and yet seeming to sway out of joy and not necessity. He is a straight, small-featured, thin-lipped man, red-haired and with blue eyes of a fierce loneliness almost fanatical. Hour after hour he crosses and recrosses the field, up to the ridge, whence he can see miles of hill and wood; down to the woodside where the rabbits hardly trouble to hide as he appears, or to the thick hedge with marigolds below and nearly all day the song of nightingales. The furrow is always straight; he could plough it so asleep, and sometimes perhaps he does. The larks sing invisible in the white May sky. The swallows and woodlarks and willow wrens and linnets, with their tenderest of all mortal voices, flit and sing about him. Partridges whirr and twang. A fox steals along the hedge, a squirrel glows and ripples across a bay of the field. And for a little time he notices these things in a mild complacency. He has even formed a theory that there is another finch like a chaffinch, but not such a singer, and he calls it a piefinch. He likes the bright weather, and his cheerful greeting leaves the passer-by feeling stupid because he cannot equal it; few sounds can equal it, except the shout of a cuckoo and the abandoned clamour of a deep-voiced hound. He never becomes tired; at noon and evening in the tavern, he drinks standing, with one hand on the high door latch and the other holding the tankard, and talking all the time at the rate of one phrase to a minute, with serious mouth and distant eyes which must be symbols to help out the words, for certainly if those words mean no more than they would in another man’s mouth, they convey little but the apparent ennui of all those long hours walking to this oak or that hawthorn spray.

At first sight the ploughman’s task seems to be one which ought rightly to be set only to some well-balanced philosopher, who could calmly descend into himself during the many lonely hours and think of nature and man in orderly thoughts. To the ordinary man, with his drug-habit of taking to reverie during any long spell of solitude, such a task would seem fatal. In fact, it is pretty certain that many a plain fellow must be turned into a fool by the immense monotony of similar furrows and the same view repeated exactly every quarter of an hour. When he is still a boy, he goes about even in the four hours’ darkness of the winter mornings with always a song amidst the sleet or the silent frost. At lunch he can look for nests or nuts or hunt a stoat. When work is over he looks forward to songs at “The Chequers” with those of his own age, or to a shamefaced walk with a girl, or to fishing for tench and eels, or even to a game of cricket. But when he is married all that is past. He leads his horses down to the plough, having some simple thought, a grievance, a recollection, perhaps a hope, running confusedly in his head, and all day he turns it over, repeating himself, exaggerating, puzzling over the meaning of someone’s words, floundering in digressions, fitting new words to the wood-pigeon’s talk, trying to keep straight and to make up his mind, justifying himself, condemning another, cursing him. Now and then he lifts his eyes to the sky or the wooded hills and his mind catches at an impression which never becomes a thought, but something between a picture and a tune in the head, and its half oblivion is pleasant, when suddenly the plough leaps forward from his relaxing grasp, he shouts “Ah, Charley!” to the leader, mutters a little and settles down again to the grievance or the recollection or the hope, to be disturbed on lucky days by the hounds, perhaps, but otherwise to go on and on; and at noon and evening he takes his horses back to the stable and confronts men with the same simple ejaculations as before, after the last glass possibly reviving his lonely thoughts, but ineffectually. “How Bill does talk!” they say. What wonder that the rustic moralist marks an infant’s tomb with the words—

“When the archangel’s trump shall blow

And souls to bodies join,

Millions shall wish their lives below

Had been as brief as thine.”

But Richard is no ordinary man, for he is happy and proud, and somewhere in the fields or in the clouds that roll before him as his plough comes to the top of the ridge, he has found that draught of excellent grace—

“Few men but such as sober are and sage,

Are by the gods to drink thereof assigned;

But such as drink, eternal happiness do find.”

There is little of wisdom in his words except moderation; but his garden is luckier, his kitchen sweeter than all the rest in the hamlet, and of all his tasks—ploughing, harrowing, rolling, drudging, reaping, mowing, carting faggots or corn or hay or green meat or dung—he likes none better than the others, because he likes them all well as they come. And ah! to see him and his team all dark and large and heroic against the sky, ploughing in the winter or the summer morning, or to see him grooming the radiant horses in their dim stable on a calm, delaying evening, is to see one who is in league with sun and wind and rain to make odours fume richly from the ancient altar, to keep the earth going in beauty and fruitfulness for still more years.

CHAPTER III
NOT HERE, O APOLLO!

It was a clay country of small fields that rose and fell slightly, not in curves, but in stiff lines which ended abruptly in the low, dividing hedges. Here and there we passed small woods of oak, hardly more than overgrown hedges, where keepers shot the jays. There were few streams—and those polluted. North and south the land rose up in some pomp to steep hills planted with oak and beech and fir, and between these, broad meadows and hop gardens, which now and then caught the faint light on their dry brown or moist green and gleamed desirably. The wind was in the north; it had rained in the night, and yet the morning was dull and the sun white and small. There was some vice in the wind or in the foliage or in the grass that now began to be long—some vice that made the land sad and cold and unawakening, with the surliness of a man who cannot sleep and will not rise.

The woods became more dense as we walked; not far ahead the oaks closed in and expounded the contours of the land by their summits. But our path led away from them, and we were about to lose sight of them when, gently as the alighting of a bird, the sunlight dropped among the tops of the oaks, which were yellow and purple with young leaves, and blessed them. We turned. There was the sun held fast among the fresh leaves and green trunks, as if Apollo had changed into a woodland god, and forsaken the long lonely ways of heaven, and resolved no more to spend a half of his days in the under world. How the nymphs clapped their hands at this advent, abandoning Pan, and bringing to the new lord all choicest herbs and highest fair grasses and golden flowers that should make him content to be away from the clouds of sunset and dawn, and blue flowers on which his feet should tread without envy of the infinite paths of the sky, and white flowers that should suffice for his shepherding in place of the flocks of the high desolate noon! How they drove up grey dove and green woodpecker to shake their wings and shine about the new god’s head as they flew among the branches! How Pan himself, that does not heed dark hours, crept away from his light-hearted nymphs and hid in the sombre reeds! “Ever-young Apollo! Eternal Apollo! Young Apollo!” were the cries. “Why have we ever served a goat-foot god?” And so they made haste to serve him with the clearest honey of the wild bees, the cream from the farm that was most clean, the fruits that yet preserved flavours of a past summer and autumn in the granary close by, and fresh cresses from the spring; nor would some of the little satyrs forget the golden ale and amber bread and cheese of the colour of primroses; and all seemed assured that never again would Apollo forsake the red and yellow leaves of the full oaks or the mid-forest grasses or the lilied pools standing among willow and alder and ash. And we saw that the light was passing in triumph slowly, and accompanied by the cooing of doves, along the wood from oak top to oak top.

CHAPTER IV
WALKING WITH GOOD COMPANY

The lightning grows upon the sky like a tumultuous thorn tree of fire. The thunder grumbles with interrupted cadences, and then, joyful as a poet, hits the long, grave, reverberating period at last, repeats it triumphantly, and muttering dies away. The pheasants in the woods have got over their alarm and have ceased to crow, and for a time the heavy perpendicular rain submerges the meadow and farmhouse and mid-field oak and the steep downs with their cloudy woods; the birds are still.

Then the rain wastes away. I can count the drops on the broad burdock leaves; and the evening sun comes through horizontally; and it is good to be afoot and making for something remote, I know not why. Each meadow shines amid its encircling hedges like a lake of infinitely deep emerald. On the dark red ploughland the flints glitter with constellated or solitary lights. In the sweet copses, where the willow wren sings again in the highest branches, the thorn foliage is so bright that the dark stems are invisible. The purple oak tops reach wonderfully into the sombre, bluish sky, and over them the wood pigeons turn rapidly from darkness to splendour—from splendour to darkness, as they wheel and clap their wings. The cuckoos shout again; first one, so far off that the character, without the notes, of the song is recognised; then another with a wild clearness in its voice as if the rainy air aided it; and then one just overhead, in the luminous grey branches of an oak, so that it can be heard trying hard and enjoying its own strength. The hills rejoice with long shadows and yellow light; the tall hares stretch themselves and gallop. The little pools hum pleasantly as the rain drips from their overhanging brier and bramble into the leaden water with bright splash. And in our own muscles and hearts the evening strives to form an aspiration that shall suit the joy of the hills, the meadows, the copses and their people. We will go on, they say; we will go on and on, through the beeches on the hill and up over the ridge and down again through the grey wet meadows and to the old road between hawthorn and guelder-rose at the foot of the downs; and still on, not as before, but out of time and space, until we come—home—to some refuge of beauty and serenity in the heart of the immense evening. And so we will, though we shall be wise to find our achievement in the rapture of walking, or in the short rest upon a gate where we may surprise the twilight at her consecrating task. It is well, too, to talk, not to walk silently and weave such dreams as will make our host to-night intolerable; or if not to talk, then to sing some old song whose melody finds a strange fitness to our minds, in spite of the words, as for example—

Or,

Or,

(Sung to the tune of the Welsh New Year’s Eve Song.)

Or,

Or,

Then perhaps we will lazily inquire why songs about the price of malt, or the coming of a Beautiful Ass out of the East should stir and uplift and compose the hearts of men dreaming of an ideal beauty on an April evening, and so to more songs and then to bed, finding at the last moment the serene and beautiful, perhaps, in the glimpse of holy evening landscape rich in unseen nightingales as we fall asleep.

CHAPTER V
NO MAN’S GARDEN

For a mile, alongside a bright high-road, runs a twelve-foot strip of grass and clover and buttercups, with cinquefoil’s golden embroidery in the turf at the edge. Little circular heaps of silver wood ash mark the cold fires of tramps, here and there. Here also they sleep in the sun, in summer and autumn, and in winter lean in the dense hedge that keeps the north wind away. The hedge is rich and high, of thorn overgrown by traveller’s joy and bryony; and at its feet, stitchwort, campions, vetchlings and bird’s-foot trefoil grow luxuriantly.

This is no man’s garden. Every one who is nobody sits there with a special satisfaction, watching the swift, addle-faced motorist, the horseman, the farmer, the tradesman, the publican, go by; for here he is secure as in the grave, and even as there free—if he can—to laugh or scoff or wonder or weep at the world.

As I was trying to persuade some buoyant bryony strands with snaky heads to return to the hedge from which they had wandered into danger, a tramp came up.

“Have you seen my old woman?” he asked.

“Not know her? She is the cursedest, foulest-mouthed old woman in the country, fond of too much drink, and she has just been spending the winter in prison—she prefers it to the workhouse which I have just left. But she just suits me. There is no one like her. They often tell me to take another instead of her, but I never will....

“I don’t know that you would like to see her. She is not a beauty, and she is not dressed up well. She is as crooked as an oak branch, and she has one leg longer than the other, and as to her face I could make a better one myself with a handful of dirt. She drags as she walks, what with keeping up with me all these years. You may know her, because she is always smoking. She cannot eat; she lives on tobacco and beer....

“Oh, I see you are one of these antiquarian gents. If you would really like to see her....

“Well, if you are curious, how would you like to hear of the murder I did twenty years ago? I tell it to everybody, and they don’t seem to believe me, so I will tell it to you....

“I spent a night in the workhouse and when I got out in the afternoon I was so hungry that I could have eaten the master, if he hadn’t been the ugliest fellow I ever saw, like a fancy potato. Walking didn’t cure my appetite, and all that day and night I didn’t have a bite. Perhaps I got a bit queer and I went on walking until I got near to Binoll in Wiltshire where I was born. That is a fine country. My old woman and I have slept in violets there many a time in April. When I got there early in the morning on the second day I thought I would go into a copse I knew and pick some bluebells there, partly for old remembrance sake and partly to make a penny or two in Swindon, but I didn’t much care what. Well, as I was picking them—God! how everything did smell and I felt like a little boy, I was enjoying it so, and putting my hand into all the nests and feeling the warm eggs—Lord! what a fool I be—I thought I would go to sleep. There was such a nice bit of moon in the sky, with the rim of the cup of it uppermost, which means that it keeps the rain from falling, but if it is upside down it lets the water out and you may know it will rain. There was a regular old-fashioned English thrush saying: ‘Bit, bit, slingdirt, slingdirt, belcher, belcher, belcher,’ and I went on picking the flowers. All of a sudden I saw two fellows sitting just outside the wood with their backs to me. One of them was a big fellow and we passed the time of day and he said he had done a job lately and was not in a hurry to do any more. The other was a little white-faced man such as I can’t away with, and he said he was looking for a job and trying to get his strength up a bit. The big fellow motioned to me, meaning that the other had got money about him; so I agreed, and nodded, and he stepped back and hit the little fellow a good blow on the head. I threw away the flowers and we dragged him into the wood. He had ten shillings on him and we took half each. He looked very bad, so the other fellow said: ‘We had better put him away,’ and I said; ‘Yes, he may be in awful pain, such a white-faced fellow as he is.’ So we knocked the life out of him, and the other fellow went off Marlborough way and I went into Swindon and had such a dinner as I hadn’t had for weeks, rabbit and new potatoes and a bit of curry.... Did you ever hear about that?

“Get on my mind? Why, I never meant the fellow any harm and I filled my belly.

“Can you tell me where there is a lone road where I can make a bit of fire? I don’t like the dust and noise of these motor cars.” ...

Away he went, halting a little, and yet, from behind, having an absurd resemblance to a child, which his cheerfulness reinforced.

Later in the evening, I found him just awakened from his first sleep, near a dead fire that had been no bigger than a pigeon’s nest.

“What a country this is,” he said indignantly, but with good humour.

“There are not enough sticks in this wood to warm the only man who wants them. I suppose they use all the firing to keep the pheasants warm. Hark at them! If I was a rich man I wouldn’t keep such birds....

“England is not such a place as it was when I was a young man. It is not half the size for one thing. Why, when I was a young man, you could go up a lane with a long dog or two and pick up a bit of supper and firing and nothing said. The country seemed to belong to me in those days, but now I might as well be in Africa. I am worse off than the labourers now, except that I have got more sense than they have, singing their silly old songs, like this.” Then he sang with perhaps mock sentimentality a frail little peasant song, full of the smallness of lonely, small lives:—

“What is that to the song about ‘the swift and silly doe’ my old father used to sing to us, or about ‘Gentle Jenny’ the mare that threw the fellow that wasn’t going to pay for her hire. No, there is no room in England now for toe-rags like me and you; if you wanted to, you couldn’t sleep on Bearsted Green to-night.”

Later in the year, on August Bank holiday, I found him at an inn, where a farm bailiff was treating the labourers to much ale. The landlord had a young relative down from London, who sang a song in the bar about a skylark who was to take a message to his mother in heaven. At this the tramp melted a little: the pale face of the singer and the high shrill voice made an entrance somewhere, and he tried to join in the song. But towards evening he was to be found sticking pins through his cheek and ears and into his arms, and offering, for a small sum, to stick them into any part whatsoever; or, lying on his back and twisting his head back—the muscles in his throat croaking all the time like frogs—to pick up with his teeth a penny that lay on the floor. The bailiff had caught him. He did odd jobs about the farm, and lived in a forgotten cottage, too far away from anywhere to keep pigs in. But he slept in the cottage only on one or two nights in the seven. During the rest of the week he was to be found at night under the edge of a copse, beside a little fire, reminding himself of the old, roomy England which he used to know.

CHAPTER VI
MARCH DOUBTS

All day the winter seemed to have gone. The horses’ hoofs on the moist, firm road made a clear “cuck-oo” as they rose and fell; and far off, for the first time in the year, a ploughboy, who remembered spring and knew that it would come again, shouted “Cuckoo! cuckoo!”

A warm wind swept over the humid pastures and red sand-pits on the hills and they gleamed in a lightly muffled sun. Once more in the valleys the ruddy farmhouses and farm-buildings seemed new and fair again, and the oast-house cones stood up as prophets of spring, since the south wind had turned all their white vanes towards the north, and they felt the sea that lay—an easy journey on such a day—beyond the third or fourth wooded ridge in the south. The leaves of goose-grass, mustard, vetch, dog’s mercury, were high above the dead leaves on hedge banks. Primrose and periwinkle were blossoming. Like flowers were the low ash-tree boles where the axe had but lately cut off the tall rods; flowerlike and sweet also the scent from the pits where labourers dipped the freshly peeled ash poles in tar. In the elms, sitting crosswise on a bough, sang thrush and missel thrush; in the young corn, the larks; the robins in the thorns; and in all the meadows the guttural notes of the rooks were mellowed by love and the sun.

Making deep brown ruts across the empty green fields came the long waggons piled high with faggots; the wheels rumbled; the harness jingled and shone; the horses panted and the carters cracked their whips.

Soon would the first chiff-chaff sing in the young larches; at evening the calm, white, majestic young clouds should lie along the horizon in a clear and holy air; and climbing a steep hill at that hour, the walker should see a window, as it were, thrown open in the sky and hear a music that should silence thought and even regret—as when, on the stage, a window is opened and some one invisible is heard to sing a heavy-laden song below it.

But as I walked and the wind fell for the sunset, the path led me under high, stony beeches. The air was cool and still and moist and waterish dark, and no bird sang. A wood-pigeon spread out his barry tale as he ascended perpendicularly to a hidden place among the branches, and then there was no sound. The waterish half-light seemed to have lasted for ever and to have an eternity ahead. Through the trees a grassy, deeply rutted road wound downwards, and at the edge the ruts were broad and full of dark water. Still retaining some corruption of the light of the sky upon its surface, that shadowed water gave an immense melancholy to the wood. The reflections of the beeches across it were as the bars of a cage that imprisoned some child of light. It was but a few inches deep of rain, and yet, had it been a legendary pool, or had a drowned woman’s hair been stamped into the mud at its edge and left a green forehead exposed, it could not have stained and filled the air more tragically. The cold, the silence, the leaflessness found an expression in that clouded shining surface among the ruts. Life and death seemed to contend there, and I recalled a dream which I had lately dreamed.

I dreamed that someone had cut the cables that anchored me to such tranquillity as had been mine, and that I was drifted out upon an immensity of desolation and solitude. I was without hope, without even the energy of despair that might in time have given birth to hope. But in that desolation I found one business: to search for a poison that should kill slowly, painlessly and unexpectedly. In that search I lost sight of what had persuaded me to it; yet when at last I succeeded, I took a draught and went out into the road and began to walk. A calm fell upon me such as I had sometimes found in June thunderstorms on lonely hills, or in midnights when I stepped for a moment after long foolish labours to my door, and heard the nightingales singing out from the Pleiades that overhung the wood, and saw the flower-faced owl sitting on the gate. I walked on, not hastening with a too great desire nor lingering with a too careful quietude. It was as yet early morning, and the wheat sheaves stood on the gentle hills like yellow-haired women kneeling to the sun that was about to rise. Now and then I passed the corners of villages, and sometimes at windows and through doorways, I saw the faces of men and women I had known and seemed to forget, and they smiled and were glad, but not more glad than I. Labouring in the fields also were men whose faces I was happy to recognise and see smiling with recognition. And very sweet it was to go on thus, at ease, knowing neither trouble nor fatigue. I could have gone on, it seemed, for ever, and I wished to live so for ever, when suddenly I remembered the poison. Then of each one I met I begged a remedy. Some reminded me that formerly I had made a poor thing of life, and said that it was too late. Others supposed that I jested. A few asked me to stay with them and rest. The sky and the earth, and the men and women drank of the poison that I had drunken, so that I could not endure the use of my eyes, and I entered a shop to buy some desperate remedy that should end all at once, when, seeing behind the counter a long-dead friend in wedding attire, I awoke.

Even so in the long wet ruts did the false hope of spring contend with the shadows: even so at last did it end, when the dead leaves upon the trees begin to stir madly in the night wind, with the sudden, ghastly motion of burnt paper on a still fire when a draught stirs it in a silent room at night; and even the nearest trees seemed to be but fantastic hollows in the misty air.

CHAPTER VII
A DECORATED CHURCH

Out of the midst of pale wheat lands and tussocky meadow, intersected by streams which butter bur and marigold announce, and soared over by pewit and lark and the first swallows with their delicate laughter, rises the grim, decorated church, of the same colour as the oak trees round about. White and grey headstones, some of great age, bow to it in the churchyard, and seem mutely to crave for the shelter from the north-east wind. There is much room within. All the headstones and those whom they commemorate might find places and not crowd out the little congregation. In one transept a knight and lady are taking their ease in stone, and looking up at the gaudy arms above them. They came early to the church. From the memorial inscriptions on pavement and walls, it would seem that the church belongs to a later great family, still living near. Soldiers, sailors, landowners, clergymen even, they take possession at their death; from 1623 they have flocked here, and the names of their virtues live after them; tyrants perhaps in their lifetime, they have the air of being idols now, and they outnumber the prophets on the window-glass. The service proceeds in the accustomed decent manner, with nasal lesson and humming prayer. Then comes the hymn:—

One woman’s ambitious, shrill treble voice that seems ever about to fall and yet continues to maintain its airy height, leads the congregation to unusual adventures of song. The church is dense with emotion; ordinary gentlemen, shopkeepers, labourers and their wives, men and women of all degrees of endurance, chivalry, good intention, uncertain aims, sentimental virtuousness, hypocrisy not dissevered from hardship, vanity not ignorant of tenderness, hard ambition, the desire to be respected,—men and women throw all kinds of strange meaning, heartfelt and present, imaginative, retrospective, expectant, into the vague words of the hymn. I can see one strong man shouting it with an expression as if he were pole-axing a bull. His neighbour, a frail, tearful woman, sings as if it absolves her from the tears with which she marred not only her own life. One aged woman made it clearly an expression of the nothingness of mankind, a ridicule and blasphemy of life, as if she had repeated the words of the old play:—

Other faces express complacency, hope, the newness of a solution of this thing life, grim, satisfied despair, even a kind of vanity. All these men and women might agree at a political meeting; here they differ each from the rest, and every one of the gods in all the mythologies must be gladdened or angered at some part of the hymn by the meaning of this or that worshipper; Odin, Apollo, Diana, Astarte, the Cat, the Beetle, and the rest revive, in whatever Tartarus they are thrust, at these strange sounds.

The last of the congregation left, but I could still hear the hymn wandering feebly among the tall arches and up and about, apparently restless, as if it sought to get out and away, but in vain. The high grey stone and those delicate windows made a cage; and the human voices were as those of Seifelmolouk and his memlooks, when the giant king kept them in cages because the sound of their lamentation seemed to him the most melodious music, and he thought them birds. Inexorably, the fancy held me that some gaunt giant, fifty cubits high, kept men and women in this cage because he loved to hear their voices expressing moods he knew nothing of. Not more caged are the five brown bells in the tower, with mute, patient heads like cows, their names being Solitude, Tranquillity, Duty, Harmony, Joy.

CHAPTER VIII
GARLAND DAY

The sun had not risen though it had long been proclaimed, when the old road led us into a moist wood that grew on the hillside, and here and there overhung a perpendicular chalk cliff. The soil was black and crisp with old beech mast, and out of it grew the clear, grave, green leaves of anemone and dog’s mercury and spurge and hyacinth and primroses, in places so dense that the dim earth below them seemed to be some deep lake’s water. All the anemones were bowed and rosy. The blue bells were plated with rain. The dark spurge leaves were crowned by pale green flowers. The primroses grew, twenty in a cluster, on long flushed stalks; each petal was perfect, and down their leaves the raindrops slid and glittered or gleamed duskily. Arching above these, the low brier branches carried sharp green young foliage. A shadowed pool in one of the hollows was hardly to be distinguished from the dark earth, except that it was covered with white crowfoot flowers as with five minutes’ snow.

From among the flowers ascended straight stony rods of ash, their ancient stoles bossy and hollowed like skulls, and covered with moss; and from the purple encrusted ash-flowers wood-pigeons shook the rain down to the leaves beneath. Amongst the ash trees were hazels, new leaved, their olive stems gloomily shining.

Over all, the ancient beeches stood up with hard sculptured holes supporting storey after storey of branch and shade which were traversed at the top and at the fringes by fair fresh leaves. The rain had run down the main trunks for generations, and made paths of green and black that tried to gleam. Here and there, low down, the beeches extended long priestly branches clothed in leaf, still and curved, to call for silence in the cool, shadowy, crystal air.

Far away among the branches whitened the chalk cliffs. On this side and on that, immense mossy boulders made tables for thrushes and cast perfect shadows.

High up in the beeches, the invisible wood-wrens sang, and their songs were as if, overhead in the stainless air, little waves of pearls dropped and scattered and shivered on a shore of pearls. Below them the wood-pigeons began to coo—with notes that were but as rounded bubbles emerging from the silence and lost again. Just within hearing, in the hawthorn hedge of the wood, blackbirds were singing: they opened with the most high, arrogating notes that slowly rolled on to noble ends, when suddenly they laughed and ceased; again and again they began so, and again and again they laughed, as if they had grown too wise to believe utterly in noble things. As we went deeper into the wood they ceased, and those moist shades welcomed us as if they held what we desired.

The trees were very old; their leaves were fresh and wet as when beauty and joy shed a few tears. The soil was centuries deep in black beech mast; the herbage seemed to have been born from it in that very hour. The boulders had stood among the primroses so long that the thrushes had chiselled shallow cups in them as they fed there in the mornings; they were embossed with the most tender green and golden moss. The shadows were as solemn and imperturbable as to a child a cathedral, when he first steps into its solitude alone, and a god is created anew out of his marvelling; and yet the hems of their mantles, where they swept the ground, disclosed a flashing underside of crystals newly-born. And for ourselves—we seemed to be home from a long exile, and the pains of it, such as they were, turned like the shadows into crystal. Here, then, was the land to which had fled those children who once bore our names, who were our companions in the days when sunshine was more than wine had ever been since, and they left us long ago, not suddenly, but so strangely, that we knew not that they were far off; hither those children had fled, and their companions of that time; here they had been hiding these many years; abiding here they had become immortal in the green-fledged antique wood, and we had come back to them. Perhaps they recognised us: perhaps they re-entered these bodies of ours. For once more the cuckoo was clear, golden, joyous. When we heard the blackbird again we did not quarrel with the laugh at his own solemnity, since it was not there. It was not memory, nor hope. Memory perished, and hope that never rests lay asleep; and winds blew softly from over Lethe and breathed upon our eyelids, coming as delicate intercessors between us and life. We forgot that ours had been the sin of Alcyone and Ceyx who, in their proud happiness, called one another Zeus! and Here! and for that were cast down by the gods. Once again we did so, for this was the wood of youth, and in the old streets of the soul where the grass grows among the long-untrodden stones, and in the doorways of deserted homes, the sound of footsteps and the click of a frequented latch was heard.

And yonder is the wide prospect again, and the dawn,—the green hedges starred with white stitchwort flower, misty with the first hawthorn clusters, a-flutter with whitethroat, wild with the warbling of the blackcap in their depths; wide, lustrous meadows dimmed by cuckoo flowers, and at the edges of them the oaks beginning to bud and their branches like great black brands about to break into golden flame; and about the oaks that stood in the midst of them the grass waving in the sun like brooks plunging from their roots; farmhouses known only by their encircling apple trees all in bloom; radiant pools where the sand-piper laughed; woods where the oak and ash waded deep in the translucent green of the undergrowth’s rising tide and even then glowed with brown and unborn greens, and the nightingale sang far withdrawn, and at the edge the hurdle-maker worked by his thatched cote; and ridge beyond ridge of hills cloudily wooded; and over all the low sky like a blue bowl just emptied of its cream.

And as we sat at breakfast the village children came up the path between borders dense with tall yellow leopard’s bane and red honesty and sang by the windows—

And they carried garlands of ivy entwined among bluebells and cowslips from the moist warm copses and the meadows.

On the twin vanes of the oasts, one pointing east, one north, the south wind and the west wind were asleep in one another’s arms.

CHAPTER IX
AN OLD WOOD

The chestnut blossom is raining steadily and noiselessly down upon a path whose naked pebbles receive mosaic of emerald light from the interlacing boughs. At intervals, once or twice an hour, the wings of a lonely swallow pass that way, when alone the shower stirs from its perpendicular fall. Cool and moist, the perfumed air flows, without lifting the most nervous leaf or letting fall a suspended bead of the night’s rain from a honeysuckle bud. In an indefinite sky of grey, through which one ponderous cloud billows into sight and is lost again, no sun shines: yet there is light—I know not whence; for the brass trappings of the horses beam so as to be extinguished in their own fire. There is no song in wood or sky. Some one of summer’s wandering voices—bullfinch or willow-wren—might be singing, but unheard, at least unrealised. From the dead nettle spires, with dull green leaves stained by purple and becoming more and more purple towards the crest, which is of a sombre uniform purple, to the elms reposing at the horizon, all things have bowed the head, hushed, settled into a perfect sleep. Those elms are just visible, no more. The path has no sooner emerged from one shade than another succeeds, and so, on and on, the eye wins no broad dominion.

It is a land that uses a soft compulsion upon the passer-by, a compulsion to meditation, which is necessary before he is attached to a scene rather featureless, to a land that hence owes much of its power to a mood of generous reverie which it bestows. And yet it is a land that gives much. Companionable it is, reassuring to the solitary; he soon has a feeling of ease and seclusion there. The cool-leaved wood! The limitless, unoccupied fields of marsh marigold, seen through the trees, most beautiful when the evening rain falls slowly, dimming and almost putting out the lustrous bloom! Gold of the minute willows underfoot! Leagues of lonely grass where the slow herds tread the daisies and spare them yet!

Towards night, under the sweet rain, at this warm, skyless close of the day, the trees, far off in an indolent, rolling landscape, stand as if disengaged from the world, in a reticent and pensive repose.

But suddenly the rain has ceased. In an old, dense wood the last horizontal beams of the sun embrace the trunks of the trees and they glow red under their moist ceiling of green. A stile to be crossed at its edge, where a little stream, unseen, sways the stiff exuberant angelica that grows from it, gives the word to pause, and with a rush the silence and the solitude fill the brain. The wood is of uncounted age; the ground on which it stands is more ancient than the surrounding fields, for it rises and falls stormily, with huge boulders here and there; not a path intrudes upon it; the undergrowth is impenetrable to all but fox and bird and this cool red light about the trunks of the trees. Far away a gate is loudly shut, and the rich blue evening comes on and severs me irrevocably from all but the light in the old wood and the ghostly white cow-parsley flowers suspended on unseen stalks. And there, among the trees and their shadows, not understood, speaking a forgotten tongue, old dreads and formless awes and fascinations discover themselves and address the comfortable soul, troubling it, recalling to it unremembered years not so long past but that in the end it settles down into a gloomy tranquillity and satisfied discontent, as when we see the place where we were unhappy as children once. Druid and devilish deity and lean wild beast, harmless now, are revolving many memories with me under the strange, sudden red light in the old wood, and not more remote is the league-deep emerald sea-cave from the storm above than I am from the world.

CHAPTER X
IN A FARMYARD

We waited to let the forty cows go past, each of them pausing to lick the forehead of the strawberry cow that leaned over the gate of her stall and lowed continually concerning her newly-born white calf. But so slow they were in their wanton, obedient movement to the milking-shed that we turned and found another path, and thus surprised a pond lying deep among tansy flowers, grey nettles and billows of conquering bramble and brier.

The farmyard was always dusty, or deep with ridgy mire, from the trampling of men and horses and cows in the streets that wound among its cart-lodges, stables, stalls, milking-sheds and barns all glowing with mature tiles, and ricks gleaming with amber thatch. But in a corner lay unused, older than them all, the long-headed and snaky-bodied pond. We learned to know that pond.

Sometimes, when summer has honoured the water with a perfect suit of emerald green, that pond shows itself to be a monstrous, coiled, primÆval thing, lying undisturbed, and content to be still and contemplative. Often has the monster been driven away—by draining; often has it returned, still a green, coiled, primÆval being that disappears suddenly in November and leaves a soft, dark pool. Some have ventured to intrude upon the monster, to fish for the sleepy carp which are found when it has been driven from its nest of purple mud; but they fish in vain.

The solitary, dying ash tree at the edge of the pond seems, by day, when the monster is powerful there in the summer, to be but the skeleton of an old victim; or, in the winter, the sad and twisted nymph of the water. But every night, like any dreaming child or musing lover, though not perhaps so happily, is it let into a varied, strange, exalted paradise.

You may see it—on still evenings when the mist prevails over all things except the robin’s song, and makes even that more melancholy—or when the songs of many nightingales besiege, enter and possess the house and the deserted farmyard—or when the cold and entirely silent air under a purple November sky chills the blood, so that friendship and hope and purposes are all in vain as in an opiate dream—then you may see the ash-tree take heart. It has the air of one going home upon a lonely road that will not end in loneliness. Those bare and stiff, decaying branches are digits pointing homeward through the sky; the tree forgets the monster at its feet and the children who laugh and the supremacy of the buildings round about. It might seem, with those extended branches, to be a self-torturing and aspiring fanatic who had endured thus for uncounted days and nights, and has his vision at last. For, when night is perfect, the tree exults, and though it is perhaps not joyous, it is as one of those great sorrowful temperaments—of soldier, or explorer, or humorist—so active and inexorable that they may claim kinship with the truly joyous ones. If it is still sad, it is “endiademed with woe.” How large and satanic it is beside the heavy rounded oaks and the stately, feminine elms and the lovely limes.

Even so might a philosopher heighten and lord it, travelling in Charon’s ship along with deflated tyrants and rhetoricians and bold and crimson animals born to eat provinces and to poison worms; even so, Ossian and Arthur and Cuchullain and Achilles triumph over men that were yesterday on thrones and chariots.

Often have I seen the tree, and it alone, giving character to the whole valley and filling the land as a bell fills a cathedral or as the droning of a bee fills a lily.

My little thoughts seem to be drawn up among the black branches like twittering birds going to rest in some high cliff that is a chief pillar of the fabric of the night. Half dead and threatened though it be, surely the spirit of it, which is to many a broad and tragical night as the arm of a great painter to his picture, will survive not only me and my words but the tree itself. I have approached it on some moonlit midnights, when the sky was so deep that the tall oaks were as weeds at the bottom of an unfathomed sea, and it has stood up erect and puissant, as if it were the dreamer at one with all he sees, in a world of blind men with open eyes. Then, as the autumn dawn arrived it was still looking towards Orion; defrauded, indeed for a time of its vision, but not of its glory. The swaying cows wandered to the milking-sheds. The little bats ran to and fro in the air and made their little snipping and drumming sounds. It was light; but the ash tree was not utterly cast down; it still walked in the way of the stars; it was inscribed in solemn characters upon the sun that rode up red in the mist.

CHAPTER XI
MEADOWLAND

This is one of the tracts of country which are discovered by few except such as study the railway maps of England in order to know what to avoid. On those maps it is one of several large triangular sections which railways bound, but have not entered. All day long the engines scream along their boundaries, and at night wave fiery arms to the sky, as if to defend a forbidden place or a sanctuary. Within there is peace, and a long ancient lane explores it, with many windings and turnings back, as if it were a humble, diffident inquirer, fortunately creeping on, aiming at some kind of truth and not success, yet without knowing what truth is when he starts. Here it hesitates by a little pool, haunted, as is clear from the scribbled footprints on the shore, only by moorhen and wagtail, and, in the spindle trees beside it, by a witty thrush; there it goes joyously forward, straight among lines of tall oaks and compact thorns; then it turns to climb a hill from which all the country it has passed is visible first, meadow and withy copse and stream, and next the country which it has yet to pass—a simple dairy land with green grass, green woods, and stout grey haystacks round the pale farms. But in a little while it winds, confused again under high maple and dogwood hedges, downhill, as if it had already forgotten what the hilltop showed. On the level again the hollow wood which the willow wren fills with his little lonely song has to be penetrated; the farmyard must be passed through, and the spirit of the road looks in at the dairy window and sees the white discs of cream in the pans and the cool-armed maid lifting a cheese; and yet another farmyard it loiters in, watching the roses and plume-poppy and lupin of the front garden, going between the stables and the barn, and there spreading out as if it had resolved to cease and always watch the idle waggon, the fair-curved hay-rakes leaning against the wall, and the fowls which are the embodiment of senseless reverie—when lo! the path goes straight across wide and level pastures, with a stream at its side. Seen afar off, losing itself among the elms that watch over the hill-side church, the little white road is as some quiet, hermit saint, just returned from long seclusion, and about to take up his home for ever and ever in the chancel; but when we reach the place, he is still as far away, still uncertain in the midst of the corn below. At the charlock-yellow summit the road seems to lead into the sky, where the white ladders are let down from the sun.

The ways of such a road—when the June grass is high and in the sun it is invisible except for its blueness and its buttercups, and the chaffinch, the corn-bunting and yellowhammer, the sleepiest voiced birds, are most persistent—easily persuade the mind that it alone is travelling, travelling through an ideal country, belonging to itself and beyond the power of the world to destroy. The few people whom we see, the mower, the man hoeing his onion-bed in a spare half-hour at mid-day, the children playing “Jar-jar-winkle” against a wall, the women hanging out clothes,—these the very loneliness of the road has prepared us for turning into creatures of dream; it costs an effort to pass the time of day with them, and they being equally unused to strange faces are not loquacious, and so the moment they are passed, they are no more real than the men and women of pastoral:—

The most credible inhabitants are Mertilla, Florimel, Corin, Amaryllis, Dorilus, Doron, Daphnis, Silvia and Aminta, and shepherds singing to their flocks—

Yonder the road curves languidly between hedges and broad fringes of green, and along it an old man guides the cattle in to afternoon milking. They linger to crop the wayside grass and he waits, but suddenly resumes his walk and they obey, now hastening with tight udders and looking from side to side. They turn under the archway of a ruined abbey, and low as if they enjoy the reverberation, and disappear. I never see them again; but the ease, the remoteness, the colour of the red cattle in the green road, the slowness of the old cowman, the timelessness of that gradual movement under the fourteenth century arch, never vanish.

Of such things the day is made, not of milestones and antiquities. Isolated, rapt from the earth, perhaps, by the very fatigue which at the end restores us to it forcibly, the mind goes on seeing and remembering these things.

Here the cattle stand at the edge of a pond and the tench swim slowly above the weeds amongst them as they stand. The sun strikes down upon the glassy water, but cannot take away the coolness of the reeds about the margin. Under the one oak in the meadow above, the farmer sits with his dog, so still that the dabchick does not dive and the water vole nibbles the reed, making a small sound, the only one.

There five little girls play the lovers’ game on a green in front of their cottages. One of them kneels down and cries quietly; the others hold hands and circle round her, singing—

Then the little “poor Mary,” with her face still in her apron, takes up the singing, the others still moving round her:—

Then the others sing to her—

At this, Mary rises, and chooses one of those from the ring, and the two stand in the middle, holding each other’s hands crossed, while the others sing—

So Mary now takes her place in the ring; her true love becomes “poor Mary,” and chooses another lover amidst the same song; and at last, when all have been Marys and true lovers, with resolute faces, they scatter carelessly and forget. Finding some marbles in a roadside crevice, I ask one child to play, but she says that marbles are not played after Good Friday. A white cow rests beside, so much in love with peace that it grazes lying down. On the other side of the road the bacon hisses and smells from a farmhouse whose mountainous thatch makes a cool cave of tranquillity; on the sunny slopes the starlings who have honeycombed the thatch, whistle or creep in with food or straw. Not one path disturbs the unfrequented verdure of the green, though the road winds lazily round it.

Yonder, up a steep field, goes a boy birdnesting in a double hedge, stooping to the nettles for the white-throat’s eggs, straining high among the hawthorns for a dove’s. He does not hasten. Now and then he calls “cuckoo,” not a timorous note, but lusty like the bird’s own: and now he lies down to suck a thrush’s egg. He will not take the robin’s eggs, “or I shall get my arm broken,” he says. A cruel game, but so long as he loves it with all his heart perhaps it is forgiven him, and in a few years he will never again go slowly up that field, forgetful of schoolmaster, father and mother and the greatness of man.

At noon there is a hamlet in front. On one side of it the church thrusts a golden weathercock high into the blue sky, and with his proud and jolly head uplifted towards the north the bird flames and exults; on the other side, tall beeches give out the sleepy noise of rooks. Straight ahead “The White Hart,” a white inn with heavy, overhanging thatch, divides the road in two. Those white walls can never cease to glow; they have persuaded the sun to sleep under those eaves for ever like the carter on the bench. The sign-board hangs silent, but the sign has melted away. A waggon stands by the door; the waggoner holds a chestnut mare with one hand, with the other he slowly tilts the glittering tankard and shows all of his brown throat throbbing; the hostess watches.

The low white kitchen is cut in two by a tall, semi-circular settle, to which the hostess returns, and with a round elm table between her and the fire she lops fine greens into a pail. A tenanted fireplace is better than a cold one on any day of the year, and it is cool in the window seat between the ale and the wind. Outside lies the little road, waiting for me. And now we go on together, the road having still the advantage of me, though it has poured no libation.

All through the long afternoon that land offers symbols of peace, security and everlastingness. Tall hedges half hidden in a rising tide of long, starry herbage, ponds where the probing carp make the lily leaves rise and flap, wide meadows where the cows wander half a mile an hour, vast green cumulus clouds with round summits here and there disclosing infinite receding glooms of blue—these with their continual presence store the mind, giving it not only the poignant joy in which half consciously we know that never again shall we be just here and thus, but the joy, too, of knowing that we take these things along with us to the end—

On that poem of Crashaw’s to his ivory-handed mistress runs my thought as the road, towards evening, once more progresses without any hedges between it and the fields, when a broad double hedge or narrow copse of oak and ash, departs at a right angle from the way. Up to the briers and thorns at the hem of the trees comes the close, cool yellow grass and obtains a shadow there. Out on to that grass the blackbirds have strayed and are straying farther and farther; the rabbits, too, are well away from shelter, hopping a few steps and crouching. In the hedge itself a hedge-sparrow just once lets loose its frail dewy song, a nightingale utters one phrase of marvelling and is still. The musky wild roses star all the hedge and the scent begins to wander in the moist air with the scent of honeysuckle and of shadowy grasses. Under a now misted sky that makes the light seem to dwell no longer in it but in the grass, the flat, yellow field running to the little wood is a place impregnable and inaccessible. Invisible walls shut me off, though no hedge intervenes; no dreadful barrier could do it more effectually. It would be as easy to step into the past as into this candid field, a withdrawn world with its own sun.

A mile farther a little town stands upon the edge of this enclosed land. A brook runs down to its edge and half encircles it. Clean and fair, shining with linen, the meadows come right up to the town which turns its back upon them, with long rows of beans and peas dividing the yellow houses from one another. The chimney smoke rises above the criss-cross roofs of stone and thatch and then travels round the church tower, which emerges from the houses like some grave schoolmaster out of his children, most of them thronging close and others wandering in wedge or line into the fields. In the town the road loses itself, bewildered among islands made by inns and groups of cottages, the church and the shops. Among these pour a flock of sheep, swelling as the streets enlarge, contracting as they contract, and always filling them. Within the town there is not a blade of grass, nor a garden, nor a tree; and yet the richly burning roofs, the grey or white walls, the sign of “The Spotted Cow,” or the sign of “The Sun,” make not an interruption but a diversion in the fields, when suddenly, between two white walls, shines the green evening land, and across it a busy train rushes and vanishes with long, delicious, dying reverberations among the dark woods and rosy clouds at the horizon.

CHAPTER XII
AN OLD FARM

The sun rose two hours ago, but he is not to be found in the sky. Rather he seems to have disembodied himself and to be lazily concealed in the sweet mist that lies white and luminous over the half-mile of level meadows at the foot of this hill. Those meadows are brown with yet untouched grasses, grey and silken with the placid ruffled waves of yesterday’s new swathes, and liquid emerald where the hay has already been carted; and now the brown, now the grey, now the emerald warms and becomes visible under the feet of the light that dwells in the mist. Beyond the level rises a low but sudden hill of large, round-topped, colourless, misty trees, known by their outline alone, and in the heart of them a moving gleam as of sudden surf now and then, for there also the sun is wandering and hiding himself but not his light. I turn my head and, looking again, the sun is once more in the sky, the mist has gone. The vast, hunched, hot, purring summer country is clearly enjoying the light and warmth. The swallows flying are joyous and vivid in colour and form as if I had the eyes of some light-hearted painter of the world’s dawn. Where the gleam was, that haunt of the sun’s, that half-hour’s inn to which he turns from the long white road of the sky to rest, is seen to be the white farm house that stands in the midst of woods and ricks.

Yet, though so clear, the house, half a mile off, seems to have been restored by this fair and early light and the cooing of doves to the seeming happy age in which it was built. The long, tearing crow of the cock, the clink of dairy pans, the palpitating, groaning shout of the shepherd, Ho! ho! ho! ho! ho! now and then, even the whirr of the mowing machines, sound as if the distance that sweetens them were the distance of time and not only of space. They set a tune on this fair morning to “What a dainty life the milkmaid leads” or that old song:—

In those days when the house was built the poets were mainly townsmen, preferring the town. Of the modern sad passion of Nature they had nothing: they loved the fields in their season. They went out into the country and in their fÊtes champÊtres there was something gay and foreign from us, the thought of which calls up a vision of fields more unspoiled than they are now. There were elves in those days; country people saw them, if poets failed. If you were returning home after nightfall, from a day’s shooting, you might see the torches among the oaks that lit the king of the cats to his grave. The country had always been there and was to be there for ever. Men greeted it and smiled as once they greeted Helen, not thinking of her immortality. And there—yonder, half a mile away—lingers that age. I see it in the green and silver wheat, and its glimmering, rustling hurry, and in the bright path beside; the very noises of a gun rolling and breaking up and embedding themselves in the dense wood cannot mutilate it, but rather hint that somewhere, where the echoes last play, a spirit of mirth is in hiding still.

The farmer himself confirms the superstition. Though nearly seventy, he is staunch and straight, and spending most of his day on horseback, with his calm, large-featured, sandstone face, filling easily and handsomely with clear-souled anger and delight, he suggests the thought of a Centaur, an impossible, noble dream of horse and man created by a god dissatisfied with man and beast. Thirty centuries ago such a man, so marvellously in harmony with the earth, would have gone down in men’s memories as a demi-god or the best-loved of the fauns. His voice rings over the meadows or across the table at the inn as strong as a cow’s, as deep and humming and sweet as a bee’s in a chimney. When he passes by men look at him, I think, as if he cast no shadow, so compact of light is he. He has known sorrow, he has known pains that threaten to crack the brain, but never melancholy. There is a kind of gaiety in his sorrow even as in his joy; for sorrow changes him only as a shadow changes a merry brook. He breathes of a day when men had not so far outstripped the lark and nightingale in heaviness as we have done. His jesting bathes the room or the lane in the light of a Golden Age and the freshness of all the May days we can never recover. Nor do I know anything human more pleasant than his grave smiling as he stands in the newly reaped cornfields under the last light and sees the large purple land and takes it all unto himself, and then turns without a sigh and, drawing a long draught of his own cider in the cool granary, drinks deep. He rises early and yet is as cheerful when he goes first afield as when he goes to bed.

His house, dark with panelling and heavy furniture of every generation since it was built, would be gloomy were it not for his blithe sentiment about the past. He speaks of the long-dead generations not as if they were names, but so that they are known certainly to have lived and worked and enjoyed. That one planted the spreading oak, that globed green world of nightingale and willow-wren and dove; that added the knolled pasture and cut the deep, stony lane that leads to it through the brook; another built the fruit wall and bought the copy of Tristram Shandy that stands with a hundred other books in the dining-room. The books themselves are good to look at, all of them original or early editions. There is The Whole Duty of Man and many sermons, Prior, The Spectator, Thomson’s Seasons, Fielding, The Rambler, The Task, The Deserted Village, The Waverley Novels, Dickens, and nothing later than In Memoriam; at that the family seems to have stopped buying books. He knows them shrewdly enough, but it is as what the family has approved and lived on that he values them. Never was a man who seemed to take his mortality so happily and naturally. One day, showing me a small board of ancient things, he brought out a tray of coins, none earlier than Charles II., but each connected with one or another of the family. Amongst them was a modern sixpence. That was his third deposit, after the guinea and the groat, and he was too much pleased with these slender memorials not to do his own part in continuing them. “What,” he said carelessly, “would they think of me in a hundred years’ time if I had not put a sixpence in?” And he smiled lightly as if he had been on a hill and seen the long tracts of time ahead and his farm and strangers of his own blood working in its fields.

CHAPTER XIII
POPPIES

The earliest mower had not risen yet; the only sign of human life was the light that burned all night in a cottage bedroom, here and there; and from garden to garden went the white owl with that indolent flight which seems ever about to cease, and he seemed to be the disembodied soul of a sleeper, vague, homeless, wandering, softly taking a dim joy in all the misty, dense forget-me-not, pansy, cornflower, Jacob’s ladder, wallflower, love-in-a-mist and rose of the borders, before the day of work once more began.

So I followed the owl across the green and past the church until I came to the deserted farm. There the high-porched barn, the doorless stables, the cumbered stalls, the decaying house, received something of life from the owl, from the kind twilight or from my working mind. Above the little belfry on the housetop the flying fox of the weather vane was still, fixed for ever by old age in the south, recording not the hateful east, the crude and violent north, the rainy west wind. Whether because the buildings bore upon their surfaces the marks of many generations of life, all harmoniously continuous, or whether because though dead and useless they yet seemed to enjoy and could speak to a human spirit, I do not know, but I could fancy that, unaided, they were capable of inspiring afresh the idea of immortality to one who desired it. Mosses grew on the old tiles and were like moles for softness and rotundity. A wind that elsewhere made no sound talked meditatively among the timbers. The village Maypole, transported there a generation ago, stood now as a flagstaff in the yard, and had it burst into leaf and flower it would hardly have surprised. Billows of tall, thick nettle, against the walls and in every corner, were a luxuriant emblem of all the old careless ease of the labourers who, despite their sweat and anxiety and hopelessness, yet had time to lean upon their plough or scythe or hoe to watch the hounds or a carriage go by. Tall tansy and fleabane and hawkweeds and dandelions, yellow blossoms, stood for the bright joys of the old life. The campions on the hedge, the fumitory in the kitchen garden, meant the vague moods between sorrow and joy, speaking of them as clearly as when from out of the church flows the litany, charged with the emotion of those who hear it not though lying near. Had the wise owner admitted these things and for their sake obeyed the command of the will which bade him leave the Green Farm untouched? He might well have done so had he seen the birth of colour after colour in the dawn.

At first, when doves began to coo and late cuckoos to call in invisible woods beyond, I thought that the green of grass was alive again; but that was only because I knew it was grass and could translate its grey. The green trees were still black above a lake of white mist far off when the yellows of hawkweed and tansy rose up. The purple fumitory, the blue of speedwells, came later. And then, as I turned a shadowy corner and came out into the broad half light just before sunrise, I saw the crimson of innumerable poppies that had a thought of mist pearl enmeshed amongst them.

They were not fifty yards away—they were in a well-known place—and yet there towered high walls and gloomed impassable moats between them and me, such was the strangeness of their beauty. Had they been reported to me from Italy or the East, had I read of them on a supreme poet’s page, they could not have been more remote, more inaccessible, more desirable in their serenity. Something in me desired them, might even seem to have long ago possessed and lost them, but when thought followed vision as, alas! it did, I could not understand their importance, their distance from my mind, their desirableness, as of a far-away princess to a troubadour. They were stranger than the high stars, as beautiful as any woman new-born out of summer air, though I could have reaped them all in half an hour. A book in a foreign, unknown language which is known to be full of excellent things is a simple possession and untantalising compared with these. They proposed impossible dreams of strength, health, wisdom, beauty, passion—could I but relate myself to them more closely than by wonder, as a child to a ship at sea which, after all, he may one day sail in, or of a lover for one whom he may some day attain. I was glad and yet I fatigued myself by a gladness so inhuman. Did men, I asked myself, once upon a time have simply an uplifting of the heart at a sight like this? Or were they destined in the end to come to that—a blissful end? Had I offended against the commonwealth of living things that I was not admitted as an equal to these flowers? Why could they not have vanished and left me with my first vision, instead of staying and repeating that it would be as easy to draw near to the stars as to them?

And yet the mind is glad, if it is troubled, of an impossible, far-away princess. She deceives the mind as Columbus deceived his weary sailors by giving out at the end of each day fewer knots than they had truly travelled, in order that they should not lose courage at the immensity of the voyage.

And still the poppies shone and the blackbird sang from his tower of ivory.

CHAPTER XIV
AUGUST

I have found only two satisfying places in the world in August—the Bodleian Library and a little reedy, willowy pond, where you may enjoy the month perfectly, sitting and being friendly with moorhen and kingfisher and snake, except in the slowly recurring intervals when you catch a tench and cast only mildly envious eyes upon its cool, olive sides. Through the willows I see the hot air quiver in crystal ripples like the points of swords, and sometimes I see a crimson cyclist on a gate. Thus is “fantastic summer’s heat” divine. For in August it is right to be cool and at the same time to enjoy the sight and perfume of heat out of doors. In June and July the frosts and east winds of May are so near in memory that they give a satisfaction to the sensation of heat. In September frosts and east winds return. August, in short, is the month of Nature’s perfect poise, and I should like to see it represented in painting by a Junonian woman, immobile, passionless and happy in a cool-leaved wood, and looking neither forward nor backward, but within.

Far off I see a forest-covered hill that says “Peace” with a great, quiet voice. From the pool and towards the hill runs a shining road, with some of its curves visible for miles, which I have not followed and dare not follow, because it seems to lead to the Happy Fields.

Between the pool and the road is a house built squarely of white stone. A tiled roof, where the light is always mellow as sunset in the various hues that sometimes mix and make old gold, slopes from the many-angled chimneys and juts out beyond and below the wall of the house. In that shadowy pocket of the eaves the martins build, and on a day of diamond air their shadows are as rivulets upon the white wall. Four large windows frame a cool and velvety and impenetrable gloom. Between them stand four still cypresses.

A footpath skirts the pool, and on one side tall grasses rise up, on the other thorns and still more grasses, heavy with flowers and the weight of birds. The grasses almost meet across the path, and a little way ahead mix in a mist through which the white-throat and the dragon fly climb or descend continually. The little green worlds below the meeting grasses are full of the music of bright insects and the glow of flowers. The long stems ascend in the most perfect grace; pale green, cool, and pleasant to the touch, stately and apparently full of strength, with a certain benignity of shape that is pleasant to the eye and mind. Branched, feathered, and tufted heads of flower top the tall grass, and in the clear air each filament divides itself from the rest as the locks of the river-moss divide on the water’s flow. All bend in trembling curves with their own fulness, and the butterflies crown them from time to time. When wind plays with the perfectly level surface of the grasses their colours close in and part and knit arabesques in the path of the light sand martins. Sometimes the mailed insects creep along the pennons of the grass leaves to sun themselves, other insects visit the forget-me-nots in the pool. Every plant has its miniature dryad.

Nearer, and sometimes in the water, the branched meadow-sweet mingles the foam of its blossom and the profuse verdure of its leaves with willow herb, blue brooklime, white cresses, and the dark purple figwort. A mellow red, like that of autumn oaks or hawthorn at the first touch of spring, tinges the meadow-sweet. The disposition of its flowers is so exquisite that they seem to have been moulded to the shape of some delicate hand; every bud takes part in the effect. The lithe meanders of the stems are contrasted with the intricacy of the goose-grass and the contortion of the forget-me-nots. Both in the midst of the long stalk and in the plume of flowers the branching is so fine and the curves rely so intimately upon one another that a simple copy on paper is cool and pensive after the vanity of cultivated curiousness. Hardly anywhere is there a visible shadow; at most there is a strange tempering of pure light that throws a delicate bloom upon the cattle and the birds, and a kind of seriousness upon the face or flower within its influence. A dark insect of clear wings alights upon the new hawkweed flower, and sits probing deliciously in its deep heart; but, although the petals are in the midst of grasses and under thorns, the fly perches unshadowed, and throws no shade beyond a moistening of the flower’s gold. The close purple flowers of the vetches are scarcely duller in the recesses, where the plant begins to climb, than at the summit where the buds bear a fine down. The fish gleam deep in the pool. The dark ivy shines in the innermost parts of the wood.

But these are merely the things that I see beside the pool, and here, more than anywhere else, the things that are seen are the least important. For they are but the fragments of the things that are embroidered on the hem of a great garment, which gathers the clouds and mountains in its folds; and in the hair of the wearer hang the stars, braided and whorled in patterns too intricate for our eyes. The Junonian woman is a little ivory image of the figure which I think of by the pool. She is older than the pool and the craggy oak at its edge, as old as the stars. But to-day she has taken upon herself the likeness of one who is a girl for lightness and joy, a woman for wisdom, a goddess for calm. Last month she seemed to laugh and dance. Next month she will seem to have grey in her hair. To-day she is perfect.

CHAPTER XV
OLD-FASHIONED TIMES

The road curves gently but goes almost east and west; on the north side is a bank surmounted by dense thorns; on the south is a low hedge, over which can be seen two broad meadows, with oaks here and there, running up in shining bays among tall woods, and above and beyond those woods several wooded ridges, hunched and blue, on the last of them a windmill like a stag’s antlered head that somehow hints at the sea beyond. His back thrust into the northern hedge, an old man leans all the year through, whenever the faint sun draws him forth, or he (as it seems) draws forth the sun, for when the sun is out he is there, and he moves round the curve of the road as the sun moves. Coral-faced, white-haired, he is still straight and tall, though his eyes, that resemble shellfish, seem dissolving in rheum, and his face is stamped with wrinkles like brookside mud where wagtails have played. Apollo, when he disguised himself as an old man, must have looked so. Most of all he loves to lean at the corner from which the windmill is clearliest seen; and thither he looks, though he cannot see it, with a serene satisfaction. For not only did he pass his best manhood close to that hill, but there, as he joyfully recalls, he once climbed an ash tree for a sparrowhawk’s nest, and in descending, the miller wrapped a stinging whip about his legs, so that he fell violently and in so doing broke the miller’s nose; and that is why he looks towards the windmill affectionately.

What times those were! Wages were low, but then a labourer got many things cheap which others got dear; for the making of a linen smock he paid a woman half-a-crown, while a farmer had to pay four shillings, and the smocking was the same. Also, in his worst days, if he and his family had nothing on the table but turnip and bread, he had given away two hundred seed potatoes to a man who praised them. Besides, those were the “old-fashioned times,” and in fifty or sixty years of toil, suffering and, at length, some leisure, he has proved to himself that they were good. “Some think,” said a passer-by to him, “that the old-fashioned times were better than these?”

“Think!” said he, “I know they were.” For surely they were, since it was then that he used to drive a glorious coach twice a week to London and now he does not; and in those days there were “good people” in the little town under the mill, and you knew who they were and their grandfathers too, but who are they now?

And yet, he says, there used to be a great deal less pride. In his young days the farmers and their sons went to church and sang in the choir in their clean white smocks; but now the church is like a gentleman’s conservatory. “And, lord! where are the gentlemen now? Many a gentleman looks like an ordinary man about here, and there’s many an ordinary man looks like a gentleman. That means a lot of awkwardness for those that care. Now, in the old-fashioned times, we knew a gentleman as soon as we could walk. There was the old squire! He used to expect us to sing carols outside his windows on Christmas Eve! then he would ask us into the hall and give us good mulled ale and a shilling apiece—and how he did give it! Not like a fellow putting a halfpenny into the collection, nor like your good old lady’s giving you a pair of gloves too small for you and a tract, as much as to say it is more blessed to give than to receive; but his look was as good as his shilling and made you want to sing, and I believe the old gentleman could no more have done without us than we could do without him.”

He is simply a memory with a voice, both of them slightly aided by a present of whisky from an old employer, and in the sun of April he sprouts like any cottager’s garden with alyssum and tulips.

Food is a great subject with him, and especially roast pork, from which it is perhaps fair to conclude that it was not often to be had. One bout of it he often recalls. He was still in his prime, a big man of fifty, and though he had been threshing all the morning—“it is a good many ups and downs of the flail to a pound of pork,” he says—he had eaten no food and he had none by him and there was none in the house. Presently hunger so far mastered him that he stopped work and took a walk round the farmyard. There he saw a fat pig lying on his side, heavy and making bacon rapidly. In a short time he had laid his plans: lifting up his flail he began to thresh the pig, and shouting above its screams: “Son of a fool, I’ll teach you to eat my dinner.” Nor did he cease to beat the pig and to upbraid it for stealing his dinner until the farmer came out and, pitying his case, sent him out a dish of roast pork to make amends. Then he tells a story to celebrate the incomparable joys of such a dish. An old woman had died and two young wives came to lay her out. After doing their work, they sat down on the bed, talking of many matters. Soon they fell to discussing pork. One said that it was best in the middle of the day; the other that it was best at night; and the debate was hot and threatened to be long, when the corpse rose straight up in the bed and said in a gentle voice that it was good at all times, then lay back in peace and never moved again.

But it was wonderful how much could be done without pork. He and two other men had mowed a seven-acre field of grass, all but a bit,—and a good crop,—in one long day, eating nothing but bread and cheese, and drinking two gallons of new ale apiece. They began at half-past two in the morning, one of them having cleared the edges the night before with an old scythe, because the ground was rough there with sticks and stones. They moved in Échelon up the field, he as the strongest mower coming last in the row, so that he could always keep them up to their work; for they had to keep ahead of him lest his swathes should fall over their unmown grass. At five they had the first meal, hardly sitting down to it, for fear of losing time; then again at nine they ate, and so on through the day. The rule for eating and drinking was never to wait until they were really hungry or thirsty, thus avoiding the necessity for a heavy meal and some rest. At first, he said, they talked all the time, especially when they were carrying back their scythes to begin a fresh swathe at the bottom of the field; but gradually their talk grew less and less, and they finished in silence at half-past nine. He recalled with pride that when he first mowed barley, being a strong man, he used to take three more drills in his swing than the other man, but in a day’s work he had lost ground and he had to give up the conceit.

But he is proudest of his coaching years and especially of one day. It was a very fine April. The snakebirds or wrynecks were screaming all along the road as he set out. The horses were all shining, the white windmills were turning with mad, downward plunges “fit to make you mad.” So at the first stop, which was ten minutes, off he went, and sure enough in the first shaw he came to he heard the cuckoo, and as there was a big shallow pond in the heart of the trees, all warm with sun, he stripped and bathed, rejoicing all the time with the thought that he would be able to drive the horses as fast as he liked to make up for the delay. He could have ridden a cow that day. He felt so proud that he wanted to run down some foxhounds that crossed the road before him, and all the way to London the horses’ hoofs beat out his name—“Peter Durrant! Peter Durrant!”—as they had never done before. Nowadays, he says, there is not a pair of horses, that does not clatter: “Poor pluck to-day! Poor pluck to-day!” which is what a team of plough horses used to sing in his day, as they went home in the afternoon. But so strong is his belief in the old days—to which he belonged—from which he is an exile in a foreign field—that he is never sad as he sits in the sun. He condescends to live on with just such an air as when an old man lays his hand on a boy’s shoulder and encourages him. From his conspicuous life he is rather well known, and it happened once that a poet with a command of large margins once made some verses after some misfortune had befallen him and recited them to the old man by the wayside. “That is wonderful,” said Peter, “wonderful! How ever did you think of all those things about a poor old man like me? But ’tis lucky, sir, that you were not the sufferer, or those beautiful things would never have been written, for I could never have thought of them myself.”

For the rest, he collects herbs and with the help of Culpeper and some little experiment concocts fragrant ointments and dark, painful draughts in which a dozen flavours conflict; nor has he ever killed a man: he takes them himself. He will bury his nose in a fragrant posy brought home by the children and say gravely, and I think with some dark wisdom, “Why, they must be good for something,” and deeply inhaling, he continues, “At least they are good for old age.” And his own old age he attributes to the diet of living tadpoles which he used against a decline, fifty years ago.

CHAPTER XVI
ONE GREEN FIELD

Happiness is not to be pursued, though pleasure may be; but I have long thought that I should recognise happiness could I ever achieve it. It would be health, or at least unthwarted intensity of sensual and mental life, in the midst of beautiful or astonishing things which should give that life full play and banish expectation and recollection. I never achieved it, and am fated to be almost happy in many different circumstances, and on account of my forethought to be contemptuous or even disgusted at what the beneficent designs of chance have brought—refusing, for example, to abandon my nostrils frankly to the “musk and amber” of revenge; or polluting, by the notice of some trivial accident, the remembrance of past things, both bitter and sweet, in the company of an old friend. Wilfully and yet helplessly I coin mere pleasures out of happiness. And yet herein, perhaps, a just judge would declare me to be at least not more foolish than those men who are always pointing out the opportunities and just causes of happiness which others have. Also, the flaw in my happiness which wastes it to a pleasure is in the manner of my looking back at it when it is past. It is as if I had made a great joyous leap over a hedge, and then had looked back and seen that the hedge was but four feet high and not dangerous. Is it perhaps true that those are never happy who know what happiness is? The shadow of it I seem to see every day in entering a little idle field in a sternly luxuriant country.

It is but five grassy acres, and yet as the stile admitting you to it makes you pause—to taste the blackberries or to see how far the bryony has twined—you salute it in a little while as a thing of character. Many of the fields around are bounded by straight-ruled hedges, as if they had been cut up by a tyrant or a slave, with only a few of such irregularities as a stream or a pond may enforce. Not one of the five hedges of this field makes a straight line. The hedge up to your right from the stile is of a noble and fascinating unruliness. So winds a mountain stream down its ladders of crag in Cardigan; into some such form would the edge of a phalanx be worn by long swaying in the height of battle. The other hedges are equally fretted. Here, there is a deep indentation where the cattle lie and wear the blackthorn stems until they are polished for ever; and there the knitted stoles and roots of ash jut out and encroach, fierce and antique and stony, like a strange beast left there to lie in the sweet grass—like a worn effigy over a grave where knight and hound have become mingled in monstrous ambiguity. The surface of the field is of the same wildness. It does not rise and fall in a few sea-like heavings, or in many little waves, nor is it level or in one long, gradual slope, but rising sleepily from west to east it is broken by sudden hollows and mounds. In one place the furze on a mound makes a little world for two or three pairs of linnets and white-throats, and there are the largest and sweetest blackberries; there also a hundred young stems of brier spend spring and summer in perfecting the curves of their long leaps—curves that are like the gush of water over a dam, and yet crossing in multitudes without crowding, in all ways without discord, like the paths of the flight of swallows when they embroider the twilight air. In another place it is always marshy, the home of marigold and reed. One corner used to be dominated by a tall tented oak, of so majestic balance that when sawn through it stood long in the wind; there the pheasants are proud among bugle or centaury flowers. Here and there a smooth boulder protrudes, guarded by hundreds of blue scabious flowers which welcome butterflies of their own hue, and sometimes a peacock butterfly displays himself on the naked stone.

At the eastern and higher end the field becomes so narrow that it is like a lane, through which the hunt gloriously decants itself among the knolls. It is narrowed still more by a small pond, and round that a tall holly of solid shadow with glancing edges, an oak, an overhanging thicket of bramble and thorn and three old butts of ash, where the fairy gold of toadstools is scattered abundantly as if sown by one sweep of a generous hand. The pond is the home of one moorhen, which is always either swimming there or hastening to it from the field. It is but as large as a farmhouse kitchen, and yet the moorhen will not desert it, finding the eaves among the roots as pleasing as attics to a boy; content with her seeming security though the road passes just above, and rich in her share of sun and moon and stars. To see the moorhen swimming in the narrow pond on a silent and misty autumn morning is to think, now with joy, now with pain, of solitude, but always with a reverie at last that is entangled among the dim, late stars—she possessing the solitary pond, in the solitary autumn country on a planet that is but an element in the solitude of the infinite; and her liquid hoot dwells long in the brain.

It is worth while to watch the pool at dawn, because, though it might seem to be but one of the myriad waters that light candles of adoration and celebration to every dawn, it has then the air, as the mist drips and tingles at the edge, of being a grey priest who has not yet done serving other gods than the dawn, and, until it puts on its white robes and glimmers altogether, it makes with the oak tree a group of pathetic revolt against the day—the oak might be a Saturn or a Lear, the pool in its gradual surrender to the light a Druid sheltering dear and unprosperous mysteries yet a little longer from the proud sun. Then the thrush sings on the holly crest with such blitheness as cannot, nevertheless, excel the water’s glory in the fully risen light.

But whatever conversion the little pond undergoes on dawn after dawn, the field as a whole retains the same antiquity, which it announces so powerfully that I knew it on first crossing the stile. Perhaps the lawless shape of the field, its unusual undulations, its unkemptness in the midst of a land all rich with crops—perhaps these things suggested antiquity; but I think not—at least they do not explain it for it was then strange, and now with all its familiarity it has rather gained than lost its power. It is the same when its outlines are concealed by mist and all I can see is the clover rough with silver dew, white mushrooms, and perhaps one red yoke of maple in the hollow air, and when the snow covers all but the myriad thistles blossoming with blue tits. Enter it in spring—the linnets sprinkle a song like audible sunlight—and yet the field is old. But November is its notable month. Its trees are all oaks and they have hardly lost a leaf; the leaves are falling continually from those smouldering sunset clouds of foliage, which, kingly rich, look as if they would never be poor. One skylark sings high over the field in the rainy sky. The blue rooks unsheathe themselves heavily from the branches and shine silverly and caw with genial voices. A pheasant explodes from a grass tussock underfoot. The air smells like the musky white wild rose; coming from the west it blows gently, laden with all the brown and golden savours of Wales and Devon and Wiltshire and Surrey which I know, and the scent lifts the upper lip so that you snuff deeply as a dog snuffs. A stoat goes with uplifted tail across the field. But the field itself—was there a great house here once and is it dead and yet vocal? Are its undulations and rude edges all that remain of an old wood? Or was there a battle here, and is the turf alive with death? Certainly there is death somewhere speaking eloquently to mortal men. It is not alive, but it laments something, and where there is sorrow there is life.

For just one day in September the goldfinches come and twitter, and are happy among the thistles, and fly away.

CHAPTER XVII
THE BROOK

The brook rises in a clear, grey, trembling basin at the foot of a chalk hill, among flowers of lotus and thyme and eyebright and rest-harrow. Here the stone curlew drinks, and above is the gently rounded encampment, ancient, and yet still young compared with the dusky spring which has something gnomish and earthy about it, though it takes the sun. It drops in thin, bright links over the chalk, and then for a time loses its way in playing with cresses and marsh marigolds, spreading out so finely that hardly will the ladybird drown that falls therein—falling at length in a cascade from one dead leaf to another down a hedge bank. Below, it nourishes the first forget-me-nots, by a gateway where it slips across the lane, and is dew-fed by the vetches and clovers that swaddle the posts of the gate. Now it is unheard and unseen in the darkness underneath dog’s mercury leaves until it has gained its first treble voice as, pausing by an interrupting branch, it fills a hollow and pours over in icy fingers to the ditch beneath. Here it has cuckoo flowers and creeping jenny and butterbur to feed; thrushes drink of it; beetles dart across it like scullers that dream now and then upon their sculls. It learns now to sway the cress, to bow the brooklime, to brighten the sides of the minnows; the fledgling of the robin that falls into it dies. It floats the catkin down, and out of it rises the azure dragon fly. Sometimes it muffles its going in moss, but in a little while it gushes through drains and falls and falls with a now unceasing noise in a land where all the hollows are full of apple trees, rough grey with dewy clover, and through all the hollows winds the brook, dappled by blossom, leaned over by the bee-cradling, sleepy, meadow cranesbill flower; in its green bed the watervoles wear their submerged pathways. Now men have laid a slab of elm or of rude stone across it, and from those they lean to drink at haymaking or harvest; the children float on it pinnaces of bent reed, or set it to turn waterwheels of ash bark, or dip their cans in it for curving minnow or twisting tadpole or the little black circlers that meet and divide and pursue for a few April days. Already it has ranged along its margin rough, leaning willows garlanded by purple ivy; and their leaves that dip to the surface it will never allow to rest. The briers still overleap it in their long dreaming curves. The kingfisher sits over it and the small trout nestle in its bed. It enters many an ash copse and fills it with willow herb and meadowsweet and all juicy plants, figwort and iris and orchis and hyacinth and reed, with osiers and their mists of crimson and gold. Nymph-like the brook brightens and curves its crystal flesh and waves its emerald hair under the bridges at field corners, where the brambles dip their blossoms, and the nightingale sings and the sedgewarbler has its nest. For it the lonely willows in the flat fields shed their yellow leaves most pensively, like maidens casting their bridal garlands off. Three flowering apple trees in one islanded angle on a lawn of perfect grass, a most dream-worthy place, fit for the footprints of the beautiful,

seem all its own; for there it first makes a deep sound in falling over a ledge among its own curded, quivering and moonlit yellow foam. Thereafter it opens wide between broad low banks from which the cattle can step and stand among the reeds under serene tall ashes, and the lily petals float upon it that catch against the branches and against the hearts of men in distant towns. There, too, among the lilies the brook first takes the stars into its heart, but gaily with all its flowers and thick herbage and its rippling fall never still amidst the arrow-headed reed. It moves like the high autumn wain, followed by many children, who have time to leave it and gather flowers and are yet never left behind. The heron comes to it at dawn, knowing from afar the dark pool where it curves under a steep bank and grim oak roots, and slopes down to it solemn and eager and alone in the winter morning. The sand-martin and wagtail often pause in their flight and hover above the placid water and the cool, reflected reeds and watermint. Where it is all of one depth, between straight banks of cowslip, the boys sit and let their feet waver in the flood and then roll or plunge in, with shouts and gurgling talk, while in the reeds, the dabchick waits with head just above water, trembling for her eggs or cheeping young. On Sunday the country lover, cruel all the week, brings his maid to the brook and, suddenly tender and a little proud, shows her the moist, weed-covered nest and delights in her melting eyes. Fed now by other brooks, from its own hills and from little woodland springs, the brook consents to spread into a pool in an old garden, and in the sweet imprisonment of lily and rose and iris and oleander lies as if asleep, an indolent Leda contented with the white swan, and yet escaping all the time, its wild soul rejoicing yonder beneath the heavily overhanging honeysuckled thorns of the wide meadows again. Under the white highway the brook runs and lures men to lean from the parapet by the milestone and look at the water and take up some coolness and some bitterness from it when they return to the blinding miles. Its course is marked by alders and willows, shaping cornfield and pasture in divine meanders that seem to have learnt rather to be contented with travelling than to be eager for the goal. Could a man but wander in that way once more, like the child in the field of flowers so multitudinous that she did not know what to do, but closed her eyes and was happy yet! Now the otter plays there, and where the ash roots twist into many a cave. Through leagues of country the brook runs, passing high, silent woods and misty, hot, luxuriant, flowering thickets and wet, cloudy copses full at evening of confused birds’ singing, which no one sees except the brook and the milk-white heifer who crowns herself in white roses in the shade as she stands in tall, moist, sumptuous angelica and watches her crowned image looking out of that fair sky in purest waters; then, suddenly emerging from this lowly country it falls into a river and is lost or seems to be lost in the turbid, serious flow that is soon to know the sea.

CHAPTER XVIII
AN AUTUMN GARDEN

The cottage gardens are ceremonious and bright with phlox and sunflower and hollyhock; the orchards are yellow with apple, and of all sunburnt hues with plum; in the descending lane you wade in a world of ragwort, knapweed and Canterbury-bell, with your head in the world of honeysuckle; and, parting the hazel branches to seek their branching clusters, you see now and then in the valley a farmhouse on whose walls and roofs the hues of fruit and flower all meet harmoniously. They meet as the colours of many pictures meet in some ancient palette, or as Plato and Catullus and Sidney and Shelley meet in some grey schoolmaster.

In every Autumn the farmhouse, with its old tiles and new and its glowing bricks (suppressing easily a few of a putrid blue scattered here and there), seems, in spite of its age, to be a great new flower. It is the royal flower of autumn. It expresses at once all that fruit and flower upon the hill have been expressing laboriously and word by word.

Perfect gay youth and sage antiquity are mingled in the aspect of the house; just as, in an autumn dawn, the gradual veiled golden pomp of serene victory speaks, to one mood, of the happy and mellow antiquity of the world, but, to another mood, speaks of the sublime, insurgent youth which all nights nourish and equip and send forth over the land. In winter it is old; it has apparently been long fortifying itself against the foreign cold of the landscape, snowy white or windy grey. In spring it is old; the green garlands it as in tender mockery. In summer it is old; it is impatient of the bragging rose on its walls and the multiplication of leaf and flower. But in September it is at home, as if after an exile; it remembers only pleasant things—the autumns of two centuries, their harvest, their fruit, their blossom, their hedgerow vintages of bryony and cornel and thorn, their ruddy moons. Gathered about it are the farm buildings of the same colour, stacks of dark hay, sharp-breasted ricks of corn, maternal, warm oast-houses and orchard and garden, all of the same family.

In the misty days, when no gleam falls from the warm sky on grass or water or fruit, you would say that the sun had stalled his horses for a season within the farmhouse walls; so much they glow; so glorious are they. I have seen the radiant cart-horses coming with grave nods through the farmyard at dawn as if they were to be yoked to the chariot of the sun; the red-haired carter was at least a Phaeton, a son of Apollo if not Apollo himself.

The garden borders are discreetly furnished, so that they are now as clouds in the neighbourhood of the sun, doing it honour by their liveries. They are populous with sun-flowers, hollyhocks (tall, solemn halberds at evening, guarding the outmost edge and held up mysteriously), red-hot pokers rising out of a lake of rose of Sharon and nasturtium, into which run promontories and peninsulas of snap-dragon, rocket, Shirley poppy, carnation and phlox of every hue that white and red confederate can invent; here and there fuchsia trees in rivers of autumn crocus, great poppies and evening primrose, and at their feet, like long, coloured shadows stretching away, red flax and pansies and the recurved stone-crop which the tortoise-shell butterfly loves. These bodies of colour change year by year—in one autumn the pansies made a long, curled purple dragon among all the rest; but always the taller flowers look as if stopped short in the mazes of a dance which is soon to be resumed. Between these two borders are two little lawns divided by a path, whereon the fanciful might see a little beam of the house’s influence in the peacock butterfly that returns continually to one stone, settling there as the wanton light cast on ceiling and wall by a raised glass settles when the glass is put down.

It is not a rich or choice garden, though a fitting one. Yet an earlier head of the farmer’s family—a student of allegorical prints and emblems, the designer of at least one, in which his own garden had notoriously served as a model for the Eden—was so much enamoured of the flowers and the house that he came, towards the end of his life, to think himself over-worldly in his esteem of them, but failed to overcome it, and, a little before his death, in the free wanderings of his mind, announced that he saw Paradise, and that it was even as his garden was, “nasturtiums and all, Jacob” (which was a thrust at the said son, a disliker of those flowers)—except that the vainglorious new carnations were not there.

Travelling beyond the garden, the house declares its lordship over four limes that stand before it, in the home field, at just such a distance that the flying blackbird, frightened from the garden, will stop there instead of going to the hedge beyond. As far as to these trees the house sends out its light and virtue. Approaching them from the hills, the eye of the wayfarer first salutes the out-buildings, the ricks and the elms; it turns to the house and gratefully pauses there; and last it glides to the limes and is at rest, delighted by that one lyric effort, yet with a slight gravity—even a sigh—at the accomplishment of its sweet toil. Then it is to be seen how noble is the order of the four trees. They are not in circle, square or line; they make no figure, except that they are in a sharp curve, straightening out as it nears you, so that they have a power as of the first ships of a fleet, coming into sight round a promontory and suggesting majestic numbers. At nightfall the swallows twitter among the topmost branches, sweetly, trippingly, one at a time, or in pairs and companies, for a little while. Suddenly lamps are lit within the house.

CHAPTER XIX
THE WALNUT TREE

The immense, solitary, half-veiled autumn land is hissing with the kisses of rain in elms and hedgerows and grass, and underfoot the tunnelled soil gurgles and croaks. Secret and content, as if enjoying a blessed interval of life, are the small reedy pools where the moorhens hoot and nod in the grey water; beautiful the hundred pewits rising in ordered flight as they bereave the grey field and, wheeling over the leagues that seem all their own, presently make another field all a-flower by their alighting; almost happy once more is the tall, weedy mill by the broken water-gates, dying because no man inhabits it, its smooth wooden wheels and shoots and pillars fair and clean still under the red roof, though the wall is half fallen.

And in the heart of this, set in the dense rain, is a farm-house far from any road; and round it the fields meet with many angles, and the hedges wind to make way, here, for a pond, deep underneath alders; there, for some scattered parcels of hayrick, on a grassy plot, encircling a large walnut tree; and for another pond, beside an apple orchard, whose trunks are lean and old and bent like the ribs of a wreck. A quadrangle of stalls, red tiled, of grey timber—trampled straw in their midst—adjoins the house, which is a red-grey cube, white-windowed, with tall, stout chimneys and steep, auburn roof, and green stonecrop frothing over its porch. In and out goes a rutted, grassy track, lined by decapitated and still-living remains of many ancient elms.

In the overhanging elm branches flicker the straws of the long-past harvest, and the spirits of summers and autumns long-past cling to grass and ponds and trees.

The walnut tree among the ricks is dead. Against its craggy bole rest the shafts of a noble, blue waggon that seems coeval with it; long ladders are thrust up among its branches; deep in the brittle herbage underneath it lean or lie broken wheels, a rude wooden roller, the lovely timber of an antique plough, a knotted and rusted chain harrow, and the vast wooden wedge of the snow-plough that cleared the roads when winters were still grim. In the soft, straight rain these things are a buried world, the skeletons of a fair-seeming old life mingled with a sort of pleasant tranquillity as on the calm dim floor of a perilous main.

Half of the fruit trees are dead, save for their lichen and moss and their nests in fork and niche and the robin musing in the branches.

The duck pond, deep below, is all in shadow. The alders lean over it. Some have fallen, and the moorhens have built on them, and the round vole sits there or drops off with the suddenness of fruit; but he cannot dive, for a million dead leaves are sunk or floating in the purple shallows.

Over all is the stillness of after harvest. Long ago the gleaners went home under the frosty moon, and the last wain left its memorial wisps in the elms. The rain possesses all, and a strange, funereal evocation calls up the bronzed corn again, and the heavy waggon and the grim, knitted chests of the bowing horses as they reach the bright-fruited walnut tree. The children laugh and run—who remember it in the workhouse now—and in a corner of the field the reaper slashes hatefully at the last standing rows. The harvest-queen sits on the topmost sheaves. They dance in the barn. Their voices are blithe and sweet; for the rain has washed away their flesh and quieted them now and recalls only golden hours, which linger in this idle autumn place and do not die but only hide themselves as sunlight hides itself in yellow apples, in red roses, in crystal water, in a woman’s eyes.

CHAPTER XX
A GOLDEN AGE

Almost at the end of a long walk, and as a small silver sun was leaving a pale and frosty sky, we began to ascend a broad, heaving meadow which was bordered on our right, on its eastern side, by a long, narrow copse of ash trees. At the top of the meadow, hardly a quarter of a mile away, was a little red farmhouse—yet not so little but that it rose with a maternal dignity among and above the sheds and stables, its children, and, like it, of antique red. The home and dependencies gave out a sense of solidity, independence and seclusion. Our hearts acknowledged at once that it was desirable, saluted it, and were calmly glad at the sight.

At that moment the tumult of a windy day was entirely gone. The north wind now lay dead upon the long white clouds in the east. The smoke from the farmhouse chimneys flowed southward along the top of the ash trees in a narrow, motionless rivulet in the calm air. Far off the hoofs of the returning hunt clattered decently, and combined with the dim memory of the wind in trees and sedge to give to the great meadow an emphasised tranquillity like that which fills an invalid’s room when others are just audibly busy about and below. We walked more and more slowly up the meadow. The red house was clear and hard in the grey air, yet with a richness and implicated shadow as of things submerged. Something which it gave out abundantly filled our minds that had for hours played with casual and untraceable thoughts and images—descended like an enthusiasm among criticisms. In a minute the house was beautiful; it seemed to flower with the happiness of men and women and little children living melodiously; there, we thought, must be minds and bodies which, without carelessness and without stupidity, found in life what some expect from the future and some feign to remember in the past; there was character and beauty and strength, which time flowed over in vain. Hither, it seemed, had drifted upon Lethe’s stream all the hopes and wishes and recollections and unaccomplished dreams of unhappy men, and had formed at last a blossoming island in the waste.

And some were enjoying that island now. The very smoke from the chimneys had goodness in it. Even as we walked we turned the moment past into a Golden Age, except that, whenever we looked up towards the house, we knew that all was not yet lost, and that a golden age might still succeed the last. Overhead sailed some little rosy clouds that were part of the blossom of that house.

Then suddenly a fearless child ran into the garden and blew a horn and disappeared. Then we knew that the past moments had been as when, in the old tale, men saw an anchor let down out of the clouds and rooted in the ground, and, looking up saw a rope shaken as if to dislodge the anchor, and heard the voices of sailors aloft in the sky, and then saw a man clambering down the rope and dying at last, as if he had been drowned in the air which they breathed easily, and the voices aloft were heard no more.

CHAPTER XXI
THE VILLAGE

I

The village stands round a triangular, flat green that has delicate sycamores here and there at one side; beneath them spotted cows, or horses, or a family of tramps; and among them the swallows waver. On two sides the houses are close together. The third, beyond the sycamores, is filled by a green hedge, and beyond it an apple orchard on a gentle hill, and in the midst of that a farmhouse and farm-buildings so happily arranged that they look like a tribe of quiet monsters that have crawled out of the sandy soil to sun themselves. There the green woodpecker leaps and laughs in flight. Down each side of the green run yellow roads that cross one another at the angles, two going north, two going south, and one each to the east and west. Along these roads, for a little way, stand isolated cottages, most of them more ancient and odd than those in the heart of the village, as if they had some vagrant blood and could not stay in the neat and tranquil community about the green. Thus, one is built high above the road and is reached by a railed flight of stone steps. The roof of another slopes right to the ground on one side in a long curve, mounded by stonecrop and moss, out of which an elder tree is beginning to grow; and it has a crumbling tiled porch, like an oyster shell in colour and shape. One has a blank wall facing the road, and into the mortar of it, while it was yet fresh, the workmen have stuck fragments and even complete rounds of old blue and white saucers and plates. In others the mortar is decorated by two strokes of the trowel forming a wedge such as is found on old urns. In the ruinous orchard by a fourth, among nettles and buttercups, there is always a gipsy tent and white linen like blossom on the hedge. One of these houses seems to have strayed on to the green. Years ago someone pitched a tent there, and in course of time put an apple pip into the ground close by and watched it grow. The codling tree is now but a stump, standing at the doorway of a black wooden cottage named after it. Between it and the village pond go the white geese with heads in air.

Off one of those roads the church lifts a dark tower along with four bright ash trees out of a graveyard and meadow which are all buttercups. On three of the others there are plain, square, plastered inns, “The Chequers,” “The Black Horse,” “The Four Elms,” where tramps sit on benches outside, and within the gamekeepers or passing carters sit and wear a little deeper the high curved arm-rests of the settles. But the chief inns stand opposite one another at one corner of the green, “The Windmill,” and “The Rose,” both of them rosy, half-timbered houses with sign boards; the one beneath a tall, rocky-based elm which a wood-pigeon loves, the other behind a row of straight, pollarded limes; and opposite them is a pond on the edge of the green. In these inns the wayfarer drinks under the dark seventeenth-century beams; the worn pewter rings almost like glass; moss and ivy and lichen, and flowers in the windows, and human beings with laughter and talk and sighs at parting, decorate the ancient walls. The lime trees run in a line along the whole of one side of the green, and at their feet still creeps a stream whose minnows hover and dart, and the black and white wagtail runs. Behind the trees are half the cottages of the village, some isolated among their bean rows and sunflowers, some attached in fantastic unions. Most are of one storey, in brick, which the autumn creepers melt into, or in timber and tiles perilously bound together by old ivy; in one the Jacobean windows hint at the manor house of which other memory is gone; all are tiled. Their windows are white-curtained, with geranium or fuchsia or suspended campanula, or full of sweets, and onions, and rope, and tin tankards, and ham, and carrot-shaped tops, dimly seen behind leaded panes. Between the houses and the limes, the gardens are given up to flowers and a path, or they have a row of beehives: in one flower-bed the fragment of a Norman pillar rests quietly among sweet rocket flowers. Instead of flower gardens, the wheelwright and the blacksmith have waggons, wheels, timber, harrows, coulters, spades, tyres, or fragments, heaped like wreckage on the sea floor, but with fowls and children or a robin amongst them, and perhaps, leaning against the trees, a brave, new waggon painted yellow or red or all blue.

On the other populous side of the green the houses are of the same family, without the limes; except that far back, among its lilac and humming maple foliage and flower, is the vicarage, a red, eighteenth-century house with long, cool, open windows, and a brightness of linen and silver within or the dark glimmer of furniture, and a seldom disturbed dream of lives therein leading “melodious days.” Of how many lives the house has voicelessly chronicled the days and nights! It is aware of birth, marriage, death; into the wall is kneaded a record more pleasing than brass. With what meanings the vesperal sunlight slips through the narrow staircase window in autumn, making the witness pause! The moon has an expression proper to the dwellers there alone, nested among the limes or heaving an ivory shoulder above the tower of the church.

From one side to the other the straight starlings fly.

Along the roads go waggons and carts of faggots, or dung, or mangolds in winter; of oak bark in spring; of hay or corn in summer; of fruit or furniture in autumn.

A red calf, with white hind legs and white socks on her forelegs, strays browsing at the edge of the road. A close flock of sheep surges out of the dust and covers the green.

II

We were twelve in the tap of “The Four Elms.” Five tramps were on one side; on the other, six pure-blooded labourers who had never seen London, and a seventh. A faggot was burning in the hearth, more for the sake of its joyful sound and perfume than for its heat. The sanded floor, cool and bright, received continually the red hollowed petals that bled from a rose on the table. The pewter glimmered; the ale wedded and unwedded innumerable shades of red and gold as it wavered in the mystic heart of the tankard. The window was held fast, shut by the stems of a Gloire de Dijon rose in bloom, and through it could be seen the gloom of an ocean of ponderous, heaving clouds, with a varying cleft of light between them and the hills which darkened the woods and made the wheat fields luminous.

Now and then a labourer extended his arm, grasped the tankard, slowly bent his arm whilst watching a gleam on the metal, and silently drank, his eyes lifted as if in prayer; then slowly put it back and saw a fresh circle being formed around it by the ale that was spilled.

The tramps leaned on a walnut table, as old as the house, polished so that it seemed to be coated with ice, here and there blackened with the heat transferred to it by a glass bottle standing in the sun. They looked at one another, changed their attitudes and their drinks, gesticulated, argued, swore and sang. They became silent only when one of their number hammered a tune out of the reluctant piano. They were of several ages and types, of three nationalities, and had different manners and accents. One was a little epicurean Spanish skeleton who loved three things, his own pointed beard, a pot of cider, and the saying of Sancho Panza: “I care more for the little black of the nail of my soul than my whole body.” He was a grasshopper in the fields of religion, scandal and politics, and wore his hat scrupulously on one side. Another was a big, gentle Frenchman, with heavy eyelids, but a fresh boy’s laugh. Early in the evening he scourged the republic; later he laughed at the monarchy, the consulate and the empire; and as he went to sleep touched his hat and whispered “Vive la France!” His neighbour was fat, and repeated the Spaniard’s remarks when they had been forgotten. It was to be wondered when he walked, what purpose his legs were made to serve. At the inn it was to be seen that they were a necessary addition to the four legs of a chair. He wanted nothing but a seat and not often wanted that. He was, I may say, made to be a sitting rather than a sapient animal, and had been lavishly favoured by Nature with that intention. The fourth, a pale, sour anarchist, hardly ever spoke, but was apparently an honest man, whom his indignant fellows called “parson.” The last was one that been born a poet, but never made one. He sang when he was asked, and later when he was asked not to sing; very quietly and very bitterly he cried when he had sung, indulging in a debauch of despair. Before we parted, the twelfth man sang all the sixteen verses of “Sir Hugh of Lincoln,” in the hope of quenching their love of interminable songs. “Heaven and Hell!” said the tramp, “ye make me feel as if I was like Sir Hugh and Lady Helen and the Jew’s daughter all in one. Curse ye! bless ye!”

Half way through the evening the tramps were asleep. The labourers were as they were at the beginning. They sat a-row according to age, and nothing but age distinguished them. Their opinions were those of the year in which they were born; for they were of that great family which, at the prime of life or earlier, seems to begin growing backwards, to quote “grandfather,” more often, and thus to give the observer a glimpse of the Dark Ages. Life to them was at once as plain and as inexplicable as the patterns on their willow cups or toby jugs. The eldest had a gift of dumbness that sometimes lasted nearly half a century, but once set going and wandering from ploughs to horses, and from horses to the king, his loyalty brought this forth:—

“If that Edward wasn’t king he ought to be.” Advancing to the subject of hay with a digression on the church, “Which,” said the youngest, “which came first, parson or hay?”

“What,” said the eldest in a short speech that occupied an hour of time, without interruption from the rest, who drank through his periods and sat watching him while he drank in the intervals by way of semi-colon. “What is church for but rector to pray in? The parson prays for—for a good season, and a good season means a good hayrick like a church; well, then, Robert, George, Henry, and Palmston, I say that the day after they first wanted a rick they put up a church and put rector in to pray. I,” continued he, growing confident, “remember the Crimea. I had but four boys then, but bad times they were. But we had tea, we had tea; the wife used to grate up toast and pour boiling water on it.”

“We called that coffee,” said the youngest, a lover of truth.

As the evening darkened and pipes went out and the scent of carnations came in with the wind, their speech became slower, with long intervals, as if they spoke only after ploughing a furrow. One by one they seemed to go out like the candles overhead, were silent, but never slept. The oldest, reddest and roundest of face, with white hair, looked like the sun at a mountain crest. The next seemed to be the spirit of beneficent rain, pale, vague, with moist eyes and tangled grey beard. The third was as the south wind, mild, cheerful, pink-faced, with a great rose in his button-hole. The fourth was the west wind, that lifts the hay from the level fields into the clouds at a breath, that robs the harebell of its dew and stores it with rain—a mighty man with head on breast, and small hands united, and flowing hair. And the youngest was the harvest moon, glowing, with close hair and elusive features, a presence as he sat there rather than a man. So they were in the twilight, like a frieze on the white wall.

“Well, us have had fun, haven’t us, George?” said the harvest moon. He received no answer as we passed out of “The Four Elms,” for all but he had left the world where words are spoken and opinions held; and the hazel lane seemed to be a temple of the mysterious elements that make the harvest and the apple crop and the glory of the hops.

III

Walking in a country churchyard it is often hard to think of it as a place of death. The children play among the tombs. At Easter the village girls bring hither primroses from the woods, planting some, scattering others. Labourers meet and talk there, for the footpaths all converge towards the church. Lovers walk there. The gravedigger is indeed often busy there, but you may go many times and not find him at a grave, and it is seldom but he is planting flowers, pruning bushes, or mowing grass. On the tombs themselves, in epitaph or in lack of epitaph, is written the corporate wisdom of the village, its philosophy and its history half transmuted into poetry. Fancy can never be quiet as the eye passes from Mary to Rebecca, from John to David, whose record let no one interpret untenderly. I have seen on an afternoon many a novel that shall never be written save as it is written here, deep without gloom, bitter without scandal, on those tablets that have kept their legends too long to be altogether fair. Even the harshest brevity has its fitness, as if it were penned by the right hand of Fate. And here, as in some other matters, we have made an insignificant advance upon our ancestors. The chief records of early races are their tombs. We know not so much that they lived as that they are dead. We guess at their lives from their dead bones. A tool, a weapon, a trinket, a favourite beast, is buried with them, conferring a life in death. In some ancient graves the bodies are found in a sitting posture, and if conjecture be just, we may suppose that the dead man once slept thus and dreamed, daring not to lie down, because no clothes kept off the frost or rain. So the endeavour to provide for an after life by utensils and food has not been wholly in vain. But “Tombs,” said the poet, “have their life and death.” The headstone is heir to the deceased and out in the world seeks a fortune, which is commonly bad. The fates of tombs have seldom been traced. The history of the epitaph has never been written. Thus is much common philosophy hidden away. Probably no body of literature could be found that is more fertile in homely truth and fancy. But collections of epitaphs either have no plan, or are intended to show only what is curious, brilliant, or very old.

In this little churchyard a chapter or two of history and progress is easily seen. At the middle of the eighteenth century the sexton wrote the epitaphs, dealing out eulogy and fact with a generous hand. After him came a series of nonentities, whose epitaphs are as like one another as Windsor chairs. Honest regret, or “smiling through tears,” was ousted by complacent joy at the celestial lot of the deceased. Decent friendship was replaced by encomiastic fraud. Like all fashions it was feeble, but like all fashions it had some good; it produced models of accurate expression of “not what he was, but what he should have been.” Then in the nineteenth century followed a silent age. “He was alive, and is dead;” tombstones with such inscriptions are like men who do not speak in company, and unlike them, they never disappoint. They say, at anyrate, not more than is written of honest men in heaven. The children of those silent people did little but irrelevantly quote or paraphrase the Bible and Dr. Watts. The epitaphs were now thought worthy of a clear, large type; the fashion at least taught children to spell. Some there were who gained no small village reputation by a diligent study of these sentences. Even the wiser pillars of the village, whether they could read or not, were sure of awe and admiration among their audience, if their speeches—political, religious, or scandalous—were launched by “As the great Dr. Watts wrote ...” or “In the words of Amos, whom you may know....” Not of this period, but first notorious then, was the epitaph on Sir ——, Bart. His family, being still one of splendour and influence, everything connected with it was held in esteem. It was, therefore, not unnatural that the admirers of an aged spinster should put upon her tomb the epitaph that was picked out with letters of gold on that of the young baronet—

Strangers are apt to wonder first at the longevity common in the parish—then at the humour of the thing—and go away both contented and deceived. For some time it was not uncommon to quote a grave passage from Shakespeare, with decent omission of the author’s name; when, however, a revolutionist not only published “Shakespeare” on a headstone, but “Romeo and Juliet” too, the vicar was approached, the sexton ran a risk every day, the inn-keeper, the J.P. was approached. The bereaved person had in the meantime erased the offending words, and until recently you might read—

beneath which the curious eye may still discover “Kings iii.” placed there in homage to parish prejudice. The storm almost raised by the introduction of two lines by Robert Burns—“a poet as well as a drunkard,” according to village rumour—is still remembered. The parish clerk having doubted whether it was in “Ancient and Modern” took refuge in the book of Ecclesiastes, until a confidant (a fearless thinker and a friend of Chartists) swore it was written by a lord. The vicar was questioned. Opening a book whose cover was well known to the doubter, and repeating with nasal unction the offending words, he drew tears and apologies from the man. After that comparative freedom of choice was enjoyed, and some went bravely back to

as recently as 1885. Tennyson was in favour at that time; no one grumbled since he was the author of

But when I brush aside the leaves and flowers of herb honesty, growing by the older graves, although I am willing to admit that the village view of death has become more solemn, I cannot but wish back again the author of

Where are the robuster views of which this is a late reminder? The gay, the fanciful, the calmly elaborate epitaphs seem to have gone for ever, and in the newer portion of the churchyard it is hard not to think of death, unless we turn to the unnamed little mounds that rise and fall like summer waters, so calm, so soft, so green, that fancy cannot make them aught save pillows for the weary. I have seen a tramp sleeping there and envied him his unconscious return to the good old insouciance which was warm with the thought that in the midst of death we are yet alive.

IV

From the churchyard run twelve footpaths; some ending at farmhouses close by; some losing themselves in the nearest road; one leading nowhere, nor of any use to-day, since the house which drew it thither across the wheat is under the cow-parsley and grass; one going on without end, touching here and there a farmhouse, crossing a road, passing in at the door of an inn and out through the garden, as if some friendly man had made the path by following his heart’s desire. Most of the paths led up on to the hills among which the village is set. From the highest part, in spring, the warmth and life of the scene below contrast strangely with its immense age, as the new brazen leaves of the oak with their ancient trunk. The houses are old, the church older, the farm wall yonder is partly the remains of a castle of Norman date. The hedges twist so fantastically because they also are old, marking ancient paths, the edges of departed woods, the gradually advancing line of men’s camp fires overcoming the wilderness. In that hollow the gemote used to sit. Here a company of cavalry charged down the hill and to a man went over the chalk pit to the road and to death. There stood an abbey, now speaking only through a curve added to the undulations of the land. In the next village a poet was born. A dolmen rises out of the wheat in one field, like a quotation from an unknown language in the fair page of a book. The names of the places are in the same language, and yet how smoothly they issue from the lips. The little roads, so old, wind among the fields timidly as if they marked the path of one creeping with difficulty through forest coeval with the world. Some roads have disappeared—there where the wheat grows thin in a narrow band across the field. Another is disappearing; worn to the depth of some feet below the surrounding fields by the feet of adventurers, lovers, exiles, plain endurers of life, its end is to become a groove full of hazels and birds, the innermost kernel of the land, because nobody owns and nobody uses it. In contrast with those, how certain of its aim the great road running east and west, the road of conqueror, pilgrim, merchant, the embodiment of will and opportunity; and that, too, so old that heron and rook seem to recognise it as they go over at nightfall. There is no age that does not play its part in the symphony of this June scene. And yet, standing still upon the ridge commanding it, when the roads are overhung by the blythe new green of beech leaves and paved with their ruddy chaff, these things become a part of the silence and clear air which they trouble and enrich as do the storied pavements and walls of a cathedral, thrilling the ear and shaming the powers of the eye, so that in the end the mind vibrates with the strangely interwoven melodies of joy in the life that still triumphs within us, and of acquiescence in the death which will leave of us not so much trace as can add to the silence and clear air one tone audible to mortal men.

CHAPTER XXII
ST. MARTIN’S SUMMER

In November I returned for a day to a lonely cottage which I had known in the summer; and all its poppies were gone. Here and there, in the garden, could be found a violet, a primrose, a wood sorrel, flowering; the forget-me-nots and columbines had multiplied and their leaves were dense in the borders; the broad row of cabbages gleamed blue in a brief angry light after rain; the black currant leaves were of pure, translucent amber at the ends of the branches. In the little copses the oaks made golden islands in the lakes of leafless ash, and the world was very little in a lasting mist.

Yet it was not impossible to reach greedily ahead to spring, and I was doing so, in spite of the incredibly early fall of night amid the whirling and crying of lapwings, when, suddenly, a dead elm tree spoke of the summer that was past. Dead, it had been worn by the summer landscape as a memorial, as a “reminiscential amulet.” It alone was now still the same, and strangely it spoke of the summer which it had not shared; and I recalled swiftly a night and daybreak of July.

All night we had sat silent with our books. There was no other company within a mile save that of the tall clock, with a face like a harvest moon, which did not tick, but stood silent with hands together pointing at twelve o’clock, seeming to rest, and to be content with resting, at the tranquil and many-thoughted midnight which it had so often celebrated alone until we came. But we were glad of the clock. It allowed us to measure the rich summer night only by the changing enchantments of Burton’s and Cervantes’s and Hudson’s page, and by the increasing depth of the silence which the owl and restless lapwing broke no more than one red ship breaks the purple of a wide sea. It is a commonplace that each one of us is alone, that every piece of ground where a man stands is a desert island with footprints of unknown creatures all round its shore. Once or twice in a life we cry out that we know the footprints; we even see the boats of the strangers putting out from the shore; we detect a neighbouring island through the haze, and creatures of like bearing to ourselves moving there. On that night a high tide had washed every footprint away, and we were satisfied, raising not a languid telescope to the horizon, nor even studying the sands at our feet.

Not less strangely or sweetly than it creeps in among dreams, came in the whisper of the first swallows of the dawn among our books; and Cleopatra, the cat, slipped out through the window and left me.

But it happened that I rose and drew a curtain aside to see whether she went to the woods or to the barn. The night was over. The pool at the bottom of the garden was glazed and dim and slightly crumpled, like the eye of a dead bird; and all its willows were grim.

In the garden there was a bee. A little wind broke up the poppies petal by petal, so that they vanished like fair children in the midst of their perfections—cut off, and marked in the memory chiefly by the blank they leave, and not by an abundance such as older people entail upon us to mimic life. Hardly had I ceased to watch them than it was day. The cattle in a distant meadow stood still at the edge of their own shadows as if at the edges of pools. The dead elm tree seemed but a skull-capped, foolish jester who set a sharper edge upon our appetite for summer and the sun. The corn, the woods, rejoiced. The green woodpecker laughed and shone in his flight, which undulated as if he had been crossing invisible hedges. A south-west wind arose and rain fell softly, yet not so soothingly but that an odd thought thrust itself into my mind.

I thought of how Cervantes was not enjoying it, and in a moment I saw him and Burton and Wordsworth and Charles Lamb close by, crouching and grey, as if they had been buried alive, under knotted cables of oak root, deep under the earth which was then bearing carnation and wild rose. The wind found out the dead elm tree and took counsel in its branches and moaned, although the broad light now reigned steadfastly over leagues of shining fields.

CHAPTER XXIII
THE PRIDE OF THE MORNING

The sun has been up for an hour without impediment, but the meadows are rough silver under a mist after last night’s frost. The greens in cottage gardens are of a bright, cold hue between blue and grey, which is fitter for the armour of heaven, or the landscape of some strong mystic, than for one who loathes to leave his bed. The blackbirds are scattering the frost, and they live in glittering little hazes while they flutter in the grass.

But the sky is of an eager, luminous pale blue that speaks of health and impetuousness and success. Across it, low down, lie pure white clouds, preserving, though motionless, many torn and tumultuous forms; they have sharp edges against the blue and invade it with daggers of the same white; they are as vivid in their place in that eager sky as yews on a pale, bright lawn, or as lightning in blue night. If pure and hale intelligence could be visibly expressed, it would be like that. The eyes of the wayfarer at once either dilate in an effort for a moment at least to be equal in beauty with the white and blue, clear sky, or they grow dim with dejection at the impossibility. The brain also dilates and takes deep breaths of life, and casts out stale thought and coddled emotion. It scorns afterthought as the winds are flouting the penitent half moon.

A squadron of wild fowl races through the crystal air; the mind expands with their speed, and tries to share it, and believes that it succeeds. A heron goes over solemnly, high up, and as if upon some starry business in that profound, bright air; the mind at once attunes itself to that majesty and directness and simplicity—

A starling sits on the weathercock with ruffled feathers watching the sky with one eye and then with the other, and his form and voice are sharp and pure as they joyfully pierce the air. The weathercock itself shines like Mars. Together, they speak of the cold and vigour and health and beauty which abide somewhere in the sky to-day and not inaccessibly.

High above me, here and there upon the road, stand oast-houses, with their conical roofs ruddy against the sky, and over them the newly painted white cowls point eastward, and in their whiteness seem to have been set as a signal to say that it is the west wind after frost that has made the world what it is; they point out a road which, if I could follow it, would lead to the very court of mind and beauty, yonder, afar off, where the wind and the heron and the wild ducks are going. There I might learn to realise the long, joyous curves in which thought and action and life itself sweep onward to their triumphs....

But I know well that long hopes and wide, vaulting thoughts are not usually nourished by lane and footpath and highway, on and on; and probably I shall stop at “The Black Horse” over the next hill, where a man may always lighten his burden on a Tuesday by hearing the price of beasts.

CHAPTER XXIV
THE METAMORPHOSIS

As the sun rose I watched a proud ash tree shedding its leaves after a night of frost. It let them go by threes and tens and twenties; very rarely, with little intervals, only one at a time; once or twice a hundred in one flight. Leaflet—for they fall by leaflets—and stalk twirled through the windless air as if they would have liked to fall not quite so rapidly as their companions to that brown and shining and oblivious carpet below. A gentle wind arose from the north and the leaves all went sloping in larger companies to the ground—falling, falling, whispering as they joined the fallen, they fell for a longer time than a poppy spends in opening and shedding its husk in June. But soon only two leaves were left vibrating. In a little while they also, both together, make the leap, twinkling for a short space and then shadowed and lastly bright and silent on the grass. Then the tree stood up entirely bereaved and without a voice, in the silver light of the morning that was still young, and wrote once more its grief in complicated scribble upon a sky of intolerably lustrous pearl.

But by the next day the grief was healed, for what was clearest about its branches was the swiftness and downward rushing and curving flight which they suggested—as of birds stooping in lines to their tree-top nests—as of divers at the moment when their descent mingles with their ascent—as of winged Greek gods and goddesses slanting to earth with wave-like breasts.

CHAPTER XXV
EARTH CHILDREN

I

Their house is a small russet cave of three dim compartments—part of a farmhouse, the rest having fallen to ruin, and from human hands to the starlings, the sparrows, and the rats. No one will live in it again. Inside, it is held together by the solid poetry of their lives, by gay-coloured, cheerful, tradesmen’s pictures of well-dressed children and blooming horsewomen, and the dogs of gentlemen, memorial cards of the dead, a few photographs, some picture post-cards pasted over flaws in the wall, and the worn furniture of several disconnected generations. The old man’s tools in the kitchen are noble—the heavy wrought iron, two-toothed hoe, that falls pleasantly upon the hard clay and splits it without effort and without jarring the hand, its ash handle worn thin where his hand has glided at work, a hand that nothing will wear smooth; the glittering, yellow handled spades and forks; the disused shovel with which he boasts regretfully that he could dig his garden when he lived on deep loam in a richer country than this; and still the useless “hop-idgit” of six tynes—the Sussex “shim”—which he retains to remind others, and perhaps himself, that he was a farmer once. He had twenty or thirty acres and a few cows. The cows all died in one year and he became a labourer.

His wife remembers those days. She was a tall woman and stooped at the doorway thatch: now she cannot rise to it. For every day she went many times to the sweet brook, a quarter of a mile away, rather than take the grey liquor of the pond for her cows. That is how she came to be bent like an oak branch on which children swing, or like a thorn that knows the west wind on the hill or the shore. Now she cannot carry a pail, for it would sweep the ground. She cannot see the apples in autumn until they have fallen to her feet. Her flesh seems to have assumed an animal sweetness, for her bees will cluster on the brown hands. Birds and beasts take to her as to an old tree, though she has pity for them, but no love. Sometimes as she sits at her door the robins come fearlessly close to her—hedge-sparrows, too, if there is nobody else near, and even the partridges that come for the ants in the old dock roots. She watches them with her dull eye and seems easily to have found a Franciscan friendliness when, as if angry with the creatures for seeing her frailty, she stamps her feet and drives them away. Then she relents and tries her power, as if she has half persuaded herself that it is a happy talent. She will crush a mouse in her fingers, and yet they still run over her in their merry business night or day, as they would over a tree that has fallen, and proved fatal to some of them in its death. Yet, in spite of her apparent indifference, I think that she knows the animals more than we who patronise them. Left alone with a cat, she shows, indeed, none of the endearments of a civilised woman, but quietly concedes and demands concessions very much as when a horse and some cows are sheltering from the heat together in a limited shade.

She speaks hardly ever, except with animals. But in church her lips move long after others are tired of “have mercy upon us.”

“Lord!” she says, “you are very kind, but your children are very many. All the sparrows in my garden have to be tended, and I suppose the mice, the moles, the worms, the lizards, the shining things that run and fly and crawl, and all the flowers, trees and birds. Oh! Lord, I had seventeen children and among so many you seemed not to notice some, and they died just anyhow in their happiness, and perhaps then you have forgotten me altogether, and I shall not even be taken away. I have heard that the good shall prosper. You have said it yourself. But I know not what is good or what is prosperity. For what am I? I am willing to learn, yet I am not taught. Am I good? Am I prospering? Lord! what am I to do? There are thousands and thousands of strong and rich and beautiful and happy things in the world, but as for me, I seem to crawl about among them in darkness like a mole. Nevertheless, glory to God the father, Lord of all, though you have done some things that I would not have done, and as to the weather ... but I know not your designs. Glory to the Son though he has long been dead, he was a good man. Glory to the Holy Ghost, which I do believe in, though they say there are no ghosts really. I am a poor old woman, born in Scotland, and a Scotswoman still. My name is Margaret Helen Page, and I live at the Hoath Cottage in the wood, at the end of the lane, where you turn up by ‘The Blue Anchor,’ in going to Horsmonden. There I shall abide and am to be found there, except on Sunday evening in fine weather, when I come to this holy place. Oh, come, Lord, when you have looked after all the sparrows, some day, and take me.”

“If,” she said once, “if God’s a Christian man, I do not know what he means by this weather.”

“I reckon he manages about as well as could be expected in such a funny world,” replied her husband. “Remember old Farmer King who used to swear at the weather so. One day when he had got his hay dry at last and saw it coming on to rain, he picks up a handful and stuffs it into his pocket, and says he will carry that much home dry at any rate, but if he didn’t fall into the brook on his way back and get wet to the skin. Such are the ways of God.”

But she was not convinced, for, with all her feebleness of body and conversation, she proves that man is older than Christ and Buddha, than Jehovah and Jupiter, and that not even such presences on the earth have left behind footpaths in which he can wander in security. She compels us to realise, if we have not done so before, that if we could isolate the child of Christian parents on a solitary island away from all religious influences, he would grow into something curiously different from a Christian, and something marvellously ancient too. Her language, stripped of its tattered and scanty Christianisms, and her acts, without that Sunday journey, reveal the multitude’s eternal paganism, which religions ruffle and sink into again—the paganism of the long-lived, most helpless, proudest and loneliest of animals, contending with winter and bad weather, with accident and disease and strange fears; rejoicing in fine weather, in strength, in the appetites; hating decay; distrusting the inhumanity of the heavens and animals and men from other climates; uncertain, troubled, and thinking little, about the future. For her the world is a flat place, decorated with a pattern of familiar and other fields, with hills, rivers, houses, a sea, a London, a Highland valley of children and old-fashioned ways, and infinitely far off towards the sunset, lands of tigers, monkeys, snakes, strange trees and flowers and men, with earthquakes, volcanoes, huge storms, all lit by sun and moon and stars—and a heaven also and a hell. Very real to her is the snow and the thaw-drip from the roof, the dry heat of summer, the apple blossom, the coming of the swallows, the growth of carrots, potatoes, cabbages and weeds, the coming home of her husband sober or drunk, the use of a few silver coins week by week, the announcement that old Mrs. Fuller is dead or that Mrs. Rixon has another child, the cold at four o’clock on a January morning and the warmth all night in July as she sits sleeping, because of her doubled back, like the corpse of a caveman in his grave, the endlessness of days when she is alone and has nothing to do but to remember and try to remember. She has no hopes, no purposes. I have seen her picking up oak branches in May after the fall of the great trees, and she will go on after her arms are filled, adding to the pile from above, and at the same time losing others from the sides, until at last it is dark and she goes home. Even so she does in life, accumulating memories and affairs, and letting them fall, until the end. Yet it is a little hard that there should be no kindly god or goddess to deceive her and receive her prayers and sanctify her little unnecessary acts, that the very wood at night, round about the house, is merely dark and full of sounds and no home for her. The beautiful Jewish stories told to her by clergymen of some birth and education, though she will gladly listen to them, are little better than ribands for oak faggots—for, though a Pagan, she has no gods. The gods of this part of the earth have long been hurled into Tartarus and bolted there in that grotesque company which the prophets of the ages have gathered together. And so she goes through life, like a child in a many-windowed house, looking on sea and barren land, and full of corridors, resounding and silent by hours, with dim, enormous apartments, bolted doors, and here and there a picture, a skeleton, an old toy, a reminiscent voice....

II

Compared with Margaret Helen Page, her husband, Robert, is a citizen of the world. He knows all the farmers in the neighbourhood, thatching for one, haymaking for another, gardening, woodcutting, washing or pole-pulling in the hop-garden for others. He can even make the beautiful, five-barred gates, with their noble top bars, tapered and shaped like a gun-stock and barrel. All the inns are known to him, and the labourers and wayfaring men who resort to them. He will gossip, and the rich do not disdain to listen to the fabrications and selections which he mixes charmingly for them alone. The workhouse or death is not more than a few years ahead of him, for he stoops with difficulty and will make haste for no man; yet he will cheerfully quarrel with a farmer in the middle of the winter, pick up his coat, take his wages and go off to the inn and drink all that he has; if the farmer grumbles in September that Robert has been taking merely an honest bushel of hops from the pickers he will not give way to the extent of a handful. No one can thatch as he can. His tall haystacks look like churches when they are new, and so they remain. The roofs of his cornricks are shaped like breasts, with convex curves that make the same lines against the sky as you walk round. His vegetable plots are invariably as flat as lawns, their sides evenly sloping to the paths. He stops in the midst of his work and smokes and thinks; and he expects to be paid for his thinking. In the spring he catches moles, hanging them up on the briers or thorns with great care, twisting the twigs round them so that they stay until fur and bone are indistinguishable and break up into dust.

At the inns he hears the gossip of the universe, heaping up as in a marine store the details of murders, swindles, divorces, expensive pictures of Venus, etc., horse races, cricket matches, letters from archbishops and literary men, distant wars, new foods and diseases and cures, automobiles, the cost of rich men’s dinners, how to live happily, the extravagance of the poor, how to feed on a shilling a week. These things are “in print” and therefore true. But he utters no opinion of his own. He consents to exchange his recollections and to accept others; then he sinks into the happy silence of those who have not the gift of ratiocination. What dark, undisturbed depths of personality are his—immense depths yielding to the upper world, now and then, an ejaculation, as Gilbert White’s well yielded a black lizard at times.

“I wonder,” he ejaculated once, “I wonder what God did with himself before he made such a kettle of fish as this world.”

Again, “Now supposing that all these things in the Bible about Adam and the beginning had never been written down, and we had not been told that God did it, what should we have done? Should we have found out these things for ourselves?”

Once he related a dream:—

“Sometimes when I am all alone, and my old girl says the same, it seems to me that I am not of much account; it is as if I had been forgotten and left off the register, and how will it be at the Judgment Day? Sometimes I think to myself, It will be fine sleeping and never hearing the blessed trumpet and getting into that crowd. But one night I dreamed that I had died and was up above, and that an angel woke me up and asked me to take his trumpet, because he wanted a bit of sleeping after waiting ever since Adam’s time, and I was to blow it at twelve o’clock and then it would be Judgment Day. Well, as he looked like a gentleman, I said I would and I took the trumpet and stared at it a bit, because it was that trumpet that was to wake the dead for the Judgment Day. I was wide awake and I could see the dead all round me, more of them than there are mangolds in twenty acres. Close to me were the angels, and they were all asleep, worn out with waiting so long, I suppose. They had wings like peacocks and owls and orpingtons—beautiful! I enjoyed myself. But when it got near to twelve o’clock I got a bit anxious. The angel was fast asleep and I did not see why I should wake him up, or anybody else. Once or twice I put the trumpet to my lips, but I thought—No, I would sleep myself and there would be no Judgment Day. But I could not sleep for thinking of the keeper who used to kill my old girl’s cats as fast as they grew up and went into the woods at night; and, without thinking what I was at, I blew the trumpet and what with the terrible noise and the sight of all these poor people waking up I awoke myself and my old girl said that I had made a noise like a trumpet in my sleep. But it did seem a pity that they should all wake up just as if they had to go to ploughing and all that again.”

But Bacchus is his only god, who has already given him many gifts. On Friday nights he is as a child upon the throne, holding himself wonderfully straight on the settle at the inn, never letting go of the tankard except to have it filled, and smiling delicately with weary eyes, as he drinks the six ale—

At such times he speaks little, except a few words of nonsense to strangers who come in; but he smiles continually, as if he had forgiven all things, and even as if he silently preached forgiveness to all the world. His tenderness to children and animals is wonderful. He would pass as a saint, an angelic doctor, or even something higher. To some, indeed, he might seem to be the original from which field artists have everywhere modelled the scarecrow. The young men recognise the resemblance and smile. The older men perhaps see in him an apotheosis of themselves, more twisted, more starved, greener in the hat and coat, and they do not smile. He has a lean, acorn-coloured face, adorned with relenting blue eyes, small hawk nose, clear-cut shrivelled lips and chin, and fresh brown hair hanging like a lion skin over his head and neck, and curling sumptuously.

I can fancy him a lesser god in some mythology. To him come the weak and ashamed; the shamefaced female tramp who went hungry, having asked for a direction to Maidstone instead of for food, because the farmer’s voice was hard and he was young and strong and her skirt was old and her breast shrunken; and he who looked through the hedge at some fair children playing and then, because one of them screamed at catching sight of him in searching for a nest, raised a hideous cry and sent them terrified away; the curst, scandalous lean maid who melts with momentary tenderness over her starved and piebald cat, and calls him “Prettiest”; all such as are foolish and slow of thought and slower of speech, and laugh at what they love because others do and then weep in solitude; those who, unable to care for anything much, grow ardent in a simulated affection and blush when a cruel strong one finds them out; those who know not what they desire except a little tranquillity before the end and know that they shall not obtain it; the drunken and obscene who are without graces, but also without repentance; those who vainly complain and fret about the evils which they have deserved and cannot endure; those who cannot keep up with life because of one beautiful or terrible thing in the past; those who mourn, they know not why; the little base ones who admire good and lovely things, and fear to hurt them by approval. And they should come to this god, Robert, as one in whom each saw his little unknown virtue and should be lifted up thereat. They should bring to his altars sour bread and rotten flesh and fruit fallen before its time, and worn-out, shattered things; and his priests, leprous, and scrofulous, and squint-eyed all, should rejoice then and tell the worshippers to be no more cast down, because in this, their god, were to be found all their little virtues, and behold! he endured for ever and looked upon them pitifully and interceded continually with the high gods. Then would they drink until they were thoroughly drunken, and the god would tell them that death came soon, and that their sleep would be heavier than they could dream of, for no king, or judge, or policeman, or clergyman, could ever disturb their sleep, though armed with sharpest swords and most cruel words.

CHAPTER XXVI
NOVEMBER RAIN

Close, perpendicular, quiet rain came upon me when I was ten miles from last night’s shelter and ten miles from my end. Shelter was not near, nor indeed to be thought of in an untrodden lane which had been, for some time, and seemed to go on for ever, winding through the delicious, vacant country of a late autumn Sunday, while it was yet early in the day and yet not so early but that the milking was over, and the milk carts gone, and the cattle satisfied and slow after their first questing in the fields. The rain was so dense, and the light so restrained, and the drops hung so about my eyes, and the sound and the sweetness of it made my brain so well contented with all that umber country asleep, that what I saw was little compared with what reached me by touch and by darker channels still. I rarely see much in the country—a few herbs underfoot, the next field, the horizon woods, some brief light that shows only its departing hem; for, like others, I always carry out into the fields a vast baggage of prejudices from books and strong characters whom I have met. My going forth, although simple enough to the eye, is truly as pompous as that of a rajah who goes through the jungle on a tall and richly encrusted elephant, with a great retinue, and much ceremony and noise. As he frightens bird and beast, and tramples on herb and grass, so I scatter from my path many things which are lying in wait for a discoverer. There is no elephant more heavy-footed and no rifle more shattering than the egoism of an imitative brain. And thus the little thing I saw was an unusual discovery.

It was a triangular, six-acre wood below me, across a bare and soaking ploughland. The wood was mainly of ash and the myriad stems were a grey mist, only denser and a little clearer than the rain itself. Out of them rose half a hundred oaks which were exuberant in foliage of hues so vigorous and splendid in their purple that it was impossible to think of it as on the edge of death, but easy to think of it as in a deathless prime. One thrush sang heartily somewhere deep among the ash trees, and that was the only sound, for the sound of the rain was but a carpet on which that song walked forth, delicate footed, haughty and beautiful....

When I had walked another mile, the wood was out of sight, the thrush unheard. The wood is now purple immortally, for ever that song emerges from its heart, as free from change as one whom we remember vividly in the tip-toe of his exulting youth, and dying then has escaped huskiness, and a stoop, and foul breath, and a steady view of life.

CHAPTER XXVII
JANUARY SUNSHINE

It is a quiet valley in which moist fields of meadow, mowing grass, mangold, and stubble are bounded from one another by deep ditches and good hedges of maple, thorn and hazel, with here and there an oak, or by oak woods that rise above an undergrowth of grey ash. Every half mile there is a tiled farmhouse with low-pitched roof and low, square windows, their frames painted white, and between them rose trees climbing; in the gardens of most, two plots of lawn are surrounded by rich dark borders and divided by a path; and each has a careless shrubbery of Portuguese laurel, lilac, syringa and elder, hardly cut off from the orchard that grows as it will above grey rank grass, and close by at least two ponds. One little stream winds through the valley and gains at times much glory of speed and sound and foam from the rain off the hillside. A few grey, smooth roads cross the valley.

It is January, and the predominant grass is green and shining in the sun. The rusty oaks and the farmhouse roofs glow. The bare clean hedges glitter with all their stems of olive hazel, silver oak and ash and white thorn, and blackthorn ruddy where the cattle have rubbed. A lark rises and sings. A flock of linnets scatters and drops little notes like a rain of singing dew, and over all is a high blue sky, across which the west wind sets a fleet of bright white clouds to sail; into this blue sky the woods of the horizon drive their black teeth.

In the immense crystal spaces of fine windy air thus bounded by blue sky, black woods and green grass, the jackdaws play. They soar, they float, they dance, and they dive and carve sudden magnificent precipices in the air, crying all the time with sharp joyous cries that are in harmony with the great heights and dashing wind. The carter’s boy raises his head from the furrow and shouts to them now and then, while the brass furnishings of his horses gleam, their shoulders grow proud and their black tails stream out above the blue furrow and the silver plough.

Suddenly a pheasant is hurled out of a neighbouring copse; something crosses the road; and out over a large and shining meadow goes a fox, tall and red, going easily as if he sailed in the wind. He crosses that meadow, then another, and he is half a mile away before a loud halloo sounds in the third field, and a mile away before the first hound crosses the road upon his scent.

Run hard hounds, and drown the jackdaws’ calling with your concerted voices. It is good to see your long swift train across the meadow and away, away; on such a day a man would give everything to run like that. Run hard, fox, and may you escape, for it would not be well to die on such a day, unless you could perchance first set your fair teeth into the throats of the foolish ones who now break through the hedge on great horses and pursue you—I know not why—ignorant of the command that has gone forth from the heart of this high blue heaven, Be beautiful and enjoy and live!

CHAPTER XXVIII
THE BARGE

Spring and summer and autumn had come—flowing into one another with that secrecy which, as in the periods of our life, spares us the pain of the irretraceable step—and still a golden tree stood here and there in the hollowed lawns.... Snow fell on singing thrushes and golden trees, and when it was over a half moon of untouched grass under a dense hawthorn was as a green shadow on the white land.... Then the year paused; there was a swallow still here and there; but again there was snow....

The world had been black and white for many days. The cygnet-coloured sky had been low from dawn to sunset; rarely a cloud dimly appeared in it, seen and lost and seen again, like a slow fish in rippling water. By night the iron firmament had been immense and remote.

Out of doors, as we walked, it was a source of faint satisfaction that we were clothed and fed; and it was easy to think of a less happy condition. We were in a primitive world. In those short days the world seemed to have grown larger; distance was more terrible. A friend living thirty miles off seemed inaccessible in the snow. The earth had to be explored, discovered, and mapped again; it was as it had been centuries ago, and progress was not very real to our minds. Only when we saw a great fire at an inn, a red face or two, a copper vessel thrust in among the coals to warm the ale, did there appear to be much being done to fight winter and to subjugate this primitive world. We saw the birds around us for what they were—little, tender, hungry things, entirely sorrowful, easily killed, and not mere melodious attendants upon our delight.

A train crawling along the valley at a distance was very feeble in our eyes. The strength and purpose were concerted. It was like a thought which is without the implements for action—pathetic and impotent, it was absorbed easily by the vast white land. It shrieked and was lost in a tunnel.

There were only two real things—the cold and the thought of man. The cold expressed itself easily by the whiteness and the leaden shade, the great power of distance, the obliteration of colours, footpaths, landmarks, the silence. Thought was not equally vigorous. It could not sustain itself alone. Men had to walk hard, to talk and even then to change the subjects rapidly, especially if they were abstract. Thus to compare the ham of Wiltshire with that of South Wales was pleasant and easy for a time; but to discuss the nature of love or style or virtue was not long possible.

Under the ice of a pond lay the last summer’s nest of a grebe among the rotten reeds. High and low in the hedges, old nests were as the jetsam of summer’s wreck—as if a galleon should be represented by a boot on the shore.

Through the land went a dusky river, and in it a black barge with merrily painted prow. It was guided by a brown woman wearing a yellow scarf and she stood boldly up. In the midst of it a man played on a concertina and sang. The barge was light and high in the water; lonely and unnoticed, it threaded the long curves and still the concertina lamented and the tall woman stood boldly up. As it disappeared the dolorous air began to darken and I knew why that barge stood so high and light—because its cargo was merely all the flowers and the birds and the joys and pains of spring, the contentments of summer, the regrets of autumn, of all men and women who had lived through the now dying year; and no one claimed them, no one sought them, no one stood on the bank to salute them.

CHAPTER XXIX
A WINTER MORNING

Night was soon to pass into a winter day as I looked out of the window to see what kind of a world it was that had been, since I began to read, shutting me off effectually from everything but my book.

The words were still fresh in my brain.

But, outside, the trees and barns and shed were quiet and dim, and as much submerged and hidden from the air in which I had been living as the green streets of motionless lily and weed at the bottom of some lonely pool where carp and tench go slowly. The road went straight away from the window to the invisible beyond; hard and dry, it was trying to shine, as if it recalled the sunlight. Half way along, at one side, under a broad oak, there was a formless but pregnant shadow. The farm buildings that lay about the road were huddled, dark, colourless and indistinguishable because of their shadows; they might have been heaped up by a great plough, of which the road was the shining furrow; they were not so much the vague wreckage of what I had known yesterday, as a chaos out of which perhaps something was to be born. Yet the outside world was vaster than it had seemed when I could see three ranges of hills and guess at the sea beyond; and strange it was when the words—

came back to me. How frail and perilous and small was the poet’s shielded world! The outside world threatened it as the smooth escarpment of tall, toppling water threatens the little piping sea-bird. And yet this poet’s world was for the time being my life. Beyond his words there were, perhaps, the gay, the dear, the beautiful persons whom I knew; Nobby, the tinker, and many more; but probably they slept; they were vain if they were not fictitious; if they could be supposed to live, my only proof of it was that somehow they were connected with a very distant light that refused to go out among the westward copses. They were hardly more credible than the words of a stale preacher talking of charity, or an artful poet writing of love.

So I clung to Keats, the reality, until the road grew almost white, and under that broad oak some rational, nay, beautiful outlines begin to appear, which the shadow enveloped like a cocoon. The outlines were hardly built until they were seen to be a waggon, and its birth out of the shadow was a mighty thing that shared the idiom of stately trees and the motions of great waters and of cliffs that look on sunset and a noble sea. Dimly, uncertainly, powerfully, never quite expressing itself in any known language—as was natural in what seemed to belong to an early brood of the giant earth—the waggon emerged, with ponderous wheels and slender, curving timbers and trailing shafts. The chariot of Dis coming up to Persephone looked thus majestic. Yet the waggon suggested nothing definite, at least no history. It had no such articulate power. But antiquity played about it as, an hour before, it had played about my shelves and books. It was simply the richer for its long life, like a violin or a wise man; and, like them, it neither carried its legend on its exterior nor encouraged anything more than joyful surmise.

It was the one clearly visible piece of man’s work among all those potent shadows and uncertain forms of roof and wall; it was crowned by the last stars. Becoming clearer as morning came, it was an important part of the recreation of the world, and involved in it, just as a brazen image may seem to be part of the good fortune or calamity which follows prayer to it. It filled the white road with emotion. It was more intelligible than some men are when they say “I worship” or “I love.” Keats left my mind. From my memory, I added melodies of voice and harp and reed, and noise of seas and winds in forests and houses by night, and organ music, with its many demons blithe and terrible, exploring the skiey roof of some cathedral and knocking at the clerestory to get out, floating, sad or happy, about the aisles, and settling at last to make the old purples and greens and blues in the glass more solemn than before; and yet I could not reproduce the melody or anything like it, with which the old waggon pervaded the farmyard. Slowly the light came, and the world was filled with it as imperceptibly as the brain with a great thought. It fell upon the spokes of the waggon wheel, and they seemed to move. Then all was over.

The clear face of things which it is so hard to enjoy was back again. The determined starlings flew swift and straight overhead. The clouds about the risen sun went stately upon their errands through the sky.