PART IV THE MOUNTAINS

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It was one of those early March days in a mountainous country when a warmly clothed man, in good health and walking rapidly, can just foretaste the spring. The icy dark water in stony brooklets shone golden whenever it could find the sun. This gold seemed a brand upon the winter that marked it for death. There was gold also on the turf between the walls and the roadways, for there were hundreds of celandine flowers: it was to be found also in the miniature forests of the moss that made detached and placid worlds upon every stone of the walls; in the little hollow woods, or steep and craggy orchard plots, where the first daffodils were unveiled; in the rickyards where fowls scattered the gleaming straw; in the fur of the squirrel that moved as if the swirling wind dissolved and shaped it again continually; in the warm ale at “The White Hart.”

But when the eye grew proud and the wind rose and every half hour the horizontal snow put out everything of the world except its noises—the cry of the curlew, the buzz of pewits’ wings, the song of the missel thrush that came through the storm like a mere ode to liberty in the midst of revolution—then it was winter still, and the rustling oak leaves talked of December. And when the snowfall ceased with a rush as if upon the wings of a peregrine, those small signs of spring were no more than a child’s sand castles on a vast sea shore, and not so noticeable as the thick suds and flakes of snow hanging from the hedges on the walls and turned to mists by the restless robins.

On one side, for some miles, ran a large fell that was a home and playground of winds, steep and long to be crossed, and all white and grim, shutting out home and the pleasures that are found among men. On the other side, steep also and widely shaped with small, precipitous crags and angry surf of heather and here and there haggish thorns, lay a moor. Between these two the road rose and fell over lesser but steep hills, and from one hilltop I could see the sea beyond the moor. It was grey, without light, with long quivering lines that never ended, but insubstantial; it seemed rather the grisly offspring of a mind made pregnant by the wintry melancholy. The mountains came down to the edge of it, like lions to drink, ten miles away. Not a house was visible, and on the sea the few ships were like the water itself, inventions of my own, as it were, which I had launched upon that infinite desolation for sport.

All day, ahead and always at the same distance, rose high mountains, with crude outlines as of heavy and frosty land fresh turned by the plough; the long ravines of snow upon their sides made their peaks more sharp and their heights more sudden. They haunted the day.

Now and then the snow fell, and in the weak sunshine that followed, the light struck up from the snow and made the white breasts of the gulls seem opal lanterns full of flame, and the hazel thickets were nets of silver and crystal branches, invisible in their own splendour.

I descended to a small deep river that ran, with noble curves of power, solemn and full of some inhuman simple purpose. For a moment the sunlight fell on one curve of it and the windy waves were now a stately glittering cavalcade, and now a dance of fairies into which some ass-headed Bottom suddenly intruded with a gust from a cloud, making them whirl faster and then disappear. But the river was careless of the light; it went on as before, unchanged even when for another moment all that grim, serious water was changed into white spray and light by a fall.

And there still were the mountains ahead. Their painful distances of long, white, houseless steeps made the mind suffer the body’s agony of toiling there, of being lost there in storm, of being there on a still, dark night. They bred—by means of natural, human sympathy with the difficulty of life among such heights, by the horror of the distance, the coldness, the whiteness—a languor out of which emerged infinite admiration and awe, a sense of beauty even, and unquestionably a kind of pride in the powers of the human spirit that can dwell upon the earth and be the equal of these things, sharing with them the sunlight and the darkness, enduring like them vicissitudes, decay, violent disaster, and like them disbelieving in the future and in death, except for others. So when at nightfall the snowy hills made a semicircle round the head of an enormous grey estuary, and couched there ten and fifteen and twenty miles away as if the sweep of a puissant arm had made them in clearing a space for the water, they were purely beautiful, while over them a large, simple sunset threw a golden bridge between towering, white, still clouds.

Then, at length, a hamlet on a hill; first, a farmyard on one side of the road and a farmhouse on the other; then four or five stone cottages; lastly an inn where I thought to sleep. Hardly had I sat down than a pedlar came in and sat beside me. He was a tall, grave man of a gritty, brown complexion and big, straight features; from his simple, heroic face, that seemed an animated piece of crag from his native hills, his blue eyes looked at me with that glance, fearless of any return, which the ordinary man gives to a dog or a labourer, but presently became more modest as I looked up and down the blue gaberdine which he wore down to his knees.

The gaberdine was of the stoutest linen, heavy and warm. It opened for about six inches down from the neck, back and front, and was fastened with small bone buttons. On each side of these openings it was smocked in an elaborate pattern nine inches deep; the wide, turn-down collar almost covered the embroidered shoulder straps and was itself adorned with seven rows of feather stitching. The sleeves were smocked both at the shoulders and the wrists, and were finished with broad, feather-stitched cuffs. He wore it because it was decent, and he would always wear one so long as the woman lived who could make it.

I asked him about his trade, and he said that he pursued it among these hills and valleys all the winter, setting it aside for work in the fields during the summer months. He was born in one of the cottages close by; so was his father before him and so were his children after him. They were happy there. Death alone disturbed them now and then; and death, he said, was incurable and to be expected. In the spring he spent less on candles and his orchard bloomed, and there was a marriage or two in the church and the ewes dropped their lambs. In the summer it was warm without fires, and they needed no candles, and he had what he desired—what that was he did not say. In the autumn he remembered that things were coming round again, winter soon and then spring again. In the winter his cottage walls were thick, and if the days were short he had always had a fire and some food, and had never yet refused a beggar something; there were songs also: and as to his trade, of course he liked it, and he did not think people could do without him.

“And now, young man,” he said, “who are you, what have you seen, and what is your country?”

He looked at me with something like the benignity of a child accepting a spoonful of honey; but for that joy and expectancy I might have spoken easily. I hesitated between the truth, which was difficult and perhaps to him unintelligible, my own view of the truth, which would be so confused by reservations and after-thoughts that it could not please, and the picturesque. So I said:—

“I am a poor, modern man”—which was true—“I have seen nothing”—which was my view of the truth—and finally, “the great city of London is my country”—which was picturesque.

“What?” said he, not angrily, not pityingly, but inquiringly, “what do you mean by a ‘poor, modern man,’ and how is it that you have seen nothing?”

A thousand things crowded to my brain and contended on my lips. This was an opportunity, but too great a one, too sudden. I stifled my designs and decided to say nothing. He was kind; he nodded gracefully and continued,—

“Tell me about London.”

He did not say, “Do me an essay of fifteen hundred words by next week.” That might have been easy; writing—possibly even good writing—is comparatively easy; because the writer is alone while he writes and is not present while his work is read, and he can therefore withhold what seems difficult to express and he deceives without appearing deceitful; moreover, he writes at his ease, or should do, what is probably read in haste. But in conversation with an aged blue-eyed man, in a majestic blue gaberdine, who has an evening’s leisure and desires the truth, asking simply: “Tell me about London,” the difficulties in the way of a simple man are enormous. I said something about a book called The Soul of London; but he could not read. He wished again to be informed what the soul of a city was. Again I failed him.

“But you have actually lived in London,” he repeated, encouraging me.

“Yes.” He seemed to be proud, as who should say, “I sit with one who has lived in the most famous city in the world.”

I remembered that there are said to be five millions of human beings in London, and that its streets on end would reach to the moon.

Also I thought of the old song and the verse:—

“There be kings and queens in London town
A-sitting all of a row.”

In despair I actually ventured to tell him that there were five million people there. But he seemed to be poor at arithmetic and he was frank.

“I beg you,” he said, “to speak simply and not all at once to a poor, remote old man. The evening is young yet,” he continued without heat and as if he were making all clear.

“There is a king there, is there not?” he said.

“There is.”

“And a queen?”

“Yes.”

“And a palace?”

“There are several palaces.”

“Then tell me about the king,” he said.

I have never seen the king, and I longed for the power of the Tempter to tell the old man of—

“PrÆtors, proconsuls to their provinces
Hasting, or on return, in robes of state;
Lictors and rods, the ensigns of their power;
Legions and cohorts, turms of horse and wings;
Or embassies from regions far remote,
In various habits, on the Appian road,
Or on the Æmilian”—

But still his questions came. How did the ships come up and unlade again? What were the army and the navy like? Had I seen the famous men? Were the people noble as became a metropolitan race? Achilles questioning Ulysses in Hades could not have spoken more magnificently than this old man questioning me, though I seemed the ghost and he the visitor to the underworld. Yet in some sort his great questions, elevating his soul, seemed to supply him, if not with an answer, at least with some satisfaction. I would have spoken, if I could. But how short the evening! myself how unprepared and inadequate! I would have told him of Pimlico and Battersea which were not entirely unknown to me. I would have said that there were sorrowful and happy men there—thousands of both, unknown to me and unknown to one another; thousands of houses, beautiful, stately, pompous, indifferent, ugly, sublimely squalid; that upon them as upon him and his neighbours fell rain and sun and snow and the wind beat and death came suddenly, desired or undesired; that the city was as vast as Time, which had made it, and that to know it a man must live and die the lives and deaths of all that had ever lived and died there. But he ceased to regard me. He entered into talk with others that came in. One sang this ballad and he, like the rest, joined the chorus:—

“My clothing was once of the linsey woolsey fine,
My tail it grew at length, my coat likewise did shine;
But now I’m growing old, my beauty does decay,
My master frowns upon me; one day I heard him say—
Poor old horse, poor old horse.
Once I was kept in the stable snug and warm,
To keep my tender limbs from any cold or harm;
But now, in open fields, I am forcÈd for to go,
In all sorts of weather, let it be hail, rain, freeze or snow,
Poor old horse, poor old horse.
Once I was fed on the very best corn and hay
That ever grew in yon fields, or in yon meadows gay;
But now there’s no such doing can I find at all;
I’m glad to pick the green sprouts that grow behind yon wall.
Poor old horse, poor old horse.
You are old, you are cold, you are deaf, dull, dumb and slow,
You are not fit for anything or in my team to draw;
You have eaten all my hay, you have spoilÈd all my straw;
So hang him, whip him, stick him, to the huntsman let him go.
Poor old horse, poor old horse.
My hide unto the tanners, then I would freely give
My body to the hound dogs, I would rather die than live;
Likewise my poor old bones that have carried you many a mile
Over hedges, ditches, gates and bridges, likewise gates and stiles.
Poor old horse, poor old horse.”

Terrible, noble old man! No doubt he expected me to speak as simply as that, so I slipped away from him and went to the next inn. A high, cloudy night hung over me, like a great yew tree in March, with stars instead of flowers. With those reticent, dark silences and spaces I tried to console myself.

CHAPTER XXXVII
THE MIRROR

There are a hundred little landscapes on the walls by the roadside—of grey or silver or golden stone, embossed and fretted and chequered by green and gold-pointed mosses, frosty lichens, pale round penny-wort leaves and the orange foliage of cranesbill. At their feet are the young leaves of the larger celandine and the lustrous blossoms of the lesser, still swaddled in dead leaves where mice and squirrels are questing. On top, thorns and ash trees trail horizontally in many dragon shapes, and purple brambles overhang. Or there are low thorns which make way at intervals for straight hollies, spared by the billhook, or even carved by it into pagoda-like shapes. Sometimes even a thorn has been thus spared and honoured, but here they are not each knotted into impenetrable globes of twigs or interlaced in pairs as elsewhere. What fantasy persuades men to make those little wayside and even railwayside suggestions of a mild tree worship surviving yet? In places the walls are interrupted and replaced by a smooth, blue sheet of natural rock based in grass and making a home for vertebrate ferns, and stamped by white and yellow and green algÆ which look as if they were the stains of a sunshine too strong to be wiped out. Some of the ash tree boles are heavily draped in a fur woven inextricably of dark green and fine-leaved ivy, pale green moss over which hover pendulous drops of gold, silver lichen, and ferns green and amber. Out of rock or wall gushes bright, crystal water, losing itself in moss and herbage below, or received into small stone tanks, and turned into a darkly gleaming, golden creature that throbs under the rain.

Between such walls the road winds into many valleys and over many fells towards the mountains. On either hand rise and fall many hollowed tawny meadows, with boulders embedded in heather and flowering gorse, and over them the pewits plunge and soar and modulate their crying by their speed. Here and there a family of oak or beech stands up in the midst of the fields. Between the meadows there are copses of hazel and oak, and snowdrops underneath, or a crisp, untrodden carpet of old leaves of many dying golds and browns and reds; or an arable field intervenes. The plough climbs the hill, turning the dry, grey soil to purple and brown that is dappled by rooks and gulls. Some of the gulls slide overhead against the wind, inclining their wings this way and that, rising and descending slightly, as if they could by tacking and delaying avoid the streamy wind.

The steeper hills are the home of oak and ash and birch and larch. The grey larch woods waver in colour like a dying trout, as the wind and the sunshine pass over them. In a five-minute shower the rainbow sets her foot among the trees before she leaps across the sky, and while yet her colours are uncertain among the luminous branches makes a small, fairy, remote world that speaks to the eye like the young moon on a fair evening or Cassiopeia when it crowns a sapphire night.

In ten miles there is an inn. “Pretty Polly” and “Sceptre” are on the walls, with notices of sales and advertisements of spirits. The hostess sings the cosmic melody of “Blue Bell” as she goes about her work—that marvellous melody over which farmboys become romantic and even cheerful at four o’clock on wild and sleety mornings in January as they go about their work. But the host has good ale, and he can sing the Holm-bank Hunting Song:—

“One morning last winter to Holm-bank there came
A noble, brave sportsman, Squire Sandys was his name,
Came a-hunting the fox, bold Reynard must die,
And he flung out his train and began for to cry
Tally-ho, tally-ho! Hark forward, away, tally-ho!
The season being frosty, and the morning being clear,
A great many gentlemen appoint to meet there;
To meet with Squire Sands with honour and fame
And his dogs in their glory to honour his name.
There Gaby the huntsman with his horn in his hand,
It sounded so clear and the dogs at command,
Tantive! Tantive! the horn it did sound,
Which alarmed the country for above a mile round.
It’s hark dogs together, while Jona comes in,
There’s Joyful and Frolic, likewise little Trim,
It’s hark unto Dinah, the bitch that runs fleet,
There’s neat little Justice, she’ll set ’em to reet.
There’s Driver and Gamester, two excellent hounds,
They’ll find out Bold Reynard if he lies above ground;
Draw down to yon cover that lies to the south,
Bold Reynard lies there, Trowler doubles his mouth.
Three times round low Furness they chased him full hard,
At last he sneaked off and through Urswick churchyard,
He listened to the singers as I’ve heard them say,
But the rest of the service he could not well stay.
The dogs coming up made Reynard look sly,
Then he marked out his tricks for to give ’em the by;
They being bred to their business they managed their cause
And they made him submit to their attention close.
Through Kirkby and Woodland they nimbly passed,
Broughton and Dunnerdale they came to at last,
Then down across Duddon to Cumberland side,
And at Grass-gards in Ulpha, bold Reynard he died.
Since Reynard is dead he’ll do no more ill,
He hadn’t much time for to make a long will,
He has left all his states to his survivor and heir,
He has a right to a widow for she’ll claim her share.
Of such a fox chase as never was known,
The horsemen and footmen were instantly thrown,
To keep within sound didn’t lie in their power,
For the dogs chased the fox eighty miles in five hours.
You gentlemen and sportsmen wherever you be,
All you that love hunting draw near unto me,
Since Reynard is dead, we have heard of his downfall,
Here’s a health to Squire Sands of High Graythwaite Hall.
Tally-ho, tally-ho! Hark forward, away, tally-ho!”

The road has turned away into a valley. The mountains are close ahead, and the billowy moorland prepares me for them, with hawks in all its hollows, and small ponds, the silent sport of winds that roar in crags and hiss in grasses, and then at length a long, blue pool, edged by yellow reeds and receiving the shadow of a steep oak wood. There the wind is lured into many metamorphoses among the ripples—at one moment a writhing, hundred-headed snake, at another the wraith perhaps of a swift skater who was once drowned in the water, and again a swarm of dark bees. At first sight this blue expanse, with narrow ends running into the moorland, and its edge of shivering reed, lays hold upon the mind. All day, unseen of any but the shepherd, the water reflects the birds and the clouds, and all night the stars, until it might be supposed to have acquired a symbolic sadness and tranquillity by thus keeping watch on all the nights and days since it began. There, in its depths, hang the mountain clouds and the immense spaces of sky, with something added by the reflecting water, as if it were some gloomy opiate personality that turned all things to its own tune. Even the joyous, golden fleece of the perfect summer morning are rendered by the pool with touches of wizardry and night, and when a little breeze erases them for a moment it is like a breath of delight sweeping over an immortal pain. The nearest mountain, too, is there. The highest summit, engraved with snow, shows in the depths like a bleached skull emerging from ridgy tracts of dark sand. There, also, are the long, tawny and olive flanks of the ascent, inlaid with purple and blue by precipices and cloud-shadows, with grey and ruddy woods below, and the silver wounds of birches. Now and then my own shadow flits among them, as if a magician had compelled me to wander in that giddy profound of water and sky. As I look down I seem to see what men have made of the universe in the past, with the help of poet and priest, by plunging it in the sorrows and uncertainties of their own heart and brain. There is superstition, there religion and poetry, confining the great heavens and the hills with sun and moon and stars, within these few acres of desolate mountain water. There are the stories of the gods and of a heaven that overhung mortals with hideous aspect. There, also, the eager courage of man’s soul when first he tried to burst “the strong bars of Nature’s gateways”—while the sun and wind contend upon the water—and set out upon the adventure which has made us “equal with heaven.” Looking up, away from the pool, there still are the mountains and the sky, just as they were, still inscrutably holding out in one hand laughter and in one hand tears for us to choose from. I look down and the singing lark, against a white cloud, is singing high and wise things in some contemplative poet’s verse. I look up and, behold! the new joy of the spring, unintelligible, and for the moment not asking to be understood, but to be shared; and as we climb happily the pool no longer imposes its version of life, for yonder is the True upon the hills, and the eyes dilate and the nostrils and the lungs accept the air and the “darling of men and gods ... mistress of the nature of things” takes her place with us.

CHAPTER XXXVIII
UNDER THE MOOR

It was June, but it had been like March for many miles upon the rough moor until, with the dawn, I came to a lowland where there were mossy fields with clear rain pools among the flowering gorse; and meadows cut into two planes by small, perpendicular cliffs of stone, so that on one the cattle were already feeding in the early light and on the other still lying down; and wheat fields that had islands of stone in their midst; and then at last an immense meadow sloping down towards fresh oak woods and the sea, and rising out of it rounded beechen knolls which, Druid-like, preserved the night under their domes of foliage, though all the grass was flooded by the slow tides of dawn. The white cow-parsley flowers hovered around me on invisible stems and gave out the thick summer flavours of nettles and myriad grasses. And lying down and sleeping in the sun until morning was hot, I awoke and seemed to hear a tale of the south as the air grew mazy with the scent of elder and thyme and the colour of bird’s-foot lotus and all the grass, and the sky leaned down upon the earth in milky purples. It was just such a change from the poor land to the rich as is expressed in the ancient tale of Cherry of Zennor told by Hunt in his Popular Romances of the West of England.

The girl, Cherry of Zennor, could not contentedly put up with her life at home, because her parents were poor, living on potatoes and fish, and she, though she was pretty and could run like a hare, had never a ribbon for her curls nor a new frock to go to church or to fair in. So she set out to get a servant’s place somewhere in the “low countries.”

The road was long and she was homesick by the time she had reached a four-went way. There she sat down and cried, but had scarcely recovered when she saw a gentleman coming up to her. He bade her “good-morning” and asked her whither she went; and when she said that she was off to look for a servant’s place, he told her that he was in search of just such a clean and handsome girl for his own house. So Cherry went off with him, to milk his cow and look after his child; and she was to have good clothes when she got there.

They went down and down for a long way; the road was clouded over by trees and was growing darker and darker, when suddenly the man opened a gate in a wall and told her that there it was that he lived. She had never seen a garden so rich in fruit and flowers and singing birds. Was it enchanted? But no, the man was no fairy; he was too big. Presently his child appeared, a boy with piercing and crafty eyes, and an old hag, called “Aunt Prudence,” who prepared a choice supper for the girl; and she ate of it heartily. Cherry slept with the child at the top of the house and was told that, even if she could not sleep, she was to keep her eyes shut up there and not to speak to the boy; at dawn she was to wash him at a spring in the garden and rub his eyes—never her own—with an ointment; then she was to milk the cow and give the boy a bowl of the last milk; she was at all times to avoid curiosity.

All this she did until it came to milking the cow. But Cherry saw no cow and was calling “Pruit! Pruit! Pruit!” when out she came from among the trees as if from nowhere. All day, but it was easy work, she scalded milk, made butter, cleaned platters and bowls with water and sand, picked the fruit, weeded the garden. Sometimes the man kissed her for her pains.

A year passed. Aunt Prudence was sent away because she took Cherry into one of the forbidden rooms, where the floor was like glass and it was full of people turned to stone. Sometimes the master went away and left Cherry alone with the child.

The ointment was still a puzzle—but surely it made the child’s eyes see many things! So one day she anointed her own eyes with it. It burned her painfully, and running to the spring to wash it away she learned its power. For there, at the bottom of the water, was a world of little people at play and among them her master; and looking up she saw that the branches of the trees and the flowers and the grass were crowded with the same joyous people. Another day she looked through the keyhole of one of the forbidden rooms and saw her master there, and many ladies too, all singing, and one of these who looked like a queen he kissed. So when, as they were fruit gathering some time afterwards, the master leaned forward to kiss her, she struck him on the face, saying, that he might kiss the small people under the water. Next morning very early he called her from her bed, led her by the light of a lantern up the dark lane for a long way, and then disappeared, after telling her that at times she would still be able to see him on the hills; and when she had recovered from her sorrow she went home.

CHAPTER XXXIX
A HARVEST MOON

The first steep cornfield under the edge of the red moor lay all rough and warm with stubble in the evening light. The corn sheaves themselves were of a shining gold and leaned together in shocks that made long, low tents and invited the wayfarer to shelter and sleep. We had come over the moor for hours and this field was the beginning of a deep valley that stretched to the sea. Yonder was the sea, ten miles away, with a row of lights running out upon a nose of land far into it. The valley held one village half way towards the sea and several white farmhouses which sent the smoke of supper to explore the neighbouring ash trees.

A stream running straight from the moor gave us water and we ate our supper leaning against a corn shock. Our pipes soon went out, what with fatigue and indulgence in the warmth and the pleasant valley, brimming with summer haze and golden still.

We had been alone when, just as the light was going, two farm boys and a girl came into the field without noticing us. The girl sat at the top of the field and the boys took off their coats and laid them beside her. She arranged their folds and then sat straight up to watch. For down the field ran the boys, striding heavily side by side, each leaping the same shock until they had reached the bottom wall almost at the same time, where they argued and made claims to victory in broken voices. They walked quickly up again to the girl and threw themselves down panting, close to her, arguing together as much as they could without breath.

The girl laughed and said something; then they rose up and raced again, the heavier one this time encouraging himself with groans at each leap over the sheaves, flinging himself over with so much ferocity that he tumbled at the end well in front.

“You can jump, no mistake,” said the girl to the winner. “But what’s the matter with you?” she asked the other, putting a foxglove between her lips. Both were too much out of breath to speak, but in a few minutes started again. They ran faster than ever; they leapt well over the tops of the shocks, so high as to stumble at each descent. The winner of the last race could only just keep level with the other, and seemed about to collapse at each thundering jump, when his rival, beginning a great leap too early, fell in the middle of the shock and lost the race. They returned, the winner first, and lay sprawling, panting full in the girl’s face.

“Well, Luke, you have won, and there’s your kiss,” she said to the heavier lad.

“And, John, you have been beaten; we did not say what the loser should have, so here’s two for you,” she went on, this time taking the flower out of her mouth. “And now, lads, race again!”

This time the race was never in doubt. John took each leap as if he aimed at the harvest moon that rose before him. Luke tripped at several sheaves, and, at the bottom, climbed over the stone wall and disappeared. As to John, he came back and began racing and leaping alone, until the girl, feeling cold or in need of some company, went off and left the proud fellow to the moon and the line of shocks.

CHAPTER XL
THE INN

The night was dark and solid rain tumultuously invested the inn. As I stood in a dim passage I could see through the bar into the cloudy parlour, square and white, surrounded by settles, each curving about a round table made of one piece of elm on three legs. A reproduction of “Rent Day” and a coloured picture of a bold Spanish beauty hung on the wall, which, for the rest, was sufficiently adorned by the sharp shadows of men’s figures and furniture that mingled grotesquely. All the men but one leaned back upon the settles or forward upon the tables, their hands on their tankards, watching the one who sang a ballad—a ballad known to them so well that they seemed not to listen, but simply to let the melody surge about them and provoke what thoughts it would.

At some time, perhaps many times in his life, every man is likely to meet with a thing in art or nature or human life or books which astonishes and gives him a profound satisfaction, not so much because it is rich or beautiful or strange, as because it is a symbol of a thing which, without the symbol, he could never grasp and enjoy. The German archers making a target of Leonardo’s sculptured horse and horsemen at Milan; the glory of purple that has flown from a painted church window and settled upon a peasant’s shoulders for an hour; the eloquence, as of an epigram rich in anger and woe, of one bare branch that juts out from a proud green wood into the little midnight stars and makes them smaller with its splendid pang; a woodman felling one by one the black and golden oak trees in the spring and slaying their ancient shadows; or, in a discreet and massive crowd, one jet of laughter, so full of joy or defiance or carelessness that it seems to cut through the heavy air like the whistle of a bullet—the world is one flame of these blossoms, could we but see. Music has many of them in her gift. Music, the rebel, the martyr, the victor—music, the romantic cry of matter striving to become spirit—is itself such a symbol, and there is no melody so poor that it will not at some time or another, to our watchful or receptive minds, have its festal hour in which it is crowned or at least crucified, for our solemn delight. “Dolly Gray” I have heard sung all day by poor sluttish women as they gathered peas in the broad, burning fields of July, until it seemed that its terrible, acquiescent melancholy must have found a way to the stars and troubled them.

And of all music, the old ballads and folk songs and their airs are richest in the plain, immortal symbols. The best of them seem to be written in a language that should be universal, if only simplicity were truly simple to mankind. Their alphabet is small; their combinations are as the sunlight or the storm, and their words also are symbols. Seldom have they any direct relation to life as the realist believes it to be. They are poor in such detail as reveals a past age or a country not our own. They are in themselves epitomes of whole generations, of a whole countryside. They are the quintessence of many lives and passions made into a sweet cup for posterity. A myriad hearts and voices have in age after age poured themselves into the few notes and words. Doubtless, the old singers were not content, but we, who know them not, can well see in their old songs a kind of immortality for them in wanderings on the viewless air. The men and women—who hundreds of years ago were eating and drinking and setting their hearts on things—still retain a thin hold on life through the joy of us who hear and sing their songs, or tread their curving footpaths, or note their chisel marks on cathedral stones, or rest upon the undulating churchyard grass. The words, in league with a fair melody, lend themselves to infinite interpretations, according to the listener’s heart. What great literature by known authors enables us to interpret thus by virtue of its subtlety, ballads and their music force us to do by their simplicity. The melody and the story or the song move us suddenly and launch us into an unknown. They are not art, they come to us imploring a new lease of life on the sweet earth, and so we come to give them something which the dull eye sees not in the words and notes themselves, out of our own hearts, as we do when we find a black hearthstone among the nettles, or hear the clangour of the joyous wild swan, invisible overhead, in the winter dawn.

In the parlour of the inn the singer stood up and sang of how a girl was walking alone in the meadows of spring when she saw a ship going out to sea and heard her true love crying on board; and he sailed to the wars and much he saw in strange countries, but never came back; and still she walks in the meadows and looks out to sea, though she is old, in the spring. He sang without stirring, without expression, except in so far as light and darkness from his own life emerged enmeshed among the deep notes. He might have been delivering an oracle of solemn but ambiguous things. And so in fact he was. By its simplicity and remoteness from life the song set going the potent logic of fancy which would lead many men to diverse conclusions. It excluded nothing of humanity except what baseness its melody might make impossible. The strangeness and looseness of its framework allowed each man to see himself therein, or some incident or dream in his life, or something possible to a self which he desired to be or imagined himself to be, or perhaps believed himself once to have been. There were no bounds of time or place. It included the love of Ruy Blas, of Marlowe, of Dante, of Catullus, of Kilhwch, of Swift, of Palomides, of Hazlitt, of Villon.... And that little inn, in the midst of mountains and immense night, seemed a temple of all souls, where a few faithful ones still burnt candles and remembered the dead.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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