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You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms -of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll -have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using -this ebook. - - - -Title: The South Country - -Author: Edward Thomas - -Release Date: November 22, 2019 [EBook #60760] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SOUTH COUNTRY *** - - - - -Produced by Henry Flower and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was -produced from images generously made available by The -Internet Archive/American Libraries.) - - - - - - -</pre> - - -<div class="transnote"> -<p>In the html version of this eBook, illustrations are linked to higher-resolution -versions of the images.</p> -</div> - -<div class="break figcenter" style="width: 557px;"> -<a href="images/coverh.jpg"> -<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="557" height="800" alt="cover" /> -</a> -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i" id="Page_i">[i]</a></span></p> - - -<h1>THE SOUTH COUNTRY</h1> - - - - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ii" id="Page_ii">[ii]</a></span></p> - - - -<div class="adbox"> - -<h2 class="nobreak">THE HEART OF ENGLAND -SERIES</h2> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>This Series opens with a new work by Mr. -<span class="smcap">Edward Thomas</span>, that curious and enthusiastic -explorer of the English Countryside, whose -prose style gives him a claim to be regarded -as the successor, as he is the biographer, of -Richard Jefferies. The Series includes a new -edition of Mr. <span class="smcap">Thomas’s</span> other work, “The -Heart of England,” and Mr. <span class="smcap">Hilaire Belloc’s</span> -“The Historic Thames.” These two -volumes were originally issued in limited -editions at one Guinea net per volume.</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p class="noindent">THE SOUTH COUNTRY. By -<span class="smcap">Edward Thomas</span>. Small crown 8vo. -3s. 6d. net.</p></div> - -<p>Mr. Thomas in this new book gives his -impressions of a year’s wanderings afoot as -the seasons change through Kent, Sussex, -Hampshire, Wiltshire and Cornwall. It is a -prose-poem of the most beautiful counties in -England.</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p class="noindent">THE HEART OF ENGLAND. -By <span class="smcap">Edward Thomas</span>. Small crown 8vo. -3s. 6d. net.</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p class="noindent">THE HISTORIC THAMES. -By <span class="smcap">Hilaire Belloc</span>, M.P. 3s. 6d. net.</p></div> - -<hr class="tb" /> -<p class="center noindent"><i>Prospectus of above Books sent post free on application.</i></p> - -<p class="center noindent"><span class="large">J. M. DENT & CO.</span><br /> -29-30, BEDFORD STREET, LONDON, W.C.</p> -</div> -<div class="chapter"> - -<p><span class="pagenum"> -<a name="Page_iv" id="Page_iv">[iv]</a></span></p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 539px;"> -<a href="images/zill_a004h.jpg"> -<img src="images/zill_a004.jpg" width="539" height="800" alt="farm scene" /> -</a> -</div> - -</div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[v]</a></span></p> - - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 546px;"> -<a href="images/zill_a005h.jpg"> -<img src="images/zill_a005.jpg" width="546" height="800" alt="title page" /> -</a> -</div> - -<div class="titlepage break"> -<p class="p4"> -<span class="large">THE SOUTH</span><br /> -<span class="x-large">COUNTRY</span></p> - - -<p class="p2"><i>by Edward Thomas</i></p> - - -<p class="p4"> -LONDON<br /> -<i>J. M. DENT & CO.</i><br /> -<i>1909</i> -</p> - -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[vi]</a></span></p> - - - - -<p class="small break center p4 noindent"> -<span class="smcap">Richard Clay & Sons, Limited</span>,<br /> -BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND<br /> -BUNGAY, SUFFOLK. -</p> - -<div class="chapter p4"> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[vii]</a></span></p> - - - - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>“As I can’t leap from cloud to cloud, I want to wander -from road to road. That little path there by the clipped -hedge goes up to the high road. I want to go up that -path and to walk along the high road, and so on and on -and on, and to know all kinds of people. Did you ever -think that the roads are the only things that are endless; -that one can walk on and on, and never be stopped by a -gate or a wall? They are the serpent of eternity. I -wonder they have never been worshipped. What are -the stars beside them? They never meet one another. -The roads are the only things that are infinite. They -are all endless.”</p> - -<p class="sig noindent"> -<span class="smcap">Paul Ruttledge</span> in<br /> -<i>Where there is Nothing</i>,<br /> -by <span class="smcap">W. B. Yeats</span>. -</p></div> - -</div> - -<div class="chapter p4"> - -<p><span class="pagenum"> -<a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[ix]</a></span></p> - - - - -<p class="center noindent"> -TO<br /> - -<span class="large">EDWARD GARNETT</span> -</p> - -</div> - -<div class="chapter p4"> - -<p><span class="pagenum"> -<a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[xi]</a></span></p> - - - - -<h2 class="nobreak">CONTENTS</h2> - - - -<div class="center"> -<table class="toc" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary=""> -<tr><td class="small">CHAP.</td><td> </td><td class="small">PAGE</td></tr> -<tr><td>I.</td><td class="left">THE SOUTH COUNTRY</td><td class="right"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr> -<tr><td>II. </td><td class="left">THE END OF WINTER—SUFFOLK—HAMPSHIRE</td><td class="right"><a href="#Page_15">15</a></td></tr> -<tr><td>III.</td><td class="left">SPRING—HAMPSHIRE—KENT—SURREY</td><td class="right"><a href="#Page_40">40</a></td></tr> -<tr><td>IV.</td><td class="left">AN ADVENTURER</td><td class="right"><a href="#Page_61">61</a></td></tr> -<tr><td>V.</td><td class="left">SUSSEX</td><td class="right"><a href="#Page_68">68</a></td></tr> -<tr><td>VI.</td><td class="left">A RETURN TO NATURE</td><td class="right"><a href="#Page_73">73</a></td></tr> -<tr><td>VII.</td><td class="left">A RAILWAY CARRIAGE—SURREY—SUSSEX</td><td class="right"><a href="#Page_95">95</a></td></tr> -<tr><td>VIII.</td><td class="left">JUNE—HAMPSHIRE—THE GOLDEN AGE—TRAHERNE</td><td class="right"><a href="#Page_121">121</a></td></tr> -<tr><td>IX.</td><td class="left">HISTORY AND THE PARISH—HAMPSHIRE—CORNWALL</td><td class="right"><a href="#Page_147">147</a></td></tr> -<tr><td>X.</td><td class="left">SUMMER—SUSSEX</td><td class="right"><a href="#Page_180">180</a></td></tr> -<tr><td>XI.</td><td class="left">HAMPSHIRE—AN UMBRELLA MAN</td><td class="right"><a href="#Page_186">186</a></td></tr> -<tr><td>XII.</td><td class="left">CHILDREN OF EARTH—HAMPSHIRE AND SUSSEX</td><td class="right"><a href="#Page_196">196</a></td></tr> -<tr><td>XIII.</td><td class="left">AUGUST—GOING WESTWARD—HAMPSHIRE AND WILTSHIRE</td><td class="right"><a href="#Page_210">210</a></td></tr> -<tr><td>XIV.</td><td class="left">AN OLD HOUSE AND A BOOK—WILTSHIRE</td><td class="right"><a href="#Page_235">235</a></td></tr> -<tr><td>XV.</td><td class="left">AN OUTCAST—WILTSHIRE</td><td class="right"><a href="#Page_245">245</a></td></tr> -<tr><td>XVI.</td><td class="left">THE END OF SUMMER—KENT—BERKSHIRE—HAMPSHIRE—SUSSEX—THE FAIR</td><td class="right"><a href="#Page_255">255</a></td></tr> -</table></div> - -</div> - -<div class="break"> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[xii]</a></span></p> - - - - - -<p class="p4">Several short passages from this book have been -printed in “The Saturday Review,” “The Nation,” -“The New Age,” “The Daily Chronicle,” and “The -Daily News,” and are reprinted by permission.</p> - -</div> - -<div class="chapter"> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[1]</a></span></p> - -<p class="x-large center p4 noindent">THE SOUTH COUNTRY</p> - - - - -<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER I<br /> - -<span class="smaller">THE SOUTH COUNTRY</span></h2> - -</div> - -<p>The name of “South Country” is taken from a poem -by Mr. Hilaire Belloc, <span class="lock">beginning—</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“When I am living in the Midlands,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">They are sodden and unkind,</div> - <div class="verse">I light my lamp in the evening,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">My work is left behind;</div> - <div class="verse">And the great hills of the South Country</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Come back into my mind.”</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p class="noindent">The name is given to the south of England as distinguished -from the Midlands, “North England”, and -“West England” by the Severn. The poet is thinking -particularly of Sussex and of the South Downs. In using -the term I am thinking of all that country which is -dominated by the Downs or by the English Channel, or -by both; Cornwall and East Anglia have been admitted -only for the sake of contrast. Roughly speaking, it is -the country south of the Thames and Severn and east -of Exmoor, and it includes, therefore, the counties of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[2]</a></span> -Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, -Dorset, and part of Somerset. East and west across it -go ranges of chalk hills, their sides smoothly hollowed by -Nature and the marl-burner, or sharply scored by old -roads. On their lower slopes they carry the chief woods -of the south country, their coombes are often fully fledged -with trees, and sometimes their high places are crowned -with beech or fir; but they are most admirably themselves -when they are bare of all but grass and a few bushes of -gorse and juniper and some yew, and their ridges make -flowing but infinitely variable clear lines against the sky. -Sometimes they support a plateau of flint and clay, which -slopes gradually to the level of the streams. Sometimes -they fall away to the vales in well-defined ledges—first a -long curving slope, then a plain of cornland, and below -that a steep but lesser slope covered with wood, and then -again grassland or sandy heaths and rivers. Except on the -plateau, the summits have few houses and very small -hamlets; the first terrace has larger villages and even a -town or two; but most of the towns are beneath on the -banks of the rivers, and chiefly where they are broadest -near the sea, or on the coast itself. The rivers flow mainly -north and south, and can have but a short course before -they enter the sea on the south or the Thames on the -north. Those I remember best are the Stours, the two -Rothers, but especially the one which joins the Arun, the -Medway, the Len, the Eden, the Holling, the Teise, the -Ouse, the Itchen, the Meon, the Wey, the Mole, the -Kennet, the Ray, the Winterbournes, the Wiltshire Avon, -the Wylye, the Ebble, and many little waters running gold -over New Forest gravel or crystal over the chalk of Hamp<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span>shire, -and not least of all that unlucky rivulet, the Wandle, -once a nymph that walked among her <span class="lock">sisters—</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">So amiable, fair, so pure, so delicate,</div> - <div class="verse">So plump, so full, so fresh, her eyes so wondrous clear:</div> - <div class="verse">And first unto her lord, at <i>Wandsworth</i> doth appear,</div> - <div class="verse">That in the goodly court, of their great sovereign <i>Tames</i>,</div> - <div class="verse">There might no other speech be had amongst the streams,</div> - <div class="verse">But only of this Nymph, sweet Wandel, what she wore;</div> - <div class="verse">Of her complexion, grace, and how herself she bore.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p class="noindent">Nor can I omit the Wiltshire and Berkshire canal, as it -was fifteen years ago, between Swindon and Dauntsey, -an unfrequented by-way through a quiet dairy country, and -full of pike and tench among the weeds and under the -tall water docks and willow herbs which even then threatened -to subdue it as they now have done.</p> - -<p>The chief roads make south, south-east, south-west and -west from London; almost the only road going east and -west and not touching London is the old road known -between Winchester and Canterbury as the Pilgrims’ Way.</p> - -<p>Most of the towns are small market towns, manufacturing -chiefly beer; or they are swollen, especially in -the neighbourhood of London, as residential quarters on -lines of railway or as health and pleasure resorts on the -sea. But any man used to maps will be wiser on these -matters in an hour than I am. For what I have sought -is quiet and as complete a remoteness as possible from -towns, whether of manufactures, of markets or of cathedrals. -I have used a good many maps in my time, -largely to avoid the towns; but I confess that I prefer -to do without them and to go, if I have some days -before me, guided by the hills or the sun or a stream—or, -if I have one day only, in a rough circle, trusting,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span> -by taking a series of turnings to the left or a series to -the right, to take much beauty by surprise and to return -at last to my starting-point. On a dull day or cloudy -night I have often no knowledge of the points of the -compass. I never go out to see anything. The signboards -thus often astonish me. I wish, by the way, -that I had noted down more of the names on the signboards -at the cross-roads. There is a wealth of poetry -in them, as in that which points—by a ford, too—first, -to Poulner and Ringwood; second, to Gorley and -Fordingbridge; third, to Linwood and Broomy: and -another pointing to Fordingbridge, to Ringwood, and to -Cuckoo Hill and Furze Hill: and another in the parish -of Pentlow, pointing to Foxearth and Sudbury, to Cavendish -and Clare, and to Belchamps and Yeldham. Castles, -churches, old houses, of extraordinary beauty or interest, -have never worn out any of my shoe leather except by -accident. I like to come upon them—usually without -knowing their names and legends—but do not lament -when chance takes me a hundred times out of their way. -Nor have I ever been to Marlow to think about Shelley, -or to Winterslow for Hazlitt’s sake; and I enter Buriton -many times without remembering Gibbon. They would -move me no more than the statue of a man and a fat -horse (with beribboned tail), which a grateful countryside -erected to William III in the market square at -Petersfield. I prefer any country church or chapel to -Winchester or Chichester or Canterbury Cathedral, just -as I prefer “All round my hat,” or “Somer is icumen -in,” to Beethoven. Not that I dislike the cathedrals, or -that I do not find many pleasures amongst them. But<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span> -they are incomprehensible and not restful. I feel when I -am within them that I know why a dog bays at the -moon. They are much more difficult or, rather, I am -more conscious in them of my lack of comprehension, -than the hills or the sea; and I do not like the showmen, -the smell and look of the museum, the feeling that it is -admiration or nothing, and all the well-dressed and flyblown -people round about. I sometimes think that -religious architecture is a dead language, majestic but -dead, that it never was a popular language. Have some -of these buildings lived too long, been too well preserved, -so as to oppress our little days with too permanent an -expression of the passing things? The truth is that, -though the past allures me, and to discover a cathedral -for myself would be an immense pleasure, I have no -historic sense and no curiosity. I mention these trivial -things because they may be important to those who read -what I am paid for writing. I have read a great deal -of history—in fact, a university gave me a degree out of -respect for my apparent knowledge of history—but I -have forgotten it all, or it has got into my blood and is -present in me in a form which defies evocation or -analysis. But as far as I can tell I am pure of history. -Consequently I prefer the old brick houses round the -cathedral, and that avenue of archaic bossy limes to the -cathedral itself with all its turbulent quiet and vague -antiquity. The old school also close at hand! I was -there after the end of the term once, and two boys were -kicking a football in a half-walled court; it was a bright, -cold, windy April afternoon; and the ancient brick was -penetrated with their voices and the sound of the ball,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span> -and I thought there could be nothing lovelier than that -court, the pleasant walls, and the broad playing fields in -sight of a smooth noble hill and a temple of dark firs -on top. I was not thinking of Winchester or of any one -older than the fondest son of that “mother, more than -mother,” and little of him; but was merely caught up by -and with the harmony of man and his work, of two -children playing, and of the green downs and windy sky.</p> - -<p>And so I travel, armed only with myself, an avaricious -and often libertine and fickle eye and ear, in pursuit, not -of knowledge, not of wisdom, but of one whom to pursue -is never to capture. Politics, the drama, science, racing, -reforms and preservations, divorces, book clubs—nearly -everything which the average (oh! mysterious average -man, always to be met but never met) and the superior -and the intelligent man is thinking of, I cannot grasp; -my mind refuses to deal with them; and when they are -discussed I am given to making answers like, “In Kilve -there is no weathercock.” I expect there are others as -unfortunate, superfluous men such as the sanitation, -improved housing, police, charities, medicine of our wonderful -civilization saves from the fate of the cuckoo’s -foster-brothers. They will perhaps follow my meanders -and understand. The critics also will help. They will -misunderstand—it is their trade. How well they know -what I ought, or at least ought not, to do. I must, they -have said, avoid “the manner of the worst oleographs”; -must not be “affected,” though the recipe is not to be -had; must beware of “over-excitation of the colour -sense.” In slow course of years we acquire a way of -expression, hopelessly inadequate, as we plainly see when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span> -looking at the methods of great poets, of beautiful women, -of athletes, of politicians, but still gradually as fitted to -the mind as an old walking-stick to the hand that has -worn and been worn by it, full of our weakness as of our -strength, of our blindness as of our vision—the man himself, -the poor man it may be. And I live by writing, -since it is impossible to live by not writing in an age not -of gold but of brass.</p> - -<p>Unlearned, incurious, but finding deepest ease and joy -out of doors, I have gone about the South Country these -twenty years and more on foot, especially in Kent -between Maidstone and Ashford and round Penshurst, -in Surrey between London, Guildford and Horley, in -Hampshire round Petersfield, in Wiltshire between -Wootton Bassett, Swindon and Savernake. The people -are almost foreign to me, the more so because country -people have not yet been thrown into quite the same -confusion as townspeople, and therefore look awkwardly -upon those who are not in trade—writing is an -unskilled labour and not a trade—not on the land, -and not idle. But I have known something of two or -three men and women, and have met a few dozen more. -Yet is this country, though I am mainly Welsh, a kind -of home, as I think it is more than any other to those -modern people who belong nowhere. Here they prefer -to retire, here they take their holidays in multitudes. For -it is a good foster-mother, ample-bosomed, mild and -homely. The lands of wild coast, of mountains, of -myriad chimneys, offer no such welcome. They have -their race, their speech and ways, and are jealous. You -must be a man of the sea or of the hills to dwell there at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span> -ease. But the South is tender and will harbour any one; -her quiet people resent intrusion quietly, so that many -do not notice the resentment. These are the “home” -counties. A man can hide away in them. The people -are not hospitable, but the land is.</p> - -<p>Yet there are days and places which send us in search -of another kind of felicity than that which dwells under -the Downs, when, for example, the dark wild of Ashdown -or of Woolmer, some parcel of heathery land, with -tufted pines and pale wandering roads, rises all dark and -stormy out of the gentle vale, or on such an evening as -when the sky is solemn blue save at the horizon where it -is faint gold, and between the blue and the gold, across the -north-west, lies an ashen waste of level cloud. This sky -and its new moon and evening star below, is barred by -the boles of beeches; through them the undulations of -deserted ploughland are all but white with dewy grass -and weed. Underfoot winds a disused path amid almost -overlapping dog’s mercury. The earth is like an -exhausted cinder, cold, silent, dead, compared with the -great act in the sky. Suddenly a dog-fox barks—with -melancholy and malice in the repeated hoarse yells—a -sound that awakens the wildest past out of the wood and -the old path. He passes by me at a trot, pausing a little -to bark. He vanishes, but not his voice, into the wood, -and he returns, still barking, and passes me again, filling -the wood and the coombe below with a sound that has -nothing to match it except that ashen waste in the beech-barred, -cold blue and golden sky, against which the fox -is carved in moving ebony. Or again, when a rude dark -headland rises out of the mist of the plain into the evening<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span> -sky. The woods seem but just freed from the horror of -primeval sea, if that is not primeval sea washing their -bases. Capella hangs low, pale, large, moist and trembling, -almost engulfed between two horns of the wood upon the -headland, the frailest beacon of hope, still fluttering from -the storm out of which the land is emerging. Then, or -at home looking at a map of Britain, the West calls, out -of Wiltshire and out of Cornwall and Devon beyond, -out of Monmouth and Glamorgan and Gower and Caermarthen, -with a voice of dead Townsends, Eastaways, -Thomases, Phillipses, Treharnes, Marendaz, sea men and -mountain men.</p> - -<p>Westward, for men of this island, lies the sea; westward -are the great hills. In a mere map the west of -Britain is fascinating. The great features of that map, -which make it something more than a picture to be -imperfectly copied by laborious childish pens, are the -great promontories of Caernarvon, of Pembroke, of Gower -and of Cornwall, jutting out into the western sea, like -the features of a grim large face, such a face as is carved -on a ship’s prow. These protruding features, even on a -small-scale map, thrill the mind with a sense of purpose -and spirit. They yearn, they peer out ever to the sea, -as if using eyes and nostrils to savour the utmost scent of -it, as if themselves calling back to the call of the waves. -To the eyes of a child they stand for adventure. They -are lean and worn and scarred with the strife and watching. -Then gradually into the mind of the child comes -the story that justifies and, still more, inspires and seems -to explain those westward-pointing promontories. For, -out towards them continually have the conquered races<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span> -of the world retreated, and their settlements give those -corners a strangeness and a charm to our fantastic sympathies. -Out from them conquerors in their turn have -gone to found a legend like the Welsh Madoc, an empire -like the men of Devon. The blood of conquered and -conqueror is in our veins, and it flushes the cheek at the -sight or thought of the west. Each man of us is as -ancient and complicated, as lofty-spired and as deep-vaulted -as cathedrals and castles old, and in those lands -our crypts and dark foundations are dimly remembered. -We look out towards them from the high camps at -Battlesbury and Barbury: the lines of the Downs go -trooping along to them at night. Even in the bosom of -the South Country, when the tranquil bells are calling -over the corn at twilight, the westward-going hills, where -the sun has fallen, draw the heart away and fill us with -a desire to go on and on for ever, that same way. When, -in the clear windy dawn, thin clouds like traveller’s joy -are upon the high air, it seems that up there also, in -those placid spaces, they travel and know the joy of the -road, and the sun—feeding on the blue, as a child said -yesterday, as Lucretius said before—goes the desired way. -London also calls, making the needle whirl in the -compass. For in London also a man may live as up “a -great river wide as any sea”; and over some of the fairest -of the South Country hangs the all-night glimmer of the -city, warning, threatening, beckoning anon. Some of this -country has already perished, or is so ramparted about that -there is no stranger country in the world unless it be -those perpendicular valleys cloven among the Blue Mountains, -their floors level and of the purest grass, but access<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span>ible -only at the end nearest the plain, where the cleft is -sometimes so narrow that not even a dog can enter.</p> - -<p>This, then, is my South Country. It covers the North -Downs and the South Downs, the Icknield Way and the -Pilgrims’ Way, and the cross-roads between them and the -Thames and the sea, a land of hops, fruit, corn, high -pasture, meadow, woodland, heath and shore. But there -is no man of whose powers I stand more in awe than the -topographical writer, from Mr. A. G. Bradley or Mr. -E. V. Lucas downwards. I shall not attempt to compete -with them. I should only be showing my ignorance and -carelessness were I to label every piece of country which -I chance to mention or describe. Any one can point out -my omissions, my blindness, my exaggeration. Nor can -I bring myself to mention the names of the places where -I walked or sat down. In a sense this country is all -“carved out of the carver’s brain” and has not a name. -This is not the South Country which measures about two -hundred miles from east to west and fifty from north to -south. In some ways it is incomparably larger than any -country that was ever mapped, since upon nothing less -than the infinite can the spirit disport itself. In other -ways it is far smaller—as when a mountain with tracts of -sky and cloud and the full moon glass themselves in a -pond, a little pond.</p> - -<p>It would need a more intellectual eye than mine to -distinguish county from county by its physical character, -its architecture, its people, its unique combination of -common elements, and I shall not attempt it. As often -as not I have no doubt mingled parts of Kent with my -Wiltshire, and so on. And positively I cannot say to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span> -which belongs one picture that occurs to me as characteristic -of the South <span class="lock">Country—</span></p> - -<p>A crossing of roads encloses a waste place of no man’s -land, of dwarf oaks, hawthorn, bramble and fern, and -the flowers of knapweed and harebell, and golden tormentil -embroidering the heather and the minute seedling -oaks. Follow one of these roads past straight avenues of -elms leading up to a farm (built square of stone, under a -roof of thatch or stone slate, and lying well back from -the road across a level meadow with some willows in the -midst, elms round about, willow herb waving rosy by the -stream at the border), or merely to a cluster of ricks; and -presently the hedges open wide apart and the level white -road cools itself under the many trees of a green, wych -elms, sycamores, limes and horse-chestnuts, by a pool, and, -on the other side, the sign of the “White Hart,” its -horns held back upon its haunches. A stone-built farm -and its barns and sheds lie close to the green on either -side, and another of more stateliness where the hedges -once more run close together alongside the road. This -farmhouse has three dormers, two rows of five shadowy -windows below, and an ivied porch not quite in the -centre; a modest lawn divided by a straight path; dense, -well-watered borders of grey lavender, rosemary, ladslove, -halberds of crimson hollyhock, infinite blending stars of -Michaelmas daisy; old apple trees seeming to be pulled -down almost to the grass by glossy-rinded fruit: and, -behind, the bended line of hills a league away, wedding -the lowly meadows, the house and the trees to the large -heavens and their white procession of clouds out of the -south and the sea. The utmost kindliness of earth is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span> -expressed in these three houses, the trees on the flat green, -the slightly curving road across it, the uneven posts and -rails leaning this way and that at the edge of the pond. -The trees are so arranged about the road that they weave -a harmony of welcome, of blessing, a viaticum for -whosoever passes by and only for a moment tastes their -shade, acknowledges unconsciously their attitudes, hears -their dry summer murmuring, sees the house behind -them. The wayfarer knows nothing of those who built -them and those who live therein, of those who planted -the trees just so and not otherwise, of the causes that -shaped the green, any more than of those who reaped and -threshed the barley, and picked and dried and packed the -hops that made the ale at the “White Hart.” He only -knows that centuries of peace and hard work and planning -for the undreaded future have made it possible. The -spirit of the place, all this council of time and Nature and -men, enriches the air with a bloom deeper than summer’s -blue of distance; it drowses while it delights the responding -mind with a magic such as once upon a time men -thought to express by gods of the hearth, by Faunus and -the flying nymphs, by fairies, angels, saints, a magic -which none of these things is too strange and “supernatural” -to represent. For after the longest inventory -of what is here visible and open to analysis, much remains -over, imponderable but mighty. Often when the lark is -high he seems to be singing in some keyless chamber of -the brain; so here the house is built in shadowy replica. -If only we could make a graven image of this spirit -instead of a muddy untruthful reflection of words! I have -sometimes thought that a statue, the statue of a human<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span> -or heroic or divine figure, might more fitly than in many -another stand in such a place. A figure, it should be, -like that benign proud Demeter in marble now banished -to a recess in a cold gallery, before which a man of any religion, -or class, or race, or time might bow and lay down -something of his burden and take away what makes him -other than he was. She would be at home and blithe -again, enshrined in the rain or in this flowery sunlight of -an English green, near the wych elm and sycamore and -the walls of stone, the mortar mixed, as in all true -buildings, with human blood.</p> - -<div class="chapter"> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span></p> - - - - -<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER II<br /> - -<span class="smaller">THE END OF WINTER—SUFFOLK—HAMPSHIRE</span></h2> -</div> - -<h3>SUFFOLK.</h3> - -<p>There are three sounds in the wood this morning—the -sound of the waves that has not died away since the -sea carried off church and cottage and cliff and the other -half of what was once an inland wood; the sound of -trees, a multitudinous frenzied sound, of rustling dead -oak-leaves still on the bough, of others tripping along the -path like mice, or winding up in sudden spirals and falling -again, of dead boughs grating and grinding, of pliant -young branches lashing, of finest twigs and fir needles -sighing, of leaf and branch and trunk booming like one; -and through these sounds, the song of a thrush. Rain -falls and, for a moment only, the dyked marshland below -and beyond the wood is pale and luminous with its flooded -pools, the sails of windmills climb and plunge, the pale -sea is barred with swathes of foam, and on the whistling -sands the tall white waves vaunt, lean forward, topple -and lie quivering. But the rain increases: the sound and -the mist of it make a wall about the world, except the -world in the brain and except the thrush’s song which, -so bright and clear, has a kind of humanity in it by -contrast with the huge bulk of the noises of sea and wood.</p> - -<p>Rain and wind cease together, and here on the short -grass at the cliff’s edge is a strange birth—a gently convex -fungus about two inches broad, the central boss of it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span> -faintly indented, the surface not perfectly regular but -dimpled so as to break the light, and the edge wavering -away from the pure circular form; in hue a pale chestnut -paling to a transparent edge of honey colour; and the -whole surface so smooth and polished by rain as to seem -coated in ice. What a thought for the great earth on -such a day! Out of the wood on to this grass the -thrushes steal, running with heads down and stopping -with heads prouder than stags’; out also into the short -corn; and so glad are they that they quarrel and sing on -the ground without troubling to find a perch.</p> - -<p>It is perfectly still; the sun splutters out of the thick -grey and white sky, the white sails shine on a sea of -steel, and it is warm. And now in the luxury of the first -humid warmth and quiet of the year the blackbird sings. -The rain sets in at nightfall, but the wind does not blow, -and still the blackbird sings and the thrushes will hardly -leave the corn. That one song alone sweetens the wide -vague country of evening, the cloudy oak woods, the -brown mixen under the elms and the little white farm -behind the unpruned limes, with its oblong windows -irregularly placed and of unequal size, its white door -almost at a corner, and the lawn coming right to the -walls.</p> - -<p>Day breaks and sun and wind dance together in the -clouds and trees, but without rain. Larks sing over the -dark heavy cornland in which the watery furrows shine. -The dead drab grasses wave at the feet of the hedgerows. -Little pools at meadow corners bring down the sky to -the dark earth. Horses nod before the plough. A slight -haze exhales from the innumerable rich spongy clods,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span> -between the hedges of oak and ash. Now and then -shapeless rags of white or snow-grey clouds wander up -from the west and for a little while obscure the white -mountains of cloud, the blue sky, the silver sun; or the -sweet smoke from the fires of hedgers and ditchers rises -up against the edge of a copse. The white linen flaps -and glows in cottage gardens; the dung cars go by -crunching the flints into the mud; and the boots and bells -of pony traps make a music forgotten since last February. -It is only the twenty-second day of February, yet these -delights of the soul through the eyes and ears are of -spring. The children have begun to look for violets, and -the youngest, being the nearest to them in stature and in -nature, has found one. There she stands, four years old, -with straight brown legs, her face clear and soft but -brown as a new hazel nut, her hair almost of the same -colour and paler where the sun has bleached it round -her temples and falling over her cheeks and neck; and -through it shine eyes of a deeper brown, the hue of the -most exquisite flints. The eyes shine, the teeth shine -through the ever parted long red lips, the chin shines, -the brow shines most of all with a lustre that seems to -come from the joyous brain behind.</p> - -<p>She is beautiful and straight as the July corn, as the -ash tree standing alone by the stream. She is fearless as -fire, bold and restless as wind, clear-hearted, simple, bright -and gay as a mountain water, in all her actions a daughter -of the sun, the wind and the earth. She has loving looks -for all. From her fair broad naked foot to her gleaming -hair she is, to many, the dearest thing that lives.</p> - -<p>Beside her plays a dog, with lifted ears, head on one<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span> -side, rosy tongue bright against his yellow fur, waiting -upon her fancies. His rest and his motion, like hers, are -careless and beautiful, gifts of the sun, the wind and the -earth. As I look at them I think of such a child and -such a playmate that lived two thousand years ago in -the sun, and once as they played each set a foot upon the -soft clay of a tile that the tile maker had not yet burned -hard and red. The tile fell in the ruin of a Roman city -in Britain, was buried hundreds of years in ashes and -flowering mould, and yesterday I saw the footprints in -the dark red tile, two thousand years old.</p> - -<p>A day follows of rain and wind, and it is the robin -that is most heard among the dripping thorns, the robin -and his autumnal voice. But the sky clears for sunset and -the blackbird’s hour, and, as twilight ends, only the rear -of the disappearing procession of day cloud is visible on -the western horizon, while the procession of night has -but sent up two or three dark forerunners. The sky is of -palest blue, and Jupiter and Sirius are bright over the sea, -Venus over the land and Mercury just over the far oaks. -The sea is very dark except at the horizon which is pale -with the dissolving remnant of sunset gold in it; but two -ranks of breakers throw up a waving vapour of fairy -foam against the dark waves behind.</p> - -<p>Again there are roaring wet mornings and sunlit mornings, -but in them all the pewits wheel over the marsh and -their wild cries mingle with the sweet whimper of dunlins, -the songs of larks, the glitter of the dykes, the wall -of rain. All day the sky over heathery moorland is like -a reduplication of the moorland, except that at the -horizon the sky clears at intervals and fleets of pure white<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span> -cloud sail over the dark ploughland and green pines; and -the gentle sea is white only where the waves break on the -sand like a line of children in white frocks advancing -with wavers in the game of “Here we come gathering -nuts and may.” Or the west is angry, thick and grey, -the snow is horizontal and fierce, and yet the south has a -bay of blue sky and in it a vast sunlit precipice of white -cloud, and the missel thrushes roll out their songs again -and again at the edges of many woods. Or a sun appears -that brings out the songs of thrush and chaffinch and lark, -and leaves a chequer of snow on pine and ploughland -and on the mole hills of the meadows. Again the sun -disappears and the swift heavy hail rebounds on the grass -with a dancing as of sand-hoppers, and there is no other -sound except a sudden hedgesparrow’s song to break in -upon the beating of the pellets on hard ivy and holly and -tender grass. In the frosty evening the first moth comes -to the lamp.</p> - -<p>Now the rain falls rejoicing in its power, and then the -sky is sunny and the white clouds are bubble-shaped in -the blue, the wet roads are azure with reflected sky, -the trees are all of crystal, and the songs of thrushes can -be heard even through the snorting and rumbling of a -train.</p> - - -<h3>HAMPSHIRE.</h3> - -<p>The beeches on the beech-covered hills roar and strain -as if they would fly off with the hill, and anon they are -as meek as a great horse leaning his head over a gate. -If there is a misty day there is one willow in a coombe<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span> -lifting up a thousand silver catkins like a thousand lamps, -when there is no light elsewhere. Another day, a wide -and windy day, is the jackdaw’s, and he goes straight -and swift and high like a joyous rider crying aloud on an -endless savannah, and, underneath, the rippled pond is as -bright as a peacock, and millions of beech leaves drive -across the open glades of the woods, rushing to their -Acheron. The bush harrow stripes the moist and shining -grass; the plough changes the pale stubble into a ridgy -chocolate; they are peeling the young ash sticks for hop -poles and dipping them in tar. At the dying of that -windy day the wind is still; there is a bright pale half-moon -tangled in the pink whirl of after-sunset cloud, -a sound of blackbirds from pollard oaks against the silver -sky, a sound of bells from hamlets hidden among -beeches.</p> - -<p>Towards the end of March there are six nights of frost -giving birth to still mornings of weak sunlight, of an -opaque yet not definitely misty air. The sky is of a -milky, uncertain pale blue without one cloud. Eastward -the hooded sun is warming the slope fields and melting -the sparkling frost. In many trees the woodpeckers -laugh so often that their cry is a song. A grassy ancient -orchard has taken possession of the visible sunbeams, and -the green and gold of the mistletoe glows on the -silvered and mossy branches of apple trees. The pale -stubble is yellow and tenderly lit, and gives the low hills -a hollow light appearance as if they might presently -dissolve. In a hundred tiers on the steep hill, the -uncounted perpendicular straight stems of beech, and yet -not all quite perpendicular or quite straight, are silver-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span>grey -in the midst of a haze, here brown, there rosy, of -branches and swelling buds. Though but a quarter of a -mile away in this faintly clouded air they are very small, -aërial in substance, infinitely remote from the road on -which I stand, and more like reflections in calm water -than real things.</p> - -<p>At the lower margin of the wood the overhanging -branches form blue caves, and out of these emerge the -songs of many hidden birds. I know that there are bland -melodious blackbirds of easy musing voices, robins whose -earnest song, though full of passion, is but a fragment that -has burst through a more passionate silence, hedgesparrows -of liquid confiding monotone, brisk acid wrens, -chaffinches and yellowhammers saying always the same -thing (a dear but courtly praise of the coming season), -larks building spires above spires into the sky, thrushes of -infinite variety that talk and talk of a thousand things, -never thinking, always talking of the moment, exclaiming, -scolding, cheering, flattering, coaxing, challenging, -with merry-hearted, bold voices that must have been the -same in the morning of the world when the forest trees -lay, or leaned, or hung, where they fell. Yet I can -distinguish neither blackbird, nor robin, nor hedgesparrow, -nor any one voice. All are blent into one seething -stream of song. It is one song, not many. It is one -spirit that sings. Mixed with them is the myriad stir of -unborn things, of leaf and blade and flower, many silences -at heart and root of tree, voices of hope and growth, of -love that will be satisfied though it leap upon the swords -of life. Yet not during all the day does the earth truly -awaken. Even in town and city the dream prevails, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span> -only dimly lighted their chalky towers and spires rise out -of the sweet mist and sing together beside the waters.</p> - -<p>The earth lies blinking, turning over languidly and -talking like a half-awakened child that now and then -lies still and sleeps though with eyes wide open. The -air is still full of the dreams of a night which this mild -sun cannot dispel. The dreams are prophetic as well as -reminiscent, and are visiting the woods, and that is why -they will not cast aside the veil. Who would rise if he -could continue to dream?</p> - -<p>It is not spring yet. Spring is being dreamed, and the -dream is more wonderful and more blessed than ever was -spring. What the hour of waking will bring forth is not -known. Catch at the dreams as they hover in the warm -thick air. Up against the grey tiers of beech stems and -the mist of the buds and fallen leaves rise two columns -of blue smoke from two white cottages among trees; -they rise perfectly straight and then expand into a -balanced cloud, and thus make and unmake continually -two trees of smoke. No sound comes from the cottages. -The dreams are over them, over the brows of the children -and the babes, of the men and the women, bringing great -gifts, suggestions, shadowy satisfactions, consolations, -hopes. With inward voices of persuasion those dreams -hover and say that all is to be made new, that all is -yet before us, and the lots are not yet drawn out of -the urn.</p> - -<p>We shall presently set out and sail into the undiscovered -seas and find new islands of the free, the beautiful, the -young. As is the dimly glimmering changeless brook -twittering over the pebbles, so is life. It is but just leaving<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span> -the fount. All things are possible in the windings -between fount and sea.</p> - -<p>Never again shall we demand the cuckoo’s song from -the August silence. Never will July nip the spring and -lengthen the lambs’ faces and take away their piquancy, -or June shut a gate between us and the nightingale, or -May deny the promise of April. Hark! before the end of -afternoon the owls hoot in their sleep in the ivied beeches. -A dream has flitted past them, more silent of wing than -themselves. Now it is between the wings of the first -white butterfly, and it plants a smile in the face of the -infant that cannot speak: and again it is with the brimstone -butterfly, and the child who is gathering celandine -and cuckoo flower and violet starts back almost in fear -at the dream.</p> - -<p>The grandmother sitting in her daughter’s house, left -all alone in silence, her hands clasped upon her knees, -forgets the courage without hope that has carried her -through eighty years, opens her eyes, unclasps her hands -from the knot as of stiff rope, distends them and feels -the air, and the dream is between her fingers and she too -smiles, she knows not why. A girl of sixteen, ill-dressed, -not pretty, has seen it also. She has tied up her black -hair in a new crimson ribbon. She laughs aloud with a -companion at something they know in common and in -secret, and as she does so lifts her neck and is glad from -the sole of her foot to the crown of her head. She is -lost in her laughter and oblivious of its cause. She walks -away, and her step is as firm as that of a ewe defending -her lamb. She was a poor and misused child, and I can -see her as a woman of fifty, sitting on a London bench,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span> -grey-complexioned, in old black hat, black clothes, crouching -over a paper bag of fragments, in the beautiful August -rain after heat. But this is her hour. That future is -not among the dreams in the air to-day. She is at one -with the world, and a deep music grows between her and -the stars. Her smile is one of those magical things, -great and small and all divine, that have the power to -wield universal harmonies. At sight or sound of them -the infinite variety of appearances in the world is made -fairer than before, because it is shown to be a many-coloured -raiment of the one. The raiment trembles, and -under leaf and cloud and air a window is thrown open -upon the unfathomable deep, and at the window we are -sitting, watching the flight of our souls away, away to -where they must be gathered into the music that is being -built. Often upon the vast and silent twilight, as now, -is the soul poured out as a rivulet into the sea and lost, not -able even to stain the boundless crystal of the air; and the -body stands empty, waiting for its return, and, poor thing, -knows not what it receives back into itself when the night -is dark and it moves away. For we stand ever at the -edge of Eternity and fall in many times before we die. -Yet even such thoughts live not long this day. All shall -be healed, says the dream. All shall be made new. The -day is a fairy birth, a foundling not fathered nor mothered -by any grey yesterdays. It has inherited nothing. It -makes of winter and of the old springs that wrought -nothing fair a stale creed, a senseless tale: they are -naught: I do not wonder any longer if the lark’s song -has grown old with the ears that hear it or if it be still -unchanged.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span></p> - -<p>What dreams are there for that aged child who goes -tottering and reeling up the lane at mid-day? He carries -a basket of watercress on his back. He has sold two-pennyworth, -and he is tipsy, grinning through the -bruises of a tipsy fall, and shifting his cold pipe from one -side of his mouth to the other. Though hardly sixty he -is very old, worn and thin and wrinkled, and bent sideways -and forward at the waist and the shoulders. Yet he -is very young. He is just what he was forty years ago -when the thatcher found him lying on his back in the sun -instead of combing out the straw and sprinkling it with -water for his use. He laid no plans as a youth; he had -only a few transparent tricks and easy lies. Never has -he thought of the day after to-morrow. For a few years -in his prime he worked almost regularly for one or two -masters, leaving them only now and then upon long -errands of his own and known only to himself. It was -then perhaps that he earned or received as a gift, along -with a broken nose, his one name, which is Jackalone. -For years he was the irresponsible jester to a smug townlet -which was privately amused and publicly scandalized, -and rewarded him in a gaol, where, unlike Tasso, he never -complained. Since then he has lived by the sale of a chance -rabbit or two, of watercress, of greens gathered when the -frost is on them and nobody looking, by gifts of broken -victuals, by driving a few bullocks to a fair, by casual -shelter in barns, in roofless cottages, or under hedges.</p> - -<p>He has never had father or mother or brother or sister -or wife or child. No dead leaf in autumn wind or -branch in flooded brook seems more helpless. He can -deceive nobody. He is in prison two or three times a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span> -year for little things: it seems a charity to put a roof -over his head and clip his hair. He has no wisdom; by -nothing has he soiled what gifts were given to him at his -birth. The dreams will not pass him by. They come -to give him that confidence by which he lives in spite of -men’s and children’s contumely.</p> - -<p>How little do we know of the business of the earth, -not to speak of the universe; of time, not to speak of -eternity. It was not by taking thought that man survived -the mastodon. The acts and thoughts that will serve the -race, that will profit this commonwealth of things that -live in the sun, the air, the earth, the sea, now and -through all time, are not known and never will be known. -The rumour of much toil and scheming and triumph -may never reach the stars, and what we value not at all, -are not conscious of, may break the surface of eternity -with endless ripples of good. We know not by what we -survive. There is much philosophy in that Irish tale -of the poor blind woman who recovered her sight at St. -Brigit’s well. “Did I say more prayers than the rest? -Not a prayer. I was young in those days. I suppose -she took a liking to me, maybe because of my name being -Brigit the same as her own.”<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> Others went unrelieved -away that day. We are as ignorant still. Hence the -batlike fears about immortality. We wish to prolong -what we can see and touch and talk of, and knowing that -clothes and flesh and other perishing things may not pass -over the borders of death with us, we give up all, as if -forsooth the undertaker and the gravedigger had archangelic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span> -functions. Along with the undertaker and the -gravedigger ranks the historian and others who seem to -bestow immortality. Each is like a child planting flowers -severed from their stalks and roots, expecting them to -grow. I never heard that the butterfly loved the chrysalis; -but I am sure that the caterpillar looks forward to an -endless day of eating green leaves and of continually -swelling until it would despise a consummation of the -size of a railway train. We can do the work of the -universe though we shed friends and country and house -and clothes and flesh, and become invisible to mortal eyes -and microscopes. We do it now invisibly, and it is not -these things which are us at all. That maid walking so -proudly is about the business of eternity.</p> - -<p>And yet it would be vain to pretend not to care about -the visible many-coloured raiment of which our houses, -our ships, our gardens, our books are part, since they also -have their immortal selves and their everlasting place, -else should we not love them with more than sight and -hearing and touch. For flesh loves flesh and soul loves -soul. Yet on this March day the supreme felicity is born -of the two loves, so closely interwoven that it is permitted -to forget the boundaries of the two, and for soul to love -flesh and flesh to love soul. And this ancient child is rid -of his dishonours and flits through the land floating on a -thin reed of the immortal laughter. This is “not altogether -fool.” He is perchance playing some large -necessary part in the pattern woven by earth that draws -the gods to lean forward out of the heavens to watch the -play and say of him, as of other men, of birds, of flowers: -“They also are of our company.”...</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span></p> - -<p>In the warm rain of the next day the chiffchaff sings -among the rosy blossoms of the leafless larches, a small -voice that yet reaches from the valley to the high hill. -It is a double, many times repeated note that foretells the -cuckoo’s. In the evening the songs are bold and full, but -the stems of the beeches are faint as soft columns of -smoke and the columns of smoke from the cottages are -like them in the still air.</p> - -<p>Yet another frost follows, and in the dim golden light -just after sunrise the shadows of all the beeches lie on -the slopes, dark and more tangible than the trees, as if -they were the real and those standing upright were the -returned spirits above the dead.</p> - -<p>Now rain falls and relents and falls again all day, and -the earth is hidden under it, and as from a land submerged -the songs mount through the veil. The mists waver out -of the beeches like puffs of smoke or hang upon them -or in them like fleeces caught in thorns: in the just penetrating -sunlight the long boles of the beeches shine, and -the chaffinch, the yellowhammer and the cirl bunting -sing songs of blissful drowsiness. The Downs, not yet -green, rise far off and look, through the rain, like old -thatched houses.</p> - -<p>When a hot sun has dried the woods the wind beats a -cloud of pollen like grey smoke from the yews on the -beechen coombes which are characteristic of Hampshire. -They are steep-sided bays, running and narrowing far -into and up the sides of the chalk hills, and especially -of those hills with which the high flinty plateau breaks -down to the greensand and the plain. These steep sides -are clothed with beeches, thousands of beeches interrupted<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span> -by the black yews that resemble caverns among the paler -trees, or, in the spring, by the green haze of a few larches -and the white flames of the beam tree buds. Sometimes -a stream rises at the head of the coombe, and before its -crystal is a yard wide and ankle deep over the crumbling -chalk it is full of trout; the sunny ripples are meshed like -honeycomb. If there is not a stream there is a hop -garden, or there is a grassy floor approached by neither -road nor path and crossed only by huntsman and hounds. -All the year round the coombes, dripping, green and still, -are cauldrons for the making and unmaking of mists, -mists that lie like solid level snow or float diaphanous -and horizontal of airiest silk across the moon or the -morning sun. The coombes breed whole families, long -genealogical trees, of echoes which the child delights to -call up from their light sleep; so, too, do fox and owl at -night, and the cow on a calm evening; and as to the horn -and the cry of hounds, the hangers entangle and repeat -them as if they would imprison them for ever, so that the -phantom exceeds the true. This is the home of the -orchises and of the daintiest snails. In spring, yellow and -white and yellowish green flowers are before all the rest -under the beeches—the flowers of the golden green saxifrage -and delicate moschatel, the spurge and the spurge -laurel, the hellebore, the white violet and wood sorrel, -and the saffron-hearted primrose which becomes greenish -in the light of its own leaves; to these must be added the -yellow green of young foliage and of moss. Fairest of all -the white flowers is the frost flower that grows about -some rotten fallen branch day after day in curls that are -beyond silk, or a child’s hair, or wool when it is first<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span> -exposed to the sun by the shearer’s hand. Most conspicuous -of the early green is that of the pale swords of -sedge that bear purple brown feathers of flower at the -end of March. The crystal wavering water, the pale -green stems and ever so slightly curving blades, and the -dark bloom, make the sense smart with joy. Never was -ivy more luxuriant under the beeches, nor moss so powerful -as where it arrays them from crown to pedestal. The -lichens, fine grey-green bushy lichens on the thorns, are -as dense as if a tide full of them had swept through the -coombe. From the topmost branches hangs the cordage -of ivy and honeysuckle and clematis. The missel thrush -rolls out his clear song. The woodpecker laughs his loud -shaking laughter as he bounds in his flight. Among the -golden green mistletoe in the old shaggy apple tree at the -entrance of the coombe the blackbird sings, composing -phrases all the sweeter for being strangely like some in -the songs that countrymen used to sing. Earth has no -dearer voice than his when it is among the chilly rain at -the end of the light. All day there have been blue skies -and parading white clouds, and no wind, with sudden -invasions of violent wind and hail or rain, followed by -perfected calm and warmer sun—sun which lures the -earliest tortoise-shell butterfly to alight on the footworn -flints in the path up the coombe. At last the sky seems -securely blue above the hangers and a clear small star -or two pricks through it. But, emerging from the coombe, -whose sides shut out half the heavens, you see that the -west has wonderfully ordered and dressed itself with pale -sky and precipitous, dark, modelled clouds and vague -woods, and above them the new moon. The blackbirds<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span> -sing, the dim Downs proceed, and the last shower’s drops -glitter on the black boughs and pallid primroses. Why -should this ever change? At the time it seems that it -can never change. A wide harmony of the brain and -the earth and the sky has begun, when suddenly darker -clouds are felt to have ascended out of the north-west and -to have covered the world. The beeches roar with rain. -Moon and Downs are lost. The road bubbles and glows -underfoot. A distant blackbird still sings hidden in the -bosom of the rain like an enchanter hidden by his -spells....</p> - -<p>It is April now, and when it is still dark in the woods -and hedges the birds all sing together and the maze of -song is dominated by the owl’s hoot—like a full moon of -sound above myriad rippling noises. Every day a new -invader takes possession of the land. The wryneck is -loud and persistent, never in harmony with other birds, a -complete foreigner, and yet the ear is glad of his coming. -He is heard first, not in the early morning, along a grove -of oaks; and the whole day is his.</p> - -<p>Then on every hand the gentle willow wrens flit and -sing in the purple ash blossoms. The martins, the -swallows, have each a day. One day, too, is the magpie’s: -for he sits low near his mate in a thicket and -chatters not aloud but low and tenderly, almost like the -sedgewarbler, adding a faint plaintive note like the bullfinch’s, -and fragments as of the linnet’s song, and chirrupings; -disturbed, he flies away with chatter as hoarse as -ever.</p> - -<p>The rooks reign several days. They have a colony in -a compact small oval beech wood that stands in a hollow<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span> -amidst dry grey ploughland; and from the foxy-red -summits of the trees, in the most genial hot day, their -cawings are loud and mellow and warm as if they were -the earth’s own voice; and all the while the dew is sliding -along the branches, dropping into other drops or to the -ground as the birds flutter at their nests, and from time -to time one triple drop catches the sun and throbs where -it hangs like Hesperus among the small stars.</p> - -<p>And every tender eve is the blackbird’s. He sings out -at the end of the long bare ash bough. Beneath him the -gloomy crystal water stirs the bronze cresses, and on the -banks the white anemones float above the dark misty -earth and under the hazel leaves yet drooping in their -infancy. The dark hollies catch the last light and shine -like water. Behind all, the Downs are clear and so near -that I feel as well as see the carving on their smooth and -already green flanks. The blackbird gathers up all the -low-lit beauty into one carol.</p> - -<p>The flowers also have days to themselves, as the minute -green moschatel when it is first found among the hedgerow -roots, or the violets when, white and pale purple, -they are smelt and then seen bowed with dew in the -weedy sainfoin field which the chain harrow passed over -but a few days before. Another notable day is when the -junipers are perfectly coloured by their sloe-blue, or palest -green, but chiefly grey, small berries. Another, a very -great day, belongs to the willows, when their crowded -fragrant catkins are yellow against the burning blue and -all murmurous with bees. And the briers have their day -when their green is a vivid flame in a gloomy air, against -a dark immense wood and sepia sky. There is, too, a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span> -solitary maimed sycamore in one of the coombes that has -a glorious hour when it stands yellow-green in separate -masses of half-opened leaf, motionless and languid -in the first joy of commerce with the blue air, yet -glowing.</p> - -<p>One morning, very early, when the moon has not set -and all the fields are cold and dewy and the woods are -still massed and harbouring the night, though a few -thorns stand out from their edge in affrighted virgin -green, and dim starry thickets sigh a moment and are still, -suddenly the silence of the chalky lane is riven and -changed into a song. First, it is a fierce impetuous downfall -of one clear note repeated rapidly and ending wilfully -in mid-burst. Then it is a full-brimmed expectant -silence passing into a long ascendant wail, and almost without -intervals another and another, which has hardly ceased -when it is dashed out of the memory by the downpour of -those rapidly repeated notes, their abrupt end and the -succeeding silence. The swift notes are each as rounded -and as full of liquid sweetness as a grape, and they are -clustered like the grape. But they are wild and pure as -mountain water in the dawn. They are also like steel -for coldness and penetration. And their onset is like -nothing else: it is the nightingale’s. The long wail is -like a shooting star: even as that grows out of the darkness -and draws a silver line and is no more, so this glides -out of the silence and curves and is no more. And yet -it does not die, nor does that liquid onset. They and -their ghosts people each hanging leaf in the hazel thicket -so that the silence is closely stored. Other notes are shut -in the pink anemone, in the white stitchwort under and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span> -about the hazels, and in the drops of dew that begin to -glitter in the dawn.</p> - -<p>Beautiful as the notes are for their quality and order, it -is their inhumanity that gives them their utmost fascination, -the mysterious sense which they bear to us that -earth is something more than a human estate, that there -are things not human yet of great honour and power in -the world. The very first rush and the following wail -empty the brain of what is merely human and leave only -what is related to the height and depth of the whole -world. Here for this hour we are remote from the -parochialism of humanity. The bird has admitted a larger -air. We breathe deeply of it and are made free citizens -of eternity. We hear voices that were not dreamed of -before, the voices of those spirits that live in minute forms -of life, the spirits that weave the frost flower on the fallen -branch, the gnomes of underground, those who care for the -fungus on the beech root, the lichen on the trunk, the -algæ on the gravestone. This hazel lane is a palace of -strange pomp in an empire of which we suddenly find -ourselves guests, not wholly alien nor ill at ease, though -the language is new. Drink but a little draught of this -air and no need is there to fear the ways of men, their -mockery, their cruelty, their foreignness.</p> - -<p>The song rules the cloudy dawn, the waiting ranges -of hills and their woods full of shadows yet crested with -gold, their lawns of light, the soft distended grey clouds -all over the sky through which the white sun looks on -the world and is glad. But it has ceased when the perpendicular -shafts of rain divide the mists over the hillside -woods and the pewits tangle their flight through the air<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span> -that is now alive with the moist gleaming of myriads of -leaves on bramble, thorn and elder. Presently the rain is -only a glittering of needles in the sun. For the sky is all -one pale grey cloud, darker at the lowest edge where it -trails upon the downs and veils their summits, except -in the south-east. There the edge is lifted up over a -narrow pane of silver across which fleet the long slender -fringes of the clouds. Through this pane the sun sends -a broad cascade of light, and up into this the fields and -the Down beyond rise and are transfigured, the fields into -a lake of emerald, the Down—here crowned by trees in -a cluster—into a castle of pearl set upon the borders of -the earth. Slowly this pane is broadened; the clouds are -plumped into shape, are illumined, are distinguished from -one another by blue vales of sky, until at length the land -is all one gleam of river and pool and grass and leaf and -polished bough, whether swollen into hills or folded into -valleys or smoothed into plain. The sky seems to belong -to this land, the sky of purest blue and clouds that are -moulded like the Downs themselves but of snow and -sun.</p> - -<p>In the clear air each flower stands out with separate and -perfect beauty, moist, soft and bright, a beauty than which -I know nothing more nearly capable of transferring the -soul to the days and the pleasures of infancy. The crust -of half a lifetime falls away, and we can feel what Blake -expressed when he wrote those lines in <i>Milton</i>—</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Thou perceivest the flowers put forth their precious odours,</div> - <div class="verse">And none can tell how from so small a centre comes such sweet,</div> - <div class="verse">Forgetting that within that centre Eternity expands</div> - <div class="verse">Its ever-during doors, that Og and Anax fiercely guard.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span> - <div class="verse">First, ere the morning breaks, joy opens in the flowery bosoms,</div> - <div class="verse">Joy even to tears, which the Sun rising dries; first the Wild Thyme</div> - <div class="verse">And Meadow-sweet, downy and soft, waving among the reeds,</div> - <div class="verse">Light springing in the air, lead the sweet Dance; they wake</div> - <div class="verse">The Honeysuckle sleeping in the Oak, the flaunting beauty</div> - <div class="verse">Revels along upon the wind; the white-thorn lovely May</div> - <div class="verse">Opens her many lovely eyes; listening the Rose still sleeps.</div> - <div class="verse">None dare to wake her. Soon she bursts her crimson-curtained bed</div> - <div class="verse">And comes forth in the majesty of beauty; every Flower—</div> - <div class="verse">The Pink, the Jessamine, the Wallflower, the Carnation,</div> - <div class="verse">The Jonquil, the mild Lily opes her heavens; every Tree</div> - <div class="verse">And Flower and Herb soon fill the air with an innumerable Dance,</div> - <div class="verse">Yet all in order sweet and lovely....</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p>Those words or such a morning—when the soul steps -back many years; or is it many centuries?—might have -moved M. Maeterlinck to his descriptions of certain great -moments in the lives of plants. The terms of these -descriptions are so chosen as to imply an intelligence and -discriminating vital energy in plants. They prove and -explain nothing, but they take one step towards the truth -by disturbing the conventional scientific view and substituting -that of a man who, passionately looking at many -forms of life, finds them to be of one family. After this, -it should be more and more difficult for men to think of -flowers as if they were fragile toys from an exceptionally -brilliant manufacturer.</p> - -<p>And now there is a day of sun and high blue sky -alternating with low, grey-yellow sky and driving snow -that chequers the northern sides of the furrows and the -beech boles. The sun melts the snow and all is clear,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span> -bright and cold, and the sky blue again with white and -lofty clouds; many thrushes are singing; the broad vale -is all one blue moorland that has buried its houses, and -the Downs at the far side are close at hand. Towards -evening the wind falls, and it is a glimpse of another -world that is given as the sun is warm for a moment on -a low curving slope of wet grass, with tall rookery -beeches glowing on one hand and on the other bulging -white clouds just emerging from behind the green edge -into the blue, while very far away the Downs, both grass -and wood, are deep blue under a broad pane of yellowish -light.</p> - -<p>The north wind makes walking weather, and the earth -is stretched out below us and before us to be conquered. -Just a little, perhaps, of the warrior’s joy at seeing an -enemy’s fair land from the hill-top is mingled with the -joy in the unfolding landscape. The ploughlands brighten -over twenty miles of country, pale and dry, among dark -woods and wooded hills; for the wind has crumbled the -soil almost white, so that a sudden local sunlight will make -one field seem actually of snow. The old road following -a terrace of the hillside curves under yews away from -the flinty arable and the grey, dry desolation round about -the poultry-farmer’s iron house, to the side of a rich valley -of oak and ash and deepening pastures traversed by water -in a glitter. The green fire of the larch woods is yellow at -the crest. There and in oak and ash the missel thrush is -an embodiment of the north wind, summing it up in -the boldness of his form and singing, as a coat of arms -sums up a history. Mounted on the plume of the top -of the tall fir, and waving with it, he sings of adventure,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span> -and puts a spirit into those who pass under and adds a -mile to their pace. The gorse is in flower. In the -hedges the goose-grass has already set its ladders against -the thorns, ladders that will soon have risen to the top -of every hedge like scaling ladders of an infinite army. -Down from tall yew and ash hang the abandoned ropes -of last year’s traveller’s joy that have leapt that height—who -has caught them in the leap?—but the new are on -their way, and even the old show what can be done as -they sway from the topmost branches. At sunset an -immense and bountiful land lies at our feet and the wine-red -sun is pouring out large cups of conquest. The -undulating ploughland is warm in the red light, and it is -broken up by some squares of old brown stubble and of -misty young wheat, and lesser green squares full of bleating -and tinkling sheep. Out of these fields the dense -beech copses rise sheer. Beyond, in the west, are ridges -of many woods in misty conflagration; in the south-west, -the line of the Downs under the level white clouds of a -spacious and luminous sky. In the south, woods upon the -hills are dissolving into a deep blue smoke, without form -except at their upper edges. And in the north and north-west -the high lands of Berkshire and Wiltshire are prostrate -and violet through thirty miles of witching air. -That also is a call to go on and on and over St. Catherine’s -Hill and through Winchester until the brain is -drowsed with the colours of night and day.</p> - -<p>The colour of the dawn is lead and white—white snow -falling out of a leaden sky to the white earth. The rose -branches bend in sharper and sharper curves to the ground, -the loaded yew sprays sweep the snow with white plumes.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span> -On the sedges the snow is in fleeces; the light strands of -clematis are without motion, and have gathered it in -clots. One thrush sings, but cannot long endure the -sound of his unchallenged note; the sparrows chirrup in -the ricks; the blackbird is waiting for the end of that low -tingling noise of the snow falling straight in windless air.</p> - -<p>At mid-day the snow is finer and almost rain, and it -begins to pour down from its hives among the branches -in short showers or in heavy hovering lumps. The leaves -of ivy and holly are gradually exposed in all their gloomy -polish, and out bursts the purple of the ash buds and the -yellow of new foliage. The beech stems seem in their -wetness to be made of a dark agate. Out from their tops -blow rags of mist, and not far above them clouds like old -spiders’ webs go rapidly by.</p> - -<p>The snow falls again and the voices of the little summer -birds are buried in the silence of the flakes that whirl this -way and that aimlessly, rising and falling and crossing -or darting horizontally, making the trees sway wearily -and their light tops toss and their numbers roar continually -in the legions of the wind that whine and moan and -shriek their hearts out in the solitary house roofs and doors -and round about. The silence of snow co-exists with -this roar. One wren pierces it with a needle of song and -is gone. The earth and sky are drowning in night and -snow.</p> - - - -<div class="chapter"> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span></p> - - - - - - -<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER III<br /> - -<span class="smaller">SPRING—HAMPSHIRE—KENT—SURREY</span></h2> -</div> - - -<p>Next day the wind has flown and the snow is again -almost rain: there is ever a hint of pale sky above, but it -is not as luminous as the earth. The trees over the road -have a beauty of darkness and moistness. Beyond them -the earth is a sainted corpse, with a blue light over it that -is fast annihilating all matter and turning the landscape -to a spirit only. Night and the snow descend upon it, -and at dawn the nests are full of snow. The yews and -junipers on a league of Downs are chequered white upon -white slopes, and the green larches support cirrus clouds -of snow. In the garden the daffodils bend criss-cross -under snow that cannot quite conceal the yellow flowers. -But the snow has ceased. The sky is at first pale without -a cloud and tender as from a long imprisonment; it -deepens in hue as the sun climbs and gathers force. The -crooked paths up the Downs begin to glitter like streaks -of lightning. The thrushes sing. From the straight dark -beeches the snow cannot fall fast enough in great drops, -in showers, in masses that release the boughs with a -quiver and a gleam. The green leaves close to the -ground creep out, and against them the snow is blue. -A little sighing wind rustles ivy and juniper and yew. -The sun mounts, and from his highest battlement of -cloud blows a long blast of light over the pure land. -Once more the larch is wholly green, the beech rosy -brown with buds. A cart goes by all a-gleam with a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span> -load of crimson-sprouting swedes and yellow-sprouting -mangolds that seem to be burning through the net of -snow above them. Down each side of every white road -runs a stream that sings and glitters in ripples like -innumerable crystal flowers. Water drips and trickles -and leaps and gushes and oozes everywhere, and extracts -the fragrance of earth and green and flowers under the -heat that hastens to undo the work of the snow. The -air is hot and wet. The snow is impatient to be water -again. It still makes a cape over the briers and brambles, -and there is a constant drip and steam and song of drops -from the crossing branches in the cave below. Loud -sounds the voice of leaf and branch and imprisoned water -in the languor and joy of their escape. On every hand -there is a drip and gush and ooze of water, a crackle and -rustle and moan of plants and trees unfolding and unbending -and greeting air and light; a close, humid, many-perfumed -host; wet gloom and a multitudinous glitter; -a movement of water and of the shadows like puffs of -smoke that fleet over the white fields under the clouds.</p> - -<p>And over and through it a cuckoo is crying and crying, -first overhead, then afar, and gradually near and retreating -again. He is soon gone, but the ears are long afterwards -able to extract the spirit of the song, the exact interval of -it, from among all the lasting sounds, until we hear it as -clearly as before, out of the blue sky, out of the white -cloud, out of the shining grey water. It is a word of -power—cuckoo! The melting of the snow is faster -than ever, and at the end of the day there is none left -except in some hollows of the Downs on the slopes -behind the topmost of the beeches that darkly fringe the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span> -violet sky. In the misty shutting of the light there are -a thousand songs laced by cuckoos’ cries and the first -hooting of owls, and the beeches have become merely -straight lines of pearl in a mist of their own boughs. -Below them, in the high woods, goes on the fall of the -melting snow through the gloomy air, and the splash on -the dead leaves. This gloom and monotonous sound make -an exquisite cloister, visited but not disturbed by the sound -of the blackbirds singing in the mist of the vale underneath. -Slowly the mist has deepened from the woods to -the vale and now the eye cannot see from tree to tree. -Then the straight heavy rain descends upon the songs -and the clatterings of blackbirds, and when they are -silenced the moorhen’s watery hoot announces that the -world belongs to the beasts and the rainy dark until to-morrow.</p> - -<p>Beautiful upon the waters, beautiful upon the mountains, -is the cuckoo’s song, and most rare over the snow. -But of all places and hours I should choose the crags -of Land’s End in a dawn of June; and let it be the end -of that month and the wind be grey and cold, so that the -ships stagger in the foam and crag-like waves as they -catch the early light tenderly upon their sails. The cold -beams, the high precipices yet full of shadow and of the -giddy calling of daw and gull, the black but white-lipped -water and the blacker cormorant flying straight across it -just over the foam, the sky golden yet still pallid and -trembling from the dungeon of night—through it floats -that beloved voice breaking, breaking, and the strong -year at the summit of its career has begun to decline. -The song is memorable and fair also when the drenched<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span> -gardens toss and spread their petals in the grass. Many a -one hears it who will not hear it again, and many that -once expected it impatiently hears it no more because he -is old and deaf or because his heart is closed. There is -not a broad and perfect day of heat and wind and sunshine -that is not haunted by that voice seeming to say the earth -is hollow under our feet and the sky hollow over our -heads.</p> - -<p>There are whole nights when the cuckoo will not sleep, -and the woods on either side of a road twenty miles long -emit the cry of these conquerors under the full moon and -the white stars of love. If you pause it will appear that -it is not a silence that this song rules over; for what was -a silence was full of sounds, as many sounds as there are -leaves, sounds of creeping, gliding, pattering, rustling, -slow wormlike continuous noises and sudden sounds. And -strangely at length is the glorious day reared high upon -the ruins of this night, of which the survivors slink away -into the old forgotten roads, the dense woods, the -chimneys of deserted houses.</p> - -<p>It is a jolly note only when the bird is visible close -at hand and the power of his throat is felt. Often two -or three will answer one another, or for half a day will -loiter about a coombe for the sake of an echo. It is one of -the richest sounds in nature when two sing together, the -second note of one being almost blended with the first -of the other; and so they continue as if themselves -entranced by the harmony, and the navvy leans upon his -pick to listen.</p> - -<hr class="tb hidden" /> - -<p>On the day after the great melting of the snow the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span> -white beam tree, at the edges of high woods and in the -midst of the beeches, has its hour, when its thousands of -large white buds point upward like a multitudinous -candelabrum. For me the white beam is always associated -with wayfaring. Its white buds are the traveller’s -joy of spring. The buds like blossoms or flames bewitch -from afar off. They are always upon sloping ground -and usually upon hillsides in the chalk land. In the -autumn their leaves often shrivel before falling, and turn -to a colour that looks like pink almond blossom by contrast -with juniper and yew. When they have fallen, they -are as much to be noticed. They lie commonly with their -white undersides uppermost, and though rain soaks them -and wind scatters them and they are trodden down, they -preserve their whiteness until the winter or the following -spring. It is a tree that belongs, above all others except -the yew, to the Pilgrims’ Way, and it is impossible to -forget these leaves lying white on the untouched wayside -sward, among the dewy purple and crimson and gold -of other leaves, sparkling in the sun and entering into all -the thoughts and fancies and recollections that come to -one who goes in solitude along that old road when the -scent of the dying year is pungent as smoke and sweet -as flowers.</p> - - -<h3>KENT, SURREY AND HAMPSHIRE.</h3> - -<p>The beam tree is bright on the soft hills all through -the days of rain following upon the snow and sun. There -are days when earth is absorbed in her delights of growth -and multiplication. The rain is a veil which she wraps<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span> -about her that she may toil and sing low at her myriad -divine domesticities untroubled. Delicate snails climb -the young stalks of grass and flower, and their houses, -pearly, chocolate, tawny, pure or ringed or chequered, -slide after them. The leaves, with their indescribable -charm of infinitely varied division, of wild clematis, -maple, brier, hawthorn, and many more, come forth into -the rain which hangs on their drooping points and on -the thorns. The lichen enjoys the enduring mist of the -woods; the blackthorns are crusted and bearded with -lichens of fleshy green-silver and ochre which grow even -on the thorns themselves and round the new leaves and -flowers. The birch is now an arrested shower of green, -but not enough to hide the white limbs of the nymph in -the midst of it. The beech trunk is now most exquisitely -coloured: it is stained and spotted and blotched with grey -and rough silver and yellow-green lichen, palest green -mould, all the greens of moss, and an elusive dappling -and graining of greys, of neutral tints and almost blacks -in the wood itself, still more diversified by the trickling -rain and the changing night. The yew bark is plated -and scaled and stained with greens and reds and greys, -powdered with green mould, and polished in places to -the colour of mahogany. Even the long-deserted thistly -cornfields are dim purple with ground-ivy flowers and -violets. The marsh, the pasture, the wood, the hedge, -has each its abundance of bloom and of scent; so, too, has -the still water and the running water. But this is the -perfect hour of the green of grass, so intense that it has -an earthly light of its own in the sunless mist. It is best -seen in meadows bounded on two or three sides by the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span> -sheer dark edges of woods; for in that contrast the grass -seems a new element, neither earth, nor water, nor sky—under -our feet like the earth, gleaming and even as -water, remote and celestial as the sky. And the voices -of the green growing in the rain are innumerable. The -very ground has now one voice of its own, the gurgle -of its soaking hollow places.</p> - - -<h3>HAMPSHIRE.</h3> - -<p>The fields where the green is now greenest, those -bounded on two or more sides by woods, are of a kind -not peculiar to Hampshire. They are usually on the -greensand and lie in smooth, often winding, hollows -like the beds of rivers. Sometimes the banks of these -beds are steep, and they are clothed in woods or in hedges -of hornbeam, hazel, ash and thorn that have grown -almost to woods. The meadows are green broad rivers -running up between the dark trees that bathe their roots -in primroses. Sometimes there is a stream of water running -down the midst of such a field, but as the stream, -being a boundary, is often lined with bushes, the particular -charm is lost. In the perfect examples there is -the smoothness of the long hollowed meadow, the green, -the river-like form, the look of being a court or cloister -between the trees. Another kind of field of great charm -is made by the convexity of the land rising up from one -side or both of such a hollow meadow. These heaving -fields, some of a regular domed shape, are favourites of -the sunset light, in spring when they are grassy, in August<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span> -when they bear corn: at noon when there are cattle -grazing on the steep slope, their shadows are an exact -inversion of themselves, as in water.</p> - -<hr class="tb hidden" /> - -<p>Out of the rain and mist spring has now risen full-grown, -tender and lusty, fragrant, many-coloured, many-voiced, -fair to see, so that it is beyond a lover’s power -to make even an inventory of her lovely ways. She is -tall, she is fresh and bold, sweet in her motion and in -her tranquillity; and there is a soft down upon her lip as -there is a silken edge to the young leaves of the beeches.</p> - - -<h3>KENT.</h3> - -<p>Even the motor road is pleasant now when the -nightingales sing out of the bluebell thickets under oak -and sweet chestnut and hornbeam and hazel. Presently -it crosses a common, too small ever to draw a crowd, a -rough up-and-down expanse of gorse and thorn, pierced by -grassy paths and surrounded by turf that is rushy and -mounded by old ant heaps; and here, too, there are -nightingales singing alone, the sweeter for the contrast -between their tangled silent bowers and the sharp, straight -white road. The common is typical of the lesser commons -of the south. Crouch’s Croft in Sussex is another, in -sight of the three dusk moorland breasts of Crowborough; -gorse-grown, flat, possessing a pond, and walled by -tall hollies in a hedge. Piet Down, close by, is a fellow -to it—grass and gorse and irregular pine—a pond, too—rough, -like a fragment of Ashdown or Woolmer, and -bringing a wild sharp flavour into the mellow cultivated<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span> -land. Yet another is at Stone Street, very small, a few -oaks up to their knees in blackthorn, gorse and bramble, -with dusty edge and the hum of the telegraph wire for -a song.</p> - -<p>After the little common and long meadows, oak and ash, -an old stone house with seven hundred years of history -quiet within its walls and dark tiles—its cedar and yew -and pine, its daisied grass, its dark water and swans—the -four oast cones opposite, all taste more exquisitely. -How goodly are the names hereabout!—Dinas Dene, the -coombe in which the old house stands; Balk Shaw, Cream -Crox, Dicky May’s Field, Ivy Hatch, Lady Lands, -Lady’s Wood, Upper and Lower Robsacks, Obram -Wood, Ruffats, Styant’s Mead, the Shode, and, of course, -a Starvecrow. Almost due west goes one of the best of -footpaths past hop garden, corn, currant plantations, rough -copses, with glimpses of the immense Weald to the east, -its trees massed like thirty miles of wood, having sky -and cloud over its horizon as if over sea, and southward -the wild ridge of Ashdown. Then the path enters tall -woods of ash and oak, boulder-strewn among their -anemone and primrose, bluebell and dog’s mercury, and -emerges in a steep lane at the top of which are five cowled -oast houses among cherry blossom and under black firs. -Beyond there is a hollow winding vale of meadow and -corn, its sides clothed in oak, hazel and thorn, revealing -primroses between. Woods shut it away from the road -and from all houses but the farm above one end. A few -cattle graze there, and the sun comes through the sloping -woods and makes the grass golden or pale.</p> - -<p>Then the North Downs come in sight, above a church<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span> -tower amid stateliest pale-foliaged beeches and vast undulations -of meadow. They are suffused in late sunshine, -their trees misty and massed, under a happy sky. Those -beeches lie below the road, lining the edge of one long -meadow. The opposite sun pours almost horizontal beams -down upon the perfectly new leaves so as to give each -one a yellow-green glow and to some a silver shimmer -about the shadowy boles. For the moment the trees lose -their anchor in the solid earth. They are floating, -wavering, shimmering, more aërial and pure and wild -than birds or any visible things, than aught except music -and the fantasies of the brain. The mind takes flight -and hovers among the leaves with whatsoever powers -it has akin to dew and trembling lark’s song and rippling -water; it is throbbed away not only above the ponderous -earth but below the firmament in the middle world of -footless fancies and half thoughts that drift hither and -thither and know neither a heaven nor a home. It is a -loss of a name and not of a belief that forbids us to say -to-day that sprites flutter and tempt there among the new -leaves of the beeches in the late May light.</p> - -<p>Almost every group of oast houses here, seen either -amongst autumn fruit or spring blossom, is equal in its -effect to a temple, though different far, even when ivy-mantled -as they occasionally are, from the grey towered -or spired churches standing near. The low round brick -tower of the oast house, surmounted by a tiled cone of -about equal height, and that again crested with a white -cowl and vane, is a pleasant form. There are groups of -three which, in their age, mellow hue, roundness, and -rustic dignity, have suggested the triple mother goddesses<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span> -of old religions who were depicted as matrons, carrying -babes or fruit or flowers, to whom the peasant brought -thank-offerings when sun and rain had been kind. Those -at Kemsing, for example, stand worthily beside the -perfect grey-shingled spire, among elm and damson, -against the bare cloudy Down. And there are many -others near the Pilgrims’ Way of the same charm.</p> - -<p>That road, in its winding course from Winchester to -Canterbury, through Hampshire, Surrey and Kent, sums -up all qualities of roads except those of the straight highway. -It is a cart-way from farm to farm; or a footpath -only, or a sheaf of half-a-dozen footpaths worn side by -side; or, no longer needed except by the curious, it is -buried under nettle and burdock and barricaded by thorns -and traveller’s joy and bryony bines; it has been converted -into a white country road for a few miles of its -length, until an ascent over the Downs or a descent into -the valley has to be made, and then once more it is left -to footsteps upon grass and bird’s foot trefoil or to rude -wheels over flints. Sometimes it is hidden among -untended hazels or among chalk banks topped with beech -and yew, and the kestrel plucks the chaffinch there -undisturbed. Or it goes free and hedgeless like a long -balcony half-way up the Downs, and unespied it beholds -half the South Country between ash tree boles. Church -and inn and farm and cottage and tramp’s fire it passes -like a wandering wraith of road. Some one of the little -gods of the earth has kept it safe—one of those little and -less than omnipotent gods who, neglecting all but their -own realms, enjoy the earth in narrow ways, delighting -to make small things fair, such as a group of trees, a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span> -single field, a pure pool of sedge and bright water, an arm -of sea, a train of clouds, a road. I see their hands in -many a by-way of space and moment of time. One of -them assuredly harbours in a rude wet field I know of -that lies neglected between two large estates: three acres -at most of roughly sloping pasture, bounded above by the -brambly edge of a wood and below by a wild stream. -Here a company of meadow-sweet invades the grass, -there willow herb tall with rosy summits of flowers, -hoary lilac mint, dull golden fleabane, spiry coltstails. -The snake creeps careless through these thickets of bloom. -The sedge-warbler sings there. One old white horse is -content with the field, summer and winter, and has made -a plot of it silver with his hairs where he lies at night. -The image of the god is in the grey riven willow that -leans leafless over the stream like a peasant sculpture of -old time. There is another of these godkins in a bare -chalk hollow where the dead thistles stick out through a -yard of snow and give strange thoughts of the sailless -beautiful sea that once rippled over the Downs: one also -in the smell of hay and mixen and cow’s breath at the -first farm out of London where the country is unsoiled. -There is one in many a worthless waste by the roadside, -such as that between two roads that go almost parallel -for a while—a long steep piece, only a few feet broad, -impenetrably overgrown by blackthorn and blackberry, -but unenclosed: and one in each of the wayside chalk-pits -with overhanging beech roots above and bramble below. -One, too, perhaps many, were abroad one August night -on a high hillside when the hedge crickets sang high up -in the dogwood and clematis like small but deafening<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span> -sewing machines, and the glowworms shone in the thyme, -and the owl’s crying did not rend the breathless silence -under the full moon, and in the confused moonlit chequer -of the wood, where tree and shadow were equals, I -walked on a grating of shadows with lights between as if -from under the earth; the hill was given over to a light -happiness through which I passed an unwilling but -unfeared intruder.</p> - -<p>In places these gods preside over some harmony of the -earth with the works of men. There is one such upon -the Pilgrims’ Way, where I join it, after passing the dark -boughs and lightsome flowers of cherry orchards, grass -full of dandelions, a dark cluster of pines, elms in groups -and cavalcades, and wet willowy meadows that feed the -Medway. Just at the approach there is a two-storied -farm with dormers in the darkly mellowed roof, protected -by sycamores and chestnuts, and before it a -weather-boarded barn with thatched roof, and then, but -not at right angles, another with ochre tiles, and other -outbuildings of old brick and tile, a waggon lodge of flint -and thatch beside a pond, at the edge of a broad unhedged -field where random oaks shadow the grass. Behind runs -the Pilgrims’ Way, invisible but easily guessed under that -line of white beam and yew, with here and there an -ash up which the stout plaited stems of ivy are sculptured, -for they seem of the same material as the tree, and both -of stone. Under the yew and white beam the clematis -clambers over dogwood and wayfaring trees. Corn grows -up to the road and sometimes hops; beyond, a league of -orchard is a-froth round farmhouses or islands of oak; and -east and west sweeps the crescent of the North Downs.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span></p> - -<p>With the crescent goes the road, half-way up the sides -of the hills but nearly always at the foot of the steepest -slopes where the chalk-pits are carved white, like the concave -of a scallop shell, out of the green turf. Luxuriant -hedges bar the view except at gateways and stiles. At -one place the upper hedge gives way to scattered thickets -scrambling up the hill, with chalky ruts and rabbit workings -between. Neither sheep nor crops cover the hill, -nor yet is it common. Any one can possess it—for an -hour. It is given up to the rabbits until Londoners can -be persuaded to build houses on it. At intervals a road -as old as the Way itself descends precipitously in a deep -chalk groove, overhung by yew and beech, or hornbeam, -or oak, and white clouds drifting in a river of blue sky -between the trees; and joins farther south the main road -which winds, parallel with the Pilgrims’ Way and usually -south of it, from Winchester, through Guildford, Dorking, -Westerham, Maidstone, Ashford, and Canterbury to -Dover Strait. Not only chalk-pits and deep roads hollow -the hills. For miles there is a succession of small smooth -coombes, some grown with white thorn, some grassy, -above the road, alternating with corresponding smooth -breasts of turf. Towers and spires, but chiefly towers, lie -beneath, and in the mile or so between one and the next -there are red farms or, very rarely, a greater house at the -end of a long wave of grass among trees. Above, the -white full-bosomed clouds lean upon the green rampart -of the hills and look across to the orchards, the woods beyond, -the oaken Weald and its lesser ridges still farther, -and then the South Downs and a dream of the south sea.</p> - -<p>Rain falls, and in upright grey sheaves passes slowly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span> -before the fresh beech leaves like ghosts in shadowy procession; -and once again the white clouds roll over the -tops of the trees, and the green is virginal, and out of the -drip and glimmer of the miles of blissful country rises the -blackbird’s song and the cuckoo’s shout. The rain seems -not only to have brightened what is to be seen but the -eye that sees and the mind that knows, and suddenly we -are aware of all the joy in the grandeur and mastery of -an oak’s balance, in those immobile clouds revealed on -the farthest horizon shaped like the mountains which a -child imagines, in the white candles of the beam tree, in -the black-eyed bird sitting in her nest in the hawthorn -with uplifted beak, and in the myriad luxuriant variety -of shape and texture and bright colour in the divided -leaves of wood sanicle and moschatel and parsley and -cranesbill, in the pure outline of twayblade and violet -and garlic. Newly dressed in the crystal of the rain the -landscape recalls the earlier spring; the flowers of white -wood-sorrel, the pink and white anemone and cuckoo -flower, the thick-clustered, long-stalked primroses and -darker cowslips with their scentless sweetness pure as an -infant’s breath; the solitary wild cherry trees flowering -among still leafless beech; the blackbirds of twilight and -the flower-faced owls; the pewits wheeling after dusk; -the jonquil and daffodil and arabis and leopard’s bane of -cottage gardens; the white clouds plunged in blue floating -over the brown woods of the hills; the delicate thrushes -with speckled breasts paler than their backs, motionless -on dewy turf; and all the joys of life that come through -the nostrils from the dark, not understood world which -is unbolted for us by the delicate and savage fragrances<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span> -of leaf and flower and grass and clod, of the plumage of -birds and fur of animals and breath and hair of women -and children.</p> - -<p>How can our thoughts, the movements of our bodies, -our human kindnesses, ever fit themselves with this blithe -world? Is it but vain remorse at what is lost, or is it -not rather a token of what may yet be achieved, that -makes these images blind us as does the sight of children -dressed for a play, some solemn-thoughtful, some wholly -gay, suddenly revealed to us in brilliant light after the -night wind and rain?</p> - -<p>But at morning twilight I see the moon low in the -west like a broken and dinted shield of silver hanging -long forgotten outside the tent of a great knight in a -wood, and inside are the knight’s bones clean and white -about his rusted sword. In the east the sun rises, a red-faced -drover and a million sheep going before him silent -over the blue downs of the dawn: and I am ill-content -and must watch for a while the fraying, changeful edges -of the lesser clouds drift past and into the great white -ones above, or hear rebellious music that puts for one -brief hour into our hands the reins of the world that we -may sit mightily behind the horses and drive to the -goal of our dreams.</p> - -<p>A footpath leads from the Pilgrims’ Way past the -divine undulations and beech glades of a park—a broad -piece of the earth that flows hither and thither in curves, -sudden or slow but flawless and continuous, and everywhere -clothed in a seamless garment of grass. The path -crosses the white main road into a lesser one that traverses -a common of beech and oak and birch. The leaves make<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span> -an unbroken roof over the common: except the roads -there is not a path in it. For it is a small and narrow -strip of but a few acres, without any open space, gloomy, -much overgrown by thickets. Last year’s leaves lie -undisturbed and of the colour of red deer under the silky -green new foliage and round the huge mossy pedestals -of beech and in caves behind the serpentine locked roots. -No child’s shout is heard. No lover walks there. The -motor-car hurries the undesirable through and down into -the Weald. And so it is alone and for themselves that -the beeches rise up in carven living stone and expand in -a green heaven for the song of the woodwren, pouring -out pearls like wine.</p> - -<p>Southward, on either side of the steep road, the slope is, -below the beeches, given to corn and hops; at the foot are -all the oaks and pasture of the Weald, diversified by hop -gardens on many of the slanting fields that break up its -surface. Looking back from here the hills above are -less finely modelled than the downs still farther behind us -in the north. But they also have their shallow coombes, -sometimes two tiers of them, and they are indented by -deep, wide-mouthed bays. One of them begins in -copses of oak and hazel and sallow, a little arable, a farm, -three oast cones, and a little steep orchard in a hollow of -their own, which give way to hops, followed by grass and -then a tortuous ploughland among the oaks and firs of the -great woods that cover the more precipitous sides of the -upper end of the bay. Exquisitely cultivated, this bay is -yet a possession of cuckoo and nightingale, singing under -the yellow-green and black-branched oaks and above the -floor of bluebell and dark dog’s mercury.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span></p> - -<p>Out of the coombe a deep lane ascends through beech, -hazel and beam to another common of heather, and whinberry -bathing the feet of scattered birch, and squat oak -and pine, interrupted by yellow gravel pits.</p> - -<p>Beyond is a little town and a low grey spire, neighboured -by sycamores that stretch out horizontal boughs -of broad leaves and new yellow-green flower tassels over -long grass. Past the town—rapidly and continually -resuming its sleep after the hooting of motor-cars—begins -a wide and stately domain. At its edge are cottages -doddering with age, but trim and flowery, and assuredly -wearing the livery of the ripe, grave house of brick that -stands on the grassy ascent above them, among new-leaved -beech masses and isolated thorns dreaming over their -shadows. That grove of limes, fair and decorous, leading -up to the house is the work of Nature and the squire. -His chestnut and pine plantations succeed. And now a -pollard beech, bossy-rooted on a mound of moss and -crumbling earth, its grotesque torso decorated as by -childish hands with new leaves hanging among mighty -boughs that are themselves a mansion for squirrel and -jay and willow wren and many shadows, looks grimly -down at the edge of a wood and asks for the wayfarer’s -passport—has he lived well, does he love this world, is -he bold and free and kind?—and if he have it not seals -him with melancholy as he enters among the innumerable -leaves of innumerable beeches beginning to respond -to the straight, still, after-sunset rain, while the last -cuckoos cry and the last footsteps and wheels of the world -die away behind. The foliage has a pale, almost white, -light of its own among the darkly dripping boughs, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span> -when that is gone the rain and leaf under a spongy grey -sky have a myriad voices of contentedness. Below, -invisible in the dark rain but not unfelt, is the deep hollow -land of the Weald. The owls whimper and mew and -croon and hoot and shriek their triumphs.</p> - - -<h3>SURREY.</h3> - -<p>In the morning a storm comes up on bellying blue -clouds above the pale levels of young corn and round-topped -trees black as night but gold at their crests. -The solid rain does away with all the hills, and shows -only the solitary thorns at the edge of an oak wood, or a -row of beeches above a hazel hedgerow and, beneath that, -stars of stitchwort in the drenched grass. But a little -while and the sky is emptied and in its infant blue there -are white clouds with silver gloom in their folds; and -the light falls upon round hills, yew and beech thick -upon their humps, the coombes scalloped in their sides -tenanted by oaks beneath. By a grassy chalk pit and -clustering black yew, white beam and rampant clematis, -is the Pilgrims’ Way. Once more the sky empties heavy -and dark rain upon the bright trees so that they pant and -quiver while they take it joyfully into their deep hearts. -Before the eye has done with watching the dance and -glitter of rain and the sway of branches, the blue is again -clear and like a meadow sprinkled over with blossoming -cherry trees.</p> - -<p>The decent vale consists of square green fields and -park-like slopes, dark pine and light beech: but beyond -that the trees gather together in low ridge after ridge so<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span> -that the South Country seems a dense forest from east -to west. On one side of the hill road is a common of -level ash and oak woods, holly and thorn at their edges, -and between them and the dust a grassy tract, sometimes -furzy; on the other, oaks and beeches sacred to the -pheasant but exposing countless cuckoo flowers among the -hazels of their underwood. Please trespass. The English -game preserve is a citadel of woodland charm, and -however precious, it has only one or two defenders easily -eluded and, when met, most courteous to all but children -and not very well dressed women. The burglar’s must -be a bewitching trade if we may judge by the pleasures -of the trespasser’s unskilled labour.</p> - -<p>In the middle of the wood is a four-went way, and the -grassy or white roads lead where you please among tall -beeches or broad, crisp-leaved shining thorns and brief -open spaces given over to the mounds of ant and mole, -to gravel pits and heather. Is this the Pilgrims’ Way, -in the valley now, a frail path chiefly through oak and -hazel, sometimes over whin and whinberry and heather -and sand, but looking up at the yews and beeches of the -chalk hills? It passes a village pierced by straight clear -waters—a woodland church—woods of the willow wren—and -then, upon a promontory, alone, within the greenest -mead rippled up to its walls by but few graves, another -church, dark, squat, small-windowed, old, and from its -position above the world having the characters of church -and beacon and fortress, calling for all men’s reverence. -Up here in the rain it utters the pathos of the old roads -behind, wiped out as if writ in water, or worn deep and -then deserted and surviving only as tunnels under the hazels.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span> -I wish they could always be as accessible as churches -are, and not handed over to land-owners—like Sandsbury -Lane near Petersfield—because straight new roads have -taken their places for the purposes of tradesmen and carriage -people, or boarded up like that discarded fragment, -deep-sunken and overgrown, below Colman’s Hatch in -Surrey. For centuries these roads seemed to hundreds so -necessary, and men set out upon them at dawn with hope -and followed after joy and were fain of their whiteness -at evening: few turned this way or that out of them -except into others as well worn (those who have turned -aside for wantonness have left no trace at all), and most -have been well content to see the same things as those -who went before and as they themselves have seen a -hundred times. And now they, as the sound of their feet -and the echoes, are dead, and the roads are but pleasant -folds in the grassy chalk. Stay, traveller, says the dark -tower on the hill, and tread softly because your way is -over men’s dreams; but not too long; and now descend to -the west as fast as feet can carry you, and follow your -own dream, and that also shall in course of time lie under -men’s feet; for there is no going so sweet as upon the old -dreams of men.</p> - - - -<div class="chapter"> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span></p> - - - - - - -<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER IV<br /> - -<span class="smaller">AN ADVENTURER</span></h2> -</div> - - -<p>In one of the new cottages at the edge of the town -beyond lives, or tries to live, a man who fought for many -years in one of the suburbs a losing battle against London. -His father had farmed land now covered by streets. He -himself was persuaded to sell all but his house and garden -to raise money for a business which promised his sons -great wealth. He retained barely enough to live upon; -the business, an honest one, failed; and in a short time -misfortunes compelled him to open a shop. He converted -the house—that was once a farmhouse—into a -shop, and not five years ago it could still be seen at the -end of a row of gaudy, glittering windows, itself a village -shop, having but a common house window for the display -of wares, the interior gloomy and approached through a -strip of garden where a lime-tree put on and shed its -leaves with the air of a princess of old romance. The -back garden, half an orchard, was bordered along a side -street by a high wall, and over that a broad cherry used -to lean a gnarled branch and shower its blossoms upon -the asphalte; the foot-passengers complained of the tree -which had grown without foreknowledge of the fact that -men would pass below in silk hats, and the branch was -lopped. In the shop itself everything was for sale, -everything that officious travellers could foist upon the -little weak-eyed half-farmer, half-gardener who kept the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span> -shop—hosiery, leather bags, purses, cheap jewellery, fishing-tackle, -cricket-bats, umbrellas, walking-sticks. A -staircase led out of the shop to the bedrooms, just as it -had done when the window on the narrow landing looked -over hay-fields to Banstead Downs. When the cat was -not lying upon the socks in the window, she had, very -likely, been kept away by a litter of kittens somewhere -among the seldom disturbed bundles of unfashionable ties, -or she lay in the sun beneath the lime and watched her -kittens pursuing the spiral flight of the yellow leaves.</p> - -<p>The owner made no concessions except such as he -was forced to, as when he bought the stock of jewellery -because the traveller praised his cat; or allowed the cherry -tree to be mutilated because the new Borough Council -commanded. He dressed in breeches, gaiters and heavy -boots, and never wore a coat or took his pipe out of his -mouth (except to play with puss). Seldom did he leave -the house, unless it was to go into the garden or to take -a walk down the emptied busy street at night, when the -only sound was the crickets’ song from the bakers’ shops. -The little old house rippled over by creeper was beautiful -then—the lime tree and the creeper trembling in the -gusty moonlight, and the windows and doorway hollow -and dark and romantic as if a poet had made them to -sting men’s hearts with beauty and with regret.</p> - -<p>No one can ever say what the old man thought as -he slammed the door after one of these walks and was -alone with himself. Certainly he regretted the big -decorous high-gated houses that used to stand opposite -his, veiled by wistaria, passion flower and clematis; the -limes that used to run the whole length of his father’s<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span> -land, but now all gone, save this one (how lovely its -fallen leaves looked in the as yet untrodden streets in -autumn mornings, lying flat and moistly golden under the -fog!); the balsam growing through the railings; the dark -yew tree that looked among bright lilac and laburnum -like a negro among the women in the <i>Arabian Nights</i>; -the pathway through the churchyard, in the days before -they had to rail it in to preserve the decent turf—in vain, -for it was now littered with newspapers and tram-tickets -among the tombs of —— Esquire, —— Esquire, for they -were all esquires. He regretted the houses and gardens, -but less than their people, the men and women of some -ease and state, of speech whose kindliness was thrice kind -through its careful dignity, so he thought. And then the -children, there were no such children now; and the young -men and women, the men a little alarming, the women -strong and lovely and gentle enough to supply him with -incarnations at once of all those whom he read of in the -novels of Scott. They had gone long ago, except those -who survived vaguely in the novels. He remembered -their houses better, for it was not until after some years -that they were pulled down, their orchards grubbed up, -and their rich mould carried away in sacks to the trumpery -villas round about—dragged along the road and spilt in -a long black trail. It was wonderful dark mould, and -the thought of the apples, the plums, the nectarines, the -roses which had grown out of it made him furious when -it was taken to their gardens by people who would be -gone in a year or less, and would grow in it nothing but -nasturtiums and sunflowers.</p> - -<p>There followed a period when, the old attitudes, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span> -things that had been handed down from the last revolution, -having been broken up, the gardens became a -possession of nettles and docks, and fewer and fewer were -the crown-imperials and hollyhocks to survive the fall of -the houses. The scaffold-poles, the harsh blocks of stone, -the rasping piles of bricks, the scores of cold earthenware -and iron articles belonging to the rows of villas about to -replace the old houses, looked more like ruin than preparation -as they lay stark and hideous among the misty -grass and still blue elms. There were days when the -thrushes still sang well among the rioting undisturbed -shrubberies. But soon men felled the elms and drove -away their shadows for ever, and all that dwelled or could -be imagined therein. No more would the trees be -enchanted by the drunken early songs of blackbirds. -The heavenly beauty of earthly things went away upon -the timber carriages and was stamped with mud. The -butts of the trees were used to decorate the gardens of -the new houses. Two, indeed, were spared by some one’s -folly, and a main bough fell in the night and crushed -through a whole fortnight’s brickwork.</p> - -<p>Those elms had come unconsciously to be part of the -real religion of men in that neighbourhood, and certainly -of that old man. Their cool green voices as they swayed, -their masses motionless against the evening or the summer -storms, created a sense of pomp and awe. They gave -mystic invitations that stirred his blood if not his slowly -working humble brain, and helped to build and to keep -firm that sanctuary of beauty to which we must be able -to retire if we are to be more than eaters and drinkers -and newspaper readers. When they were gone he won<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span>dered, -still humbly, what would do their work in the -minds of the newcomers. Looking at the features of -the younger people, held in a vice of reserve or pallidly -leering, and hearing the snarl of their voices, he was not -surprised. They had not been given a chance. How -could they have the ease, the state, the kindliness of the -old inhabitants? They had no gods, only a brand-new -Gothic church. Often they supported this or that new -movement, or bought a brave new book, but they continued -to sneer timidly or brutally at everything else. -They were satisfied with a little safe departure from the -common way, some mental or spiritual equivalent to the -door-knocker of imitation hammered copper. They did -not care very much for trees though they planted them -in every street, where the grammar-school boys and -errand-boys mutilated them one by one in the dark; they -cut off the heads of a score of tall poplars, lest perchance -the west wind should one day do the same thing when -one of the million was passing below.</p> - -<p>The new people were a mysterious, black-liveried host, -the grandchildren of peers, thieves, gutter-snipes, agricultural -labourers, artisans, shopkeepers, professional men, -farmers, foreign financiers, an unrelated multitude. They -were an endless riddle to the old man. He used to stare -at their houses as one might stare at a corpse in the hope -of discovering that there was something alive there. They -were as impenetrable as their houses, when at night the -blinds of the lighted rooms were drawn and figures or -parts of figures shot fantastically by. He read of their -bankruptcies, their appointments, their crimes, their -successes, unwittingly, in the newspapers. He could<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span> -never take it as a matter of course to pass, to be continually -surrounded by, thousands of whom he knew -nothing, to whom he was nothing. Well did they keep -their secrets, this blank or shamefaced crowd of discreetly -dressed people who might be anywhere to-morrow.</p> - -<p>He turned from them to his garden and cherry-tree, -and thinking of those who had walked there, and in the -long garden on the other side of the fence, he felt at -home again, with his cat and her long line of descendants. -That long garden had survived the big house to -which it had belonged. A merchant had lived there with -his family of four daughters, dark, tall women, whose -pride and tender speech the old trees in their garden often -recalled. All were beautiful, and they were most beautiful -together. They walked, they rode, they played and -read in the garden, and the old man could see them there. -They were said to be clever and their father was wealthy. -They were nearly always together, and as often as possible -with him. They were a tribe apart, of extraordinary -perfection of strength and grace, holding their own -against the world. And yet, as the old man thought to -himself, looking at their garden in the rain, not one of -them was ever married. They had moved right into -London after selling their house and land. They had -come to his shop once or twice after and made an excuse -for going into the garden: they looked into their -own as if they had lost something there. Thinking of -them he went into his shop and opened a book. A -minute black insect, disturbed from among the leaves, -crawled over and over the white page as he pretended to -read; it went in zigzags half-an-inch long, lost in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span> -black and white desert, sometimes turning the sharp edge -and going to the other side of the page; but as a rule the -edge alarmed it and it retreated; it was never still. It -reminded him of himself. They were both lost upon the -vast surface of the earth.</p> - -<p>But, of course, that was not why he left. Nobody -knew why he left. In his seventieth year he ran away, -bursting out of the crowd as one sheep no braver than the -rest will do sometimes, inexplicably. He has brought his -cats with him, and he has money enough to last until he is -dead. Being considered by his niece as of unsound mind, -he is free to do as he will and is happy when he is alone.</p> - - - -<div class="chapter"> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span></p> - - - - - - -<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER V<br /> - -<span class="smaller">SUSSEX</span></h2> -</div> - - -<p>A few miles south of that great presiding pollard -beech is the boundary line between Surrey and Kent on -the north and Sussex on the south. A few miles over -the line the moorland organ roll of heather and birch and -pine succeeds the grassy undulations and the well-grown -beech and oak. The yellow roving lines of the paths cut -through the heather into the sand add to the wildness of the -waste, by their suggestion of mountain torrents and of channels -worn in the soft rock or clay by the sea. The same -likeness in little is often to be seen upon a high-pitched -roof of thatch when the straw is earth-coloured and -tunnelled by birds and seamed by rain. Here the houses -are of stone, unadorned, heather-thatched. The maker -of birch-heath brooms plies his trade. There are stacks -of heath and gorse in the yard. All the more fair are -the grooves in the moorland, below the region of pines, -where the tiled white-boarded mill stands by the sheen -of a ford, and the gorse is bright and white clothes are -blowing over neat gardens and the first rose. On a day -of rain and gloom the answer of the gorse to sudden -lights and heats is delicious; all those dull grey and -glaucous and brown dry spines bursting into cool and -fragrant fire is as great a miracle as the turning of flames -to roses round a martyr’s feet.</p> - -<p>It is only too easy for the pheasant lords to plant larch -in parallelograms: to escape from them it is necessary to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span> -go in amongst them. Yet there are parts of the forest -large and dark and primeval in look, with a few poor -isolated houses and a thin file of telegraph posts crossing -it among the high gloomy pines and down to the marshy -hollows, to the strewn gold of dwarf willows, and up -again to the deserted wooden windmill, the empty boarded -cottage, the heather-thatched sheds at the southern edge -of the moor. Looking at this tract of wild land the mind -seems to shed many centuries of civilization and to taste -something of the early man’s alarm in the presence of -the uncultured hills—an alarm which is in us tempered -so as to aid an impression of the sublime. Its influence -lingers in the small strips of roadside gorse beyond its -proper boundary. Then, southward, there are softly dipping -meadows, fields of young corn, and oaks thrown -among the cowslips. The small farmhouses are neat -and good—one has a long stone wall in front, and, over -the road, tall Scotch firs above a green pond dappled by -the water crowfoot’s white blossoms and bordered by -sallow and rush. Narrow copses of oak or wide hedges -of hazel and sallow line the road; and they are making -cask hoops under lodges of boughs at the woodsides. -Bluebells and primroses and cuckoo flowers are not to -be counted under the trees. The long moist meadows flow -among the woods up and down from farm to farm and -spire to tower. Each farmhouse group is new—this one -is roofed and walled with tiles; and opposite is a tangle -of grass and gorse, with fowls and hen-coops amongst it, -a sallowy pond, a pile of faggots, some crooked knees of -oak, some fresh-peeled timber: old grey hop poles lean -in a sheaf all round a great oak. The gates are of good<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span> -unpainted oak, and some few are of a kind not often seen -elsewhere, lower than a hurdle and composed of two -stout parallel bars united by twenty uprights and by two -pieces meeting to form a V across these. The gates -deserve and would fill a book by themselves.</p> - -<p>Green lucent calipers of flags shadow one another in -little wayside ponds, white-railed; for this is the Weald, -the land of small clay ponds. The hazels are the nightingale’s. -In many of the oak woods the timber carriages -have carved a way through primroses and bluebells deep -into the brown clay. The larger views are of cloudy, -oak woods, ridge behind ridge, and green corn or grass -and grey ploughland between; and of the sun pouring -a molten cataract out of dark machicolated clouds on to -one green field that glows a moment and is insignificant -again: the lesser are of little brambly precipitous sandpits -by the road, of a white mill at a crossing, of carved -yews before black-timbered inns, of a starling that has -learned the curlew’s call perched on a cottage roof, of -abeles all rough silver with opening leaf shivering along -the grass-bordered evening road, of two or three big oaks -in a meadow corner and in their shadow unblemished -parsley and grasses bowed as if rushing in the wind. At -an inn door stands a young labourer, tall and straight but -loosely made, his nose even and small, his eyes blue and -deep set, his lips like those of Antinous, his face ruddy -and rough-grained, his hair short and brown and crisp upon -his fair round head; his neck bound by a voluminous -scarf (with alternate lozenges of crimson and deep green -divided by white lines) that is gathered beneath his chin -by a brass ring and thence flows down under his blue<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span> -coat; his trousers of grey cord, dirty and patched with -drab to a weathered stone colour, fitting almost tightly -to his large thighs and calves and reaching not too near -to his small but heavily-shod feet. A prince—a slave. -He is twenty, unmarried, sober, honest, a noble animal. -He goes into a cottage that stands worn and old and -without a right angle in its timbers or its thatch any -more than in its apple trees and solitary quince which all -but hide the lilac and massed honesty of the little garden. -This is a house—I had almost said this is a man—that -looked upon England when it could move men to such -songs as, “Come, live with me and be my love,” <span class="lock">or—</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Hey, down a down!” did Dian sing,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Amongst her virgins sitting;</div> - <div class="verse">“Than love there is no vainer thing,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For maidens most unfitting.”</div> - <div class="verse">And so think I, with a down, down derry.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p>For a moment or less as he goes under the porch I seem -to see that England, that swan’s nest, that island which a -man’s heart was not too big to love utterly. But now -what with Great Britain, the British Empire, Britons, -Britishers, and the English-speaking world, the choice -offered to whomsoever would be patriotic is embarrassing, -and he is fortunate who can find an ideal England of -the past, the present, and the future to worship, and -embody it in his native fields and waters or his garden, -as in a graven image.</p> - -<p>The round unending Downs are close ahead, and upon -the nearest hill a windmill beside a huge scoop in the -chalk, a troop of elms below, and then low-hedged fields -of grass and wheat. The farms are those of the down<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span>land. -One stands at the end of the elm troop that -swerves and clusters about its tiled roof, grey cliff of -chimney-stack, and many gables; the stables with newer -tiles; the huge slope of the barn; the low mossy cart-lodge -and its wheels and grounded shafts; the pale straw stacks -and the dark hay ricks with leaning ladders. A hundred -sheep-bells rush by with a music of the hills in the wind. -The larks are singing as if they never could have done -by nightfall. It is now the hour of sunset, and windy. -All the sky is soft and dark-grey-clouded except where -the sun, just visible and throbbing in its own light, looks -through a bright window in the west with a glow. -Exactly under the sun the grass and wheat is full both -of the pure effulgence and of the south-west wind, -rippling and glittering: there is no sun for anything else -save the water. North of the sun and out of its power -lies a lush meadow, beyond it a flat marshland cut by -several curves of bright water, above that a dark church -on a wooded mound, and then three shadowy swoops of -Down ending at a spire among trees.</p> - -<p>South-west, the jagged ridgy cluster of a hillside town, -a mill and a castle, stand dark and lucid, and behind them -the mere lines of still more distant downs.</p> - - - -<div class="chapter"> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span></p> - - - - - - -<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER VI<br /> - -<span class="smaller">A RETURN TO NATURE</span></h2> -</div> - - -<p>I turn into my next inn with unusual hopes. For -it was here some years ago that I met for the first time -a remarkable man. It was nine o’clock on a late July -evening, and the haymakers, only just set free, came -stamping into the bar. The last waggon-load stopped -at the door while the red-whiskered carter stood, one hand -on the latch, and drank his pint before leading his horses -into the stall. After the haymakers, in their pale -corduroys and dirty white slops, came a tall, spare, shock-headed -man, not recently shaved, dressed in grey—grey -coat, grey breeches and stockings, and a tall, hard felt hat -that was old and grey. He called for sixpenny ale, and -wiping the hay dust from his neck sat down beside me.</p> - -<p>No, he is not here to-day. Perhaps he will never get -out of London again.</p> - -<p>I asked him the way to the nearest village, and whether -a bed was to be had there. He answered that it was -some way off—paused, looked at me, drank from his -tankard—and added in a lower voice that he would be -glad if I would come and share his place. Such an -unusual invitation enforced assent.</p> - -<p>A quarter of a mile down the next by-way he opened -a little oaken gate that slammed after us, and there, in a -corner of a small, flat field, was his sleeping place, under -an oak. Would I care to join him in fried bacon and -broad beans and tea at six the next morning?</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span></p> - -<p>He lit a wisp of hay and soon had a fire burning, and -brought over some hay and sacks for the second bed. -The lights of the farmhouse shone on the other side of -the little field behind lilac bushes. The farmhouse pump -gave out a cry like a guinea fowl for a few minutes. -Then the lights went out. I asked the name of the farm -and he told me.</p> - -<p>“I come here almost every summer for the haymaking,” -he said, and detecting my surprise that it was not -his first year of haymaking, he <span class="lock">continued—</span></p> - -<p>“It is my tenth summer, to be exact.”</p> - -<p>He was a man of hardly over thirty, and I noticed -that his hands, though small and fine, were rough and -warty and dark. Thoughtlessly I remarked that he must -find the winter hard if he travelled like this all the year -round.</p> - -<p>“Yes,” he said, with a sigh, “it is, and that is why I -go back in the winter; at least partly why.”</p> - -<p>“Go back——?”</p> - -<p>“Yes, to London.”</p> - -<p>I was still perplexed. He had the air of a town-bred -man of the clerkly class, but no accent, and I could not -think what he did in London that was compatible with -his present life.</p> - -<p>“Are you a Londoner, then?”</p> - -<p>“Yes, and no. I was born at the village of —— in -Caermarthenshire. My father was a clerk in a coal -merchant’s office of the neighbouring town. But he -thought to better himself, worked hard in the evenings -and came to London, when I was seven, for a better-paid -post. We lived in Wandsworth in a small street<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span> -newly built. I went to a middle-class school close by -until I was sixteen, and then I went into a silk merchant’s -office. My father died soon after. He had never been -strong, and from the first year’s work in the city, I have -heard my mother say, he was a doomed man. He made -no friends. While I was young he gave up all his spare -time to me and was happy, wheeling me, my mother -walking alongside, out into the country on every Sunday -that was not soaking wet, and nearly every Saturday -afternoon, too.</p> - -<p>“It was on one of these excursions, when they had -left me to myself a little while to talk more gravely than -they usually did when we were out like that, that there -was suddenly opened before me—like a yawning pit, -yet not only beneath me but on every side—infinity, endless -time, endless space; it was thrust upon me, I could -not grasp it, I only closed my eyes and shuddered and -knew that not even my father could save me from it, -then in a minute it was gone. To a more blessed child -some fair or imposing vision might have risen up out of -the deep and given him a profounder if a sadder eye for -life and the world. How unlike it was to the mystic’s -trance, feeling out with infinite soul to earth and stars -and sea and remote time and recognizing his oneness with -them. To me, but later than that, this occasionally -recurring experience was as an intimation of the endless -pale road, before and behind, which the soul has to travel: -it was a terror that enrolled me as one of the helpless, -superfluous ones of the earth.</p> - -<p>“I was their only child that lived, and my father’s -joy in me was very great, equalled only by his misery at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span> -the life which he had to lead and which he foresaw for -me. He used to read to me, waking me up for the purpose -sometimes when he reached home late, or if he did -not do that rousing me an hour before breakfast. His -favourite books were <i>The Compleat Angler</i> and -<i>Lavengro</i>, the poems of Wordsworth, the diaries of -Thoreau and the <i>Natural History of Selborne</i>. I remember -crying—when I was twelve—with despair of human -nature’s fickleness to think that White, even though he -was an old man, could have it in his heart to write that -farewell to natural history at the end of his last letter -to Barrington. My father read these books to me several -times in a sad, hoarse voice—as it seemed to me, though -when he paused he was happy enough—which I had often -great trouble to endure as I got older and able and willing -to read for myself. So full was I of a sense of the real -wild country which I had never seen—the Black Mountains -of Caermarthen I hardly recalled—that I became -fanciful, and despised the lavish creeper that hung like a -costly dress over the fence between our garden and the -next, because the earth it grew in was not red earth but -a black pasty compound, full of cinders and mortar and -decayed rags and kittens. I used to like to go to the -blacksmith’s to smell the singeing hoof and to the tram-stables -and smell the horses, and see the men standing -about in loose shirts, hanging braces, bare arms, clay pipes, -with a sort of free look that I could not see elsewhere. -The navvies at work in the road or on the railway line -were a tremendous pleasure, and I noticed that the clerks -waiting for their trains in the morning loved to watch -these hulking free and easy men doing something that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span> -looked as if it mattered, not like their own ledger work -and so on. I had the same sort of pleasure looking up -the street that rose from east to west and seeing the sun -set between the two precipices of brick wall at the top; -it was as if a gate opened there and through it all the -people and things that saddened me had disappeared and -left me to myself; it was like the pit, too, that opened -before me as a little child.</p> - -<p>“My father died of consumption. I was then just -able to earn my own living, so I was left in lodgings -and my mother returned to Wales. I worked hard at -figures; at least I went early and stayed late and never -stopped to talk to the others; yet I made frequent mistakes, -and the figures swam in a mist of American rivers -and English waterfalls and gipsy camps, so that it was a -wonder I could ever see my Thoreau and Wordsworth -and Borrow without these figures. Fancy men adopting -as a cry the ‘right to work’! Apparently they are too -broken-spirited to think of a right to live, and would be -content only to work. It is not wonderful that with -such a cry they do very little. Men cannot fight hard -for the ‘right to work’ as I did. My office was at the -bottom of a pit. The four sides of the pit were walls -with many windows, and I could hear voices speaking in -the rooms behind and the click of typewriters, but could -not see into them. Only for two or three days in June -could I see the sun out of the pit. But in the hot days -blue-bottles buzzed on my panes and I took care of them -until one by one they lay dead upon the window ledge. -There were no spiders and they seemed to have a good -life. Sparrows sometimes flew up and down the pit, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span> -once for a week I had the company of a black-and-white -pigeon. It sat day after day in a hole in the opposite -wall until it died and fell on to the paved yard below. -The clouds sailed over the top of the pit. Sea-gulls flew -over, all golden-winged, in October afternoons. I liked -the fog when all the lights were lit, and though we -did not know one another in the pit we seemed to keep -one another company. But I liked the rain best of all. -It used to splash down from all sides and make a country -noise, and I looked up and saw the quaint cowls sitting -like cats on the chimney-pots, and had ridiculous fancies -that took me far away for a second or two.</p> - -<p>“The worst time of all was two or three years after -my father’s death. I spent most of my poor earnings -on clothes; I took the trouble to talk and smoke and -think as much as possible like the other nine young -men in the railway carriage that took me into the city; -I learned their horrible, cowardly scorn for those who -were poor or outlandish, and for all things that were not -like those in their own houses or in those of the richer -people of their acquaintance or envy. We were slaves, -and we gilded our collars.”</p> - -<p>“But the journalist and hack writer,” said I, “is worse -off. At least your master only asked for your dregs. -The hack writer is asked to give everything that can be -turned into words at short notice, and so the collar round -his neck is never taken off as yours was between six in -the afternoon and nine in the morning.”</p> - -<p>“Ah, but it is open to you to do good or bad. We -could only do bad. All day we were doing things which -we did not understand, which could not in any way con<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span>cern -us, which had nothing to do with what we had been -taught at school, had read in books or had heard from -our fathers and mothers. When he was angry the head -of the firm used to say we had better take care or a -machine would supersede us in ten years instead of -twenty. We had been driven out of life into a corner in -an underground passage where everything was unnecessary -that did not help us to be quick at figures, or taking down -letters from dictation, or neat in dress and obedient to -the slaves who were set over us. When we were out of -the office we could do nothing which unfitted us for it. -The head of the firm used to say that we were each -‘playing a part, however humble, in the sublime machine -of modern civilization, that not one of us was unnecessary, -and that we must no more complain or grow restive -than does the earth because it is one of the least elements -in this majestic universe.’ We continued to be neat -when we were away from the office, we were disobedient -to everything and everybody else that was not armed with -the power of taking away our bread—to the old, the -poor, the children, the women, the ideas which we had -never dreamed of, and that came among us as a white -blackbird comes in the winter to a barbarous parish where -keeper and gardener and farmer go out with their guns -and stalk it from hedge to hedge until, starved and conspicuous -and rather apart from its companions, it falls to -their beastly shot and is sold to one of the gentry who -puts it into a glass case.</p> - -<p>“Sometimes on a Saturday or Sunday I broke away in -a vague unrest, and walked alone to the pretty places -where my father and mother had taken me as a little boy.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span> -Most of them I had not seen for five or six years. My -visits were often formal. I walked out and was glad -to be back to the lights of the street, the strong tea, the -newspaper and the novel. But one day I went farther -than usual to a wood where we used to go without interference -and, after finding all the blackbirds’ and thrushes’ -and robins’ nests within reach, boil a kettle and have tea. -I had never in that wood seen any man or woman except -my father and mother; never heard a voice except theirs—my -father perhaps reading Wordsworth aloud—and the -singing birds’ and the moorhens’ in the pond at the edge; -it used to shut out everything but what I had learned to -love most, sunshine and wind and flowers and their love. -When I saw it again I cried; I really could not help it. -For a road had been made alongside of it, and the builder’s -workmen going to and fro had made a dozen gaps in the -hedge and trodden the wood backward and forward and -broken down the branches and made it noisome. Worse -than all, the field, the golden field where I used to lie -among the buttercups and be alone with the blue sky—where -I first felt the largeness and dearness and nearness -of the blue sky as a child of eight and put up my hand -in my delight to draw it through the soft blue substance -that seemed so near—the field was enclosed, a chapel -built; it was a cemetery for all the unknown herd, strange -to one another, strange to every one else, that filled the -new houses spreading over the land.</p> - -<p>“At first I was for running away at once. But the -sight made me faint-hearted and my legs dragged, and -it was all I could do to get home—I mean, to my -lodgings.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span></p> - -<p>“However, I was quite different after that. I was -ashamed of my ways, and now spent all my spare time -and money in going out into the country as far as possible, -and reading the old books and the new ones that I could -hear of in the same spirit. I lived for these things. It -was now that I knew my slavery. Everything reminded -me of it. The return half of my railway ticket to the -country said plainly, ‘You have got to be back at —— -not later than 10.39 p.m.’ Then I used to go a different -way back or even walk the whole way to avoid having -this thing in my pocket that proclaimed me a slave.</p> - -<p>“It was now that I first accepted the invitation of a -relation who lived on the east coast very near the sea. -The sea had a sandy shore bounded by a perpendicular -sandy cliff, to the edge of which came rough moorland. -The sea washed the foot of the cliff at high tide and -swept the yellow sand clean twice a day, wiping away all -footprints and leaving a fresh arrangement of blue pebbles -glistering in the bitter wind. It was impossible to be -more alone than on this sand, and I was contented again. -The sea brought back the feelings I had when I lay in -the buttercup field—the cemetery—and looked into the -sky. Walking over the moor the undulations of the land -hid and revealed the sea in an always unexpected way, -and often as I turned suddenly I seemed to see the blue -sky extended so as to reach nearly to my feet and half-way -up it went small brown or white clouds like birds—like -ships—in fact they were ships sailing on a sea that -mingled with the sky. It seemed a beautiful life, where -clouds could not help being finely spun or carved, or -pebbles help being delicious to eye and touch. But out<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span> -of the extremity of my happiness came my worst grief. -I fell in love. I fell in love with one of my cousins, a -girl of seventeen. She never professed to return my love, -but she was a most true friend, and for a time I was -intoxicated with the delight; I now envy even the brief -moment of pain and misery that I had in those days.</p> - -<p>“She was clever and understanding so that I was always -at my best with her, and yet, too, she was as sweet as a -child and strange as an animal. The few moments of -pain were when I saw her with the other girls. When -they were together, running on the sands or talking or -dancing they seemed all to be one, like the wind; and -sometimes I thought that like the wind they had no heart -amongst them—except mine that raced with the runners -and sighed among the laughers. It was lovely to see her -with animals! with cows or horses, her implicit motherhood -going out to them in an animal kindness, a bluff -tenderness without thought. At times I looked carefully -and solemnly into her eyes until I was lost in a curious -pleasure like that of walking in a shadowy, still, cold -place, a cathedral or wintry grove—she had the largest -of dark grey eyes; and she did not turn away or smile, -but looked fearlessly forward, careless and unashamed -like a deep pool in a wood unused to wayfarers. Then -she seemed so much a child, and I longed for the days -(which I had never really had) when I could have been -as careless and bold and free as she was. No, I could -never teach those eyes and lips the ways of love: that -was for some boy to do. And I thought I will be content -to love her and to have her friendliness. I was old -for my years, and my life without the influence of women<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span> -in office and lodgings, I thought, had made me unfit for -her delicate ways. I turned away and the sunny ships -in the sea were mournful because of my thoughts. But I -could not wait. I told her my love. She was not angry -or indifferent. She did not reject it. She was afraid. -They sent her away to college. She overworked and -overplayed, and they have told me she is now a schoolmistress. -I see her sad and firm with folded hands. -When I knew her she was tall and straight, with long -brown hair in two heavy plaits, a shining, rounded brow, -dark-lashed, grey eyes, and a smile of inexpressible sweetness -in which I once or twice surprised her, pleased with -the happiness and beauty of her thoughts and of Nature.</p> - -<p>“When I had lost her, or thought I <span class="lock">had—</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent14">Not comforted to live</div> - <div class="verse">But that there is this jewel in the world</div> - <div class="verse">Which I may see again——</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p class="noindent">I resolved that I would not be a slave any more. For -a few weeks I used to fancy it was only by a chance I -had lost her, and every now and then as I mused over it -I got heated and my thoughts raced forward as if in the -hope of overtaking and averting that very evil chance -which had already befallen, and had in fact caused the -train of thought.</p> - -<p>“I saved every penny that I could from my salary. -In six months I had saved twenty pounds. Out of this -I bought a new black suit, a pair of boots and a hat, and -gave them to my landlady and asked her to take care of -them until I returned, which might be at the end of -October. It was then April. I gave notice to my -employers and left them. The next day very early I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span> -left London, and walked all day and all night until I -reached the sea. There I bathed and ate a hearty meal, -and walking along the cliffs till I came to a small farmhouse -I engaged a bedroom, and there I slept and thought -and slept undisturbed for twenty-four hours. I was free. -I was free to dream myself no longer one of the mob-led -mob. With care my money would last until mid-summer, -even if I did no work.</p> - -<p>“It was a warm, wet May, and by the end of the -month there was a plentiful crop of weeds, and I had no -difficulty in getting work at hoeing. Strawberry picking -and cherry picking followed. I was very slow and -earned little, but it was now warm enough to sleep out, -and I earned my food. By the end of July, as I liked -the work, I was as useful with my hayrake as any of the -women and better than most of the odd hands. I wore -my fingers raw at tying up barley and oats and, later on, -at feeding the threshing machine. But before the end of -October the weather drove me back to London, with ten -shillings in my pocket.</p> - -<p>“I put on my new clothes and got as good a berth as -my first one, and in the hope of another spring and -summer out of doors I passed the winter cheerfully. To -save more money I went to bed as soon as I got back -to my lodgings, and read myself to sleep.</p> - -<p>“In May a spell of fine weather drove me to give -notice again, and I walked as far as Maidstone the first -day. My second summer was like my first. I was -already known at half-a-dozen farms. When they could -not give me work at once they gave me leave to fish in -the three or four ponds to be found on all the farms<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span> -in the Weald of Kent, and I had many a large, if not -always savoury, meal of tench and eels. At the end of -the summer I had three pounds in my pocket, and little -less by the end of October.</p> - -<p>“The winter I passed as before. For five years I lived -in this way. Then, for the sake of going abroad on my -savings, I worked for a whole year at a desk, and spent -four months along the Loire and down to Bordeaux; -from there I worked my passage to Newport. Since -then I have gone back to my old plan.”</p> - -<p>Here he paused and mused. I asked him if he still -found it easy to get work in London.</p> - -<p>“No, that’s it,” he replied; “my handwriting is worse -and it is slow. The first weeks in London seem to undo -all the good of my summer outing, especially as my salary -is less than it used to be. They begin to ask me if I am -a married man when I apply for work. The November -rains remind me that I have rheumatism. It is my great -fear that I may need a doctor, and so spend my savings, -and be unable to leave London until field work is plentiful -in June. But I have my freedom; I could, if necessary, -take an under-cowman’s place and live entirely on -the land. They begin to look at my hands when I apply -for clerical work, and I can’t wear gloves.”</p> - -<p>“And ten years hence?”</p> - -<p>“That is ten years too far ahead for me to look, though -I am less cheerful than I used to be. I realize that I -belong to the suburbs still. I belong to no class or race, -and have no traditions. We of the suburbs are a muddy, -confused, hesitating mass, of small courage though much -endurance. As for myself, I am world-conscious, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span> -hence suffer unutterable loneliness. I know what bitterness -it is to be lacking in those strong tastes and impulses -which, blinding men to what does not concern them, -enables them to live with a high heart. For example, I -have a sensitive palate and am glad of my food, yet whenever -I taste lamb—which I do when I can—my pleasure -is spoilt by the sight of the butcher carrying a lamb under -his arm. There it is. I am sensitive on all sides. Your -true man would either forget the sight or he would be -moved to a crusade. I can do neither.</p> - -<p>“I am weary of seeing things, the outsides of things, -for I see nothing else. It makes me wretched to think -what swallows are to many children and poets and other -men, while to me they are nothing but inimitable, compact -dark weights tumbling I do not know how through -the translucent air—nothing more, and yet I know they -are something more. I apprehend their weight, buoyancy -and velocity as they really are, but I have no vision. -Then it is that I remember those words of Sir Thomas -Browne’<span class="lock">s—</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>“‘I am sure there is a common spirit that plays within -us, yet makes no part in us; and that it is the Spirit of -God, the fire and scintillation of that noble and mighty -essence, which is the life and radical heat of spirits.... -This is that gentle heat that brooded on the waters and in -six days hatched the world; this is that irradiation that -dispels the mists of hell, the clouds of horror, fear, sorrow, -despair; and preserves the region of the mind in serenity. -Whosoever feels not the warm gale and gentle ventilation -of this spirit (though I feel his pulse) I dare not say -he lives; for truly without this, to me there is no heat -under the tropic; nor any light, though I dwell in the -body of the sun.’</p></div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span></p> - -<p>“I dare not say I live. And yet the cows, the well-fed, -quiet cows, in this fine soft weather stare enviously at -me through the gate, though they know nothing of death, -and I know it must come, and that even though often -desired, when it comes it will be unwelcome——Yet -they stare enviously at me, I am sure.</p> - -<p>“I have no courage. I can at least endure. I can use -my freedom to become a slave again, and at least I know -that I have lost nothing by my way of living. Yes, I -can endure, and if after my death I am asked questions -difficult to answer, I can ask one that is unanswerable -which I have many times asked myself—often in London, -but not here. Here I love my food and my work, my -rest. My dreams are good. I am not unkindly spoken -to; I make no enemies.</p> - -<p>“But yet I cannot look forward—there is nothing -ahead—just as I cannot look back. My people have not -built; they were not settled on the earth; they did -nothing; they were oil or grit in a great machine; they -took their food and shelter modestly and not ungratefully -from powers above that were neither kind nor cruel. I -hope I do no less; I wish I could do more.</p> - -<p>“Now again returns that old feeling of my childhood—I -felt it when I had left my cousin—I have felt it -suddenly not only in London, but on the top of the -Downs and by the sea; the immense loneliness of the -world, as if the next moment I might be outside of all -visible things. You know how it is, on a still summer -evening, so warm that the ploughman and his wife have -not sent their children to bed, and they are playing, and -their loud voices startle the thought of the woods; my<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span> -feeling is like that, space and quiet and my own littleness -stupendously exaggerated. I have wished I could lay -down my thoughts and desires and noises and stirrings -and cease to trouble that great peace. It was, perhaps, of -this loneliness that the Psalmist spoke: ‘My days are -consumed like smoke.... I watch, and am as a sparrow -alone on the housetop.’ The world is wrong, but the -night is fine; the dew light and the moist air is full of the -honeysuckle scent. I will smoke another pipe of your -tobacco and leave you for a while. I like to be alone -before I sleep.”</p> - -<p>The next I saw of him was when he was frying bacon -and boiling beans for our meal. “Forget my night -thoughts,” he said, “and be thankful for the white dry -road and the blue sky. We are not so young but that -we must be glad it is summer and fine. As for me, the -dry weather is so sweet that I like the smell of elder -flower and the haycart horses’ dung and the dust that get -into the throat of an evening. Good-bye.”</p> - -<p>He went away to wash at the pump, as the cattle spread -out from the milking-stalls into the field and filled it with -their sweet breath and the sound of their biting the thick -grass.</p> - -<p>I saw him again a few years later.</p> - -<p>London was hot and dry, and would have been -parched, cracked and shrivelled had it been alive instead -of dead. The masonry was so dry that the eye wearied -of it before the feet wearied of the pavement, and -both desired the rain that makes the city at one with -Nature. The plane-trees were like so many captives -along the streets, shackled to the flagstones, pelted with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span> -dust, humiliated, all their rusticity ravished though not -forgotten. The very sky, lofty, blue, white-clouded, was -parched, the blue and the white being soiled by a hot, -yellowish-grey scum that harmonizes with gritty pavements -and stark towers and spires. The fairest thing to -be seen—away from the river—was the intense young -green of the grass-blades trying to grow up through the -gratings which surround the trees of the streets. The -grass was a prophet muttering wild, ambiguous things, -and since his voice was very small and came from underground, -it was hard to hear him, even without understanding. -Thousands tread down the grass, so that except for -a few hours at night it can never emerge from the grating.</p> - -<p>Some vast machinery plunged and thundered behind -the walls, but though they trembled and grew hot, it -burst not through. Even so the multitude in the streets, -of men and horses and machines and carriages of all kinds, -roared and moved swiftly and continuously, encaged within -walls that are invisible; and they also never burst through. -Both are free to do what they are told. All of the crowd -seem a little more securely imprisoned than him who -watches, because he is aware of his bars; but they move -on, or seem to do, on and on, round and round, as -thoughtless as the belt of an engine.</p> - -<p>There was not one face I knew; not one smiled; not -one relaxed or contracted with a thought, an emotion, a -fancy; but all were clear, hard, and fixed in a vice, so -that though they were infinite in their variety—no two -eyebrows set the same way, no two mouths in the same -relation to the eyes—the variety seemed the product of a -senseless ingenuity and immense leisure, as of a sublime<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span> -philatelist. Hardly one spoke; only the women moved -from left to right instead of straight on, and their voices -were inaudible when their lips moved. The roar in -which all played a part developed into a kind of silence -which not any one of these millions could break; the sea -does not absorb the little rivers more completely than this -silence the voices of men and women, than this solitude -their personalities. Now and then a face changed, an -eyebrow was cocked, or a mouth fell; but it meant less -to me than the flutter as of a bird when drop by drop -the rain drips from the beeches and gives a plash and a -trembling to one leaf and then another in the undergrowth. -There is a more than human force in the movement -of the multitude, more than the sum of all the -forces in the arched necks, the grinding chest muscles, -and the firm feet of the horses, the grace of the bright -women, the persistency of the tall men and thick men. -They cannot stop. They look stupid or callous or blank -or even cruel. They are going about another’s business; -they conceal their own, hiding it so that they forget (as -a drunkard forgets where he has hidden his gold) where -they have hidden it, hiding their souls under something -stiffer and darker than the clothing of their bodies. It is -hard to understand why they do not sometimes stop one -another, to demand where the soul and the soul’s business -is hid, to snatch away the masks. It was intolerable that -they were not known to me, that I was not known to -them, that we should go on like waves of the sea, obeying -whatever moon it is that sends us thundering on the -unscalable shores of night and day. Such force, such -determination as moved us along the burning streets might<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span> -scale Olympus. Where was he who could lead the -storming-party?</p> - -<p>Between a pack of cabs and a pack of ’buses there was -a quiet space of fifty yards in length; for a little while it -seemed that the waves were refusing their task. There -was not one black coat, not one horse, not one brightly -loaded ’bus: no haste. It was a procession.</p> - -<p>In front marched a tall son of man, with white -black-bearded face, long black hair, more like plumage -than hair in its abundance and form, and he wore no hat. -He walked straight as a soldier, but with long, slow steps, -and his head hung so that his bare breast supported it, for -he had no coat and his shirt was half open. He had knee-breeches, -bare dark legs, and shoes on his feet. His hands -were behind his back, as if he were handcuffed. Two -men walked beside him in other men’s black clothes and -black hats worn grey—two unnoticeable human beings, -snub-nosed, with small, rough beards, dull eyes, shuffling -gait. Two others followed them close, each carrying -one of the poles of a small white banner inscribed with -the words: “The Unemployed.” These also were unnoticeable, -thin, grey, bent, but young, their clothes, their -faces, their hair, their hats almost the same dry colour as -the road. It was impossible to say what their features were, -because their heads hung down and their hats were drawn -well on to their heads, and their eyes were unseen. They -could not keep step, nor walk side by side, and their -banner was always shaky and always awry. Next, in no -order, came three others of the same kind, shambling like -the rest, of middle height, moderately ill-dressed, moderately -thin, their hands in their pockets. In one of these<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span> -I recognized the man who was born in Caermarthenshire. -A cart came close behind, drawn by a fat grey donkey -who needed no driving, for the one who rode in the cart -had his back to the shafts, and, leaning forward on a tub -into which money was expected to be thrown, he appeared -to be talking to those who trailed at the back, for he -waved an arm and wagged his yellow beard. He was fat, -and dressed in a silk hat, frock-coat and striped trousers, -almost too ancient to be ridiculous had they not kept -company with a jaunty pair of yellow boots. He was -midway between a seaside minstrel and a minister, had -not one gesture destroyed the resemblance by showing -that he wore no socks. Round about his coat also were -the words: “The Unemployed,” repeated or crudely -varied. Those whom he addressed were the fifteen or -twenty who completed the procession but seemed not to -listen. They were all bent, young or middle-aged men, -fair-haired, with unintentional beards, road-coloured skins -and slightly darker clothes. Many wore overcoats, the -collars turned up, and some had nothing under them -except a shirt, and one not that. All with hands in -pockets, one carrying a pipe, all silent and ashamed, -struggled onward with bent knees. No two walked -together; there was no approach to a row or a column in -their arrangement, nor was there any pleasing irregularity -as of plants grown from chance-scattered seed; by no -means could they have been made to express more feebleness, -more unbrotherliness, more lack of principle, purpose -or control. Each had the look of the meanest thief -between his captors. Two blue, benevolent, impersonal -policemen, large men, occasionally lifted their arms as if<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span> -to help forward the contemptible procession; sometimes, -with a quick motion of the hand, they caused the straggling -rear to double their pace for a few yards by running -with knees yet more bent and coat-tails flapping and -hands still deep in pockets—only for a few yards, for -their walking pace was their best, all having the same -strength, the same middle height, the same stride, though -no two could be seen keeping step.</p> - -<p>The traffic thickened, and amidst the horses that -nodded and trampled and the motor-cars that fumed and -fretted the procession was closed up into a grey block -behind the donkey-cart. On one side of the donkey was -the black-bearded man, his right arm now resting on the -animal’s neck; on the other side the policemen; in front -the standard-bearers hung down their heads and held up -their poles. Often the only remnant visible was the -raven crest of the leader.</p> - -<p>The multitude on the pavement continued to press -straight onward, or to flit in and out of coloured shops. -None looked at the standard, the dark man and his cloudy -followers, except a few of the smallest newspaper boys -who had a few spare minutes and rushed over to march -with them in the hope of music or a speech or a conflict. -The straight flower-girl flashed her eyes as she stood on -the kerb, her left arm curving with divine grace round -the shawl-hidden child at her bosom, her left hand thrust -out full of roses. The tender, well-dressed women leaning -on the arms of their men smiled faintly, a little -pitiful, but gladly conscious of their own security and -pleasantness. Men with the historic sense glanced and -noted the fact that there was a procession. One man,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span> -standing on the kerb, took a sovereign from his pocket, -looked at it and then at the unemployed, made a little -gesture of utter bewilderment, and dropping the coin -down into the drain below, continued to watch. Comfortable -clerks and others of the servile realized that here -were the unemployed about whom the newspapers had -said this and that—(“a pressing question”—“a very -complicated question not to be decided in a hurry”—“it -is receiving the attention of some of the best intellects of -the time”—“our special reporter is making a full investigation”—“who -are the genuine and who are the impostors?”—“connected -with Socialist intrigues”)—and -they repeated the word “Socialism” and smiled at the -bare legs of the son of man and the yellow boots of the -orator. Next day they would smile again with pride that -they had seen the procession which ended in feeble, -violent speeches against the Army and the Rich, in four -arrests and an imprisonment. For they spoke in voices -gentle with hunger. They were angry and uttered -curses. One waved an arm against a palace, an arm that -could scarcely hold out a revolver even were all the kings -sitting in a row to tempt him. In the crowd and disturbance -the leader fell and fainted. They propped him in -their arms and cleared a space about him. “Death of -Nelson,” suggested an onlooker, laughing, as he observed -the attitude and the knee-breeches. “If he had only a -crown of thorns ...” said another, pleased by the group. -“Wants a bit of skilly and real hard work,” said a third.</p> - - - -<div class="chapter"> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span></p> - - - - - - -<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER VII<br /> - -<span class="smaller">A RAILWAY CARRIAGE—SURREY—SUSSEX</span></h2> -</div> - - -<p>I left London as quickly as possible. The railway -carriage was nearly full of men reading the same newspapers -under three or four different names, when a little -grizzled and spectacled man of middle age entered—a -printer, perhaps—with a twisted face and simple and -puzzled expression that probably earned him many a laugh -from street-corner boys. As he sat down he recognized a -sailor, a tall, ponderous, kind-faced man made in three -distinct storeys, who supported his enormous red hands -upon knees each fit to have been the mould of a hero’s -helmet.</p> - -<p>“Well, I never did, and how are you, Harry?”</p> - -<p>They looked at one another kindly but with a question -piercing through the kindness and an effort to divine the -unknowable without betraying curiosity. The kindness -did, in fact, melt away the almost physical obstacle of -twenty years spent apart and in ignorance of one another.</p> - -<p>“When did you leave the old place?” said the sailor.</p> - -<p>“Soon after you did yourself, Harry; just after the -shipwreck of the <i>Wild Swan</i>; twenty-one, twenty-two—yes, -twenty-two years ago.”</p> - -<p>“Is it so long? I could have sworn you had that -beard when I saw you last,” and the sailor looked at him -in a way that showed he had already bridged the twenty-two -years and knew the man.</p> - -<p>“Yes, twenty-two years.”</p> - -<p>“And do you ever go back to the old place? How’s -Charlie Nash, and young Woolford, and the shepherd?”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span></p> - -<p>“Let me see——”</p> - -<p>“But how is Maggie Looker?” broke in the sailor -upon a genial answer in the bud.</p> - -<p>“Oh, didn’t you know? She took ill very soon after -you went away, and then they thought she was all right -again; but they could not quite get rid of the cough, and -it got bad in the winter, and all through the spring it -was worse.”</p> - -<p>“And so she died in the summer.”</p> - -<p>“So she did.”</p> - -<p>“Oh, Christ! but what times we had.”</p> - -<p>And then, in reminiscences fast growing gay—the mere -triumph of memory, the being able to add each to the -other’s store, was a satisfaction—they told the story of a -pretty country girl whom they had quarrelled over until -she grew too proud for both; how heavy was her hair; -how she could run, and nobody was like her for finding -a wasps’-nest. Her boldness and carelessness filled them -with envy still.</p> - -<p>“I reckon we old ones would call her a tomboy now,” -said the sailor.</p> - -<p>“I should say we would.”</p> - -<p>“Now, I wonder what sort of a wife she would have -made?”</p> - -<p>“Hum, I don’t know....”</p> - -<p>“Do you remember that day her and you and me got -lost in the forest?”</p> - -<p>“Yes, and we were there all night, and I got a hiding -for it.”</p> - -<p>“Not Maggie.”</p> - -<p>“Not poor Maggie.”</p> - -<p>“And when we couldn’t see our way any more we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span> -lifted her up into that old beech where the green woodpecker’s -nest was.”</p> - -<p>“Yes, and you took off your coat and breeches to -cover her up.”</p> - -<p>“And so did you, though I reckon one would have -been enough now I come to think of it.”</p> - -<p>“I don’t know about that. But how we did have to -keep on the move all night to keep warm.”</p> - -<p>“And dared not go very far for fear of losing the -tree.”</p> - -<p>“And in the morning I wondered what we should do -about getting back our clothes.”</p> - -<p>“You wanted me to go because my shirt hadn’t any -holes in it.”</p> - -<p>“But we both went together.”</p> - -<p>“And, before we had made up our minds which should -go first and call, up she starts. Lord, how she did laugh!”</p> - -<p>“Ay, she did.”</p> - -<p>“And says, ‘Now, that’s all my eye and Betty Martin, -boys’; and so did we laugh, and I never felt a bit silly -either. She was a good sort of girl, she was. Man and -woman, I never met the likes of her, never heard tell -of the equal of her,” said the sailor musingly.</p> - -<p>“Married, Harry?”</p> - -<p>“No, nor likely to be, I don’t think. And yourself?”</p> - -<p>“Well, I was.... I married Maggie.... It was after -the first baby....”</p> - -<p>A small boy in a corner could not get on with his -novelette: he stared open-mouthed and open-eyed, now -and then unconsciously imitating their faces; or he would -correct this mere wonderment and become shy and -uncomfortable at the frank ways of these men talking<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span> -aloud in a crowded carriage, and utterly regardless of -others, about private matters.</p> - -<p>A trim shop assistant pretended to read about the -cricket, but listened, and could not conceal his cold contempt -for men so sunken as to give themselves away -like this.</p> - -<p>A dark, thin, genial, pale-faced puritan clerk looked -pitifully—with some twinkles of superiority that asked -for recognition from his fellow-passengers—these <i>children</i>, -for as such he regarded them, and would not wholly -condemn.</p> - -<p>Others occasionally jerked out a glance or rolled a -leaderless eye or rustled a newspaper without losing the -dense veil over their individuality that made them tombs, -monuments, not men.</p> - -<p>One sat gentle, kindly, stupidly envying these two their -spirited free talk, their gestures, the hearty draughts of life -which they seemed to have taken.</p> - -<p>All were botanists who had heard and spoken words -but had no sense of the beauty and life of the flower -because fate had refused, or education destroyed, the gift -of liberty and of joy.</p> - - -<h3>SURREY.</h3> - -<p>Then I saw a huge silence of meadows, of woods, and -beyond these, of hills that raised two breasts of empurpled -turf into the sky; and, above the hills, one mountain of -cloud that beamed as it reposed in the blue as in a sea. -The white cloud buried London with a <i>requiescat in pace</i>.</p> - -<p>I like to think how easily Nature will absorb London -as she absorbed the mastodon, setting her spiders to spin<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span> -the winding-sheet and her worms to fill in the grave, -and her grass to cover it pitifully up, adding flowers—as -an unknown hand added them to the grave of Nero. I -like to see the preliminaries of this toil where Nature tries -her hand at mossing the factory roof, rusting the deserted -railway metals, sowing grass over the deserted platforms -and flowers of rose-bay on ruinous hearths and walls. -It is a real satisfaction to see the long narrowing wedge -of irises that runs alongside and between the rails of the -South-Eastern and Chatham Railway almost into the -heart of London. And there are many kinds of weather -when the air is full of voices prophesying desolation. The -outer suburbs have almost a moorland fascination when -fog lies thick and orange-coloured over their huge flat -wastes of grass, expectant of the builder, but does not -quite conceal the stark outlines of a traction engine, some -procumbent timber, a bonfire and frantic figures darting -about it, and aërial scaffolding far away. Other fields, yet -unravished but menaced, the fog restores to a primeval -state. And what a wild noise the wind makes in the -telegraph wires as in wintry heather and gorse! When -the waste open spaces give way to dense streets there is -a common here and a lawn there, where the poplar leaves, -if it be November, lie taintless on the grass, and the -starlings talk sweet and shrill and cold in the branches, -and nobody cares to deviate from the asphalte path to the -dewy grass: the houses beyond the green mass themselves -gigantic, remote, dim, and the pulse of London beats low -and inaudible, as if she feared the irresistible enemy that -is drawing its lines invisibly and silently about her on -every side. If a breeze arises it makes that sound of the -dry curled leaves chafing along the pavement; at night<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span> -they seem spies in the unguarded by-ways. But there -are also days—and spring and summer days, too—when -a quiet horror thicks and stills the air outside London.</p> - -<p>The ridges of trees high in the mist are very grim. -The isolated trees stand cloaked in conspiracies here and -there about the fields. The houses, even whole villages, -are translated into terms of unreality as if they were -carved in air and could not be touched; they are empty -and mournful as skulls or churches. There is no life -visible; for the ploughmen and the cattle are figures of -light dream. All is soft and grey. The land has drunken -the opiate mist and is passing slowly and unreluctantly -into perpetual sleep. Trees and houses are drowsed -beyond awakening or farewell. The mind also is infected, -and gains a sort of ease from the thought that an eternal -and universal rest is at hand without any cry or any pain.</p> - - -<h3>SUSSEX.</h3> - -<p>The road skirts the marshland, the stream and the -town, and goes through a gap in the Downs towards -another range and more elms and farms at its feet. Stately -walks the carter’s boy with his perpendicular brass-bound -whip, alongside four waggon-horses, while the carter rides. -It is a pleasant thing to see them going to their work in -the early gold of the morning, fresh, silent, their horses -jingling, down the firm road. If they were leading their -team to yoke them to the chariot of the sun they could -not be more noble. They are the first men I have seen -this morning, and truly they create for a little while the -illusion that they are going to guide the world and that -all will be well in the golden freshness under the blue.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span></p> - -<p>The road now divides to go round the base of the -Downs, but a farm track sets out to climb them. There, -at the corner, is a church, on the very edge of the flat -vale and its elms and ashes in the midst of meadows; a -plain towered church, but with a rough churchyard, half -graveyard and half orchard, its grass and parsley and nettle -uncut under the knotty apple trees, splashed with silver -and dull gold-green, dotted by silver buds among yellow-lichened -branches that are matted densely as a magpie’s -nest. The dust from the high road powders the nettles -and perfects the arresting melancholy of the desolation, -so quiet, so austere, and withal as airy as a dream remembered. -But above are the Downs, green and sweet with -uplifting grass, and beyond them the sea, darkly gleaming -under lustrous white cliffs and abrupt ledges of turf, in -the south; in the south-east a procession of tufted trees -going uphill in single file; in the south-west the dazzling -slate roofs of a distant town, two straight sea walls and -two steamers and their white wakes; northward the most -beautiful minor range in all the downland, isolated by a -river valley at the edge of which it ends in a gulf of -white quarry, while on the other side it heaves and flows -down almost to the plain, but rises again into a lesser hill -with woods, and then slowly subsides. Within a few -square miles it collects every beauty of the chalk hill; -its central height is a dome of flawless grass only too -tender to be majestic; and that is supported by lesser -rounds and wavering lines of approach in concavity and -convexity, playgrounds for the godlike shadows and lights, -that prolong the descent of the spent wave of earth into -the plain.</p> - -<p>An uncertain path keeps to the highest ridge. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span> -sides of the Downs are invaded by long stream-like gorse-sided -coombes, of which the narrow floor is palest green -grass. The highest points command much of earth, all -of heaven. They are treeless, but occasionally the turf -is over-arched by the hoops of a brier thicket, the new -foliage pierced by upright dead grey grass. They are the -haunt of the swift, the home of wheatear and lark and -of whatsoever in the mind survives or is born in this pure -kingdom of grass and sky. Ahead, they dip to a river and -rise again, their sweep notched by a white road.</p> - -<p>At the inland end of this river valley is an antique -red-tiled large village or small town, a perfect group of -human dwellings, as inevitable as the Downs, dominated -by a mound and on it a windmill in ruin; mothered by a -church at the river’s edge. Under the sign of “Ye Olde ——” -is a room newly wainscoted in shining matchboard. -Its altar—its little red sideboard—is symmetrically decorated -by tiers and rows of lemonade, cherry cider and -ginger ale bottles, many-coloured, and in the midst of -these two syphons of soda-water. The doorways and -windows are draped in white muslin, the hearth filled by -a crinkled blue paper fan; the mantelpiece supports a -dozen small vases. The oilcloth is new and odorous -and bright. There are pink geraniums in salmon-coloured -bowls on the table; a canary in a suspended cage; and on -the walls a picture of a girl teasing a dog with a toy -mouse.</p> - -<p>At the cross-roads is a group of old slated white farm -buildings and a tiled farmhouse of brick and flint; and -above, at the top of a slope of down, is a grey spire and -two orange roofs of cottages amidst a round cluster of -trees; the sheep graze and their bells tittle-tattle. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span> -seaward-going road alongside but above the river dips -then under steep banks of blackthorn and parsley to a -village of flint where another spire rises out of the old -roofs of a farmhouse and its family of barns and lodges; -a nightingale sings at hand, a wheeling pewit cries and -gleams over the blue ripples of the river. Across the -water a shallow scoop has been carved by Nature out -of the side of the down; it is traversed by two diverging -paths which alone are green, for the rest of the surface -is of gorse and, full in the face of the sun, forms a mossy -cirrus over the mist of its own warm shade. The down -beside the road is now all cowslips among its scattered -bramble and thorn, until it is cloven by a tributary bay, -a quarter of a mile in length, marshy at first and half-filled -by elms and willows, but at its higher end occupied, -behind ash trees and an orchard, by a farmhouse, a circular -domed building and a barn, all having roofs of ochre tile, -except the thatched barn, and grey stained walls; a straight -road goes to the house along the edge of the marsh and -elms. Grey plover whistle singly on the wet borders of -the stream or make a concerted whimper of two or three.</p> - -<p>A little beyond is a larger bay of the same kind, -bordered by a long curving road entirely lined by elms -dividing it from the broad meadow that has an elm -rookery in a corner under the steep clean slope of down; -at the end is a church singing to itself with all its bells -in the solitude. And the hedges are full of strong young -thrushes which there is no one to frighten—is there any -prettier dress than the speckled feathers of their breasts -and the cape of brown over their shoulders and backs, as -they stir the dew in May?</p> - -<p>Then the valley opens wide and the river doubles in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span> -gleaming azure about a narrow spit of grass, in sight of -a sharp white fall of chalk, into the lucid quiet sea. At -this bend a company of sycamores girds and is one with -a group of tiled and thatched and gabled buildings, of -ochre, brown and rose. The road crosses the river and -a path leads near the sea, between mustard flower, lucerne, -beans, corn and grass, in flint-walled fields, to a church -and farm of flint, overtopped by embowering chestnuts, -ilex and the elms of rooks; and below there is another -valley and river, a green pathless marsh, at whose edge five -noisy belching chimneys stand out of a white pit. The -path, over turf, rises to the Downs, passing a lonely flint -barn with rich dark roof and a few sycamores for mates. -This is the cornland, and the corn bunting sings solitary -and monotonous, and the linnets twitter still in flocks. -Above and around, the furzy coombes are the home of -blackbirds that have a wilder song in this world of infinite -corn below and grass above, and but one house. Violets -and purple orchis (and its white buds) cloud the turf. -On the other side the Downs sink to gently clustered -and mounded woods and yet more corn surrounding a -thatched flint barn, a granary and cart-lodge, and, again, -a farm under sycamores.</p> - -<p>The soft-ribbed grey sky of after-sunset is slowly -moving, kindly and promising rain. The air is still, the -road dusty, but the hedges tender green, and the grasshopper -lark sings under the wild parsley of the roadside -and the sedge-warbler in the sallows.</p> - -<p>Just beyond is the town by the beautiful domed hill, -a town of steep lanes and wallflowers on old walls and -such a date as 1577 modestly inscribed on a doorway; its -long old street, sternly adapted to the needs of shopkeepers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span> -and gentry, looks only old-fashioned, its age being as -much repressed as if it were a kind of sin or originality. -This is that spirit which would quarrel with the stars for -not being in straight lines like print, the spirit of one who, -having been disturbed while shaving by the sight of a -favourite cat in the midst of her lovers and behaving after -the manner of her kind, gives orders during the long -mid-day meal that she shall be drowned forthwith, or—no—to-morrow, -which is Monday. This is that spirit -which <span class="lock">says—</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>Nature is never stiff, and none recognizes this fact -better than —— & Son, and their now well-known and -natural-looking rockeries have reclaimed many a dreary -bit of landscape. At —— they showed me photographs -of various country seats where the natural-looking scenery -has been evolved by their artistic taste and ingenuity out -of the most ordinary efforts of Nature. Thus a dull old -mill-stream has, with the aid of rockeries and appropriate -vegetation, been converted into a wonderfully picturesque -spot, an ordinary brook was transformed into a -lovely woodland scene, with ferns, mosses, and lichens -growing among the rockeries, and the shores of an -uninteresting lake became undulating banks of beauty by -the same means; while the beautiful rockeries in —— -Park were also the work of this firm. —— & Son have -other ways, too, of beautifying gardens and grounds by -the judicious use of balustrades, fountains, quaint figures, -etc., made of “—— terra-cotta,” or artificial stone, which -is far more durable than real stone or marble, not so -costly, and impervious to frost and all weathers, although -it takes the vegetation in the same way, and after a year’s -exposure it can scarcely be distinguished from antique -stone. In it the great <i>spécialité</i> here just now is “sundials,” -the latest craze; for without a sundial no ancient -or up-to-date garden is considered complete.</p></div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span></p> - -<p>Nevertheless the town smells heartily of cattle, sheep, -and malt; a rookery and white orchard confront the railway -station, and in the midst of the streets the long grass -is rough and wet and full of jonquils round ancient -masonry: seen from a height the town shares the sunlight -equally with massy foliage and finds its place as a part -of Nature, and the peregrine takes it in its sweep.</p> - -<p>The turtle-doves have come and the oaks are budding -bronze in the Weald. The steep roadside banks are -cloaked in grass, violet, and primrose still, and robin-run-in-the-hedge -and stitchwort and cuckoo flowers, and the -white-throats talk in the hazel copses. A brooklet runs -in a hollow that would almost hold the Thames, and -crossing the road fills a rushy mill-pond deep below, and -makes a field all golden and shining with marigold. Just -beyond, a gnarled lime avenue leads to a grey many-windowed -house of stone within a stately park. Opposite -the gate an old woman sits on the grass, her feet in the -dust at the edge of the road; motor-cars sprinkle her and -turn her black to drab; she sits by the wayside eternally, -expecting nothing.</p> - -<p>Turn out of this main road, and by-ways that tempt -neither cyclists nor motorists go almost as straight. Here -is no famous house, not a single inn or church, but only -the unspoilt Weald, and far away, a long viaduct that -carries noiseless trains against the sky above hollow -meadows. Bluebell, primrose, anemone—anemone, primrose, -bluebell—star and cloud the lush banks and the roots -of the blackthorns, hazels and maples of the hedge. A -stream washes the roots of many oaks, and flows past flat -fields of dusky grass, cuckoo flower and marigold,—black -pines at the verge. The light smoke of a roadside fire<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span> -ascends into the new leaves of the hazels where two -tramps are drying their clothes. Many oaks are down, -and lie pale and gleaming like mammoth bones among -the bluebells in plantations roughened by old flint pits.</p> - -<p>The faggots of oak tops and cords of twisted timber -are being made up; the woodmen light a fire and the chips -fly from the axes. It is only to these men that I am a -stranger as I walk through the land. At first I admire -the hardihood and simplicity of their necessary toil among -the oaks, but they lift their dark eyes, and then—it is as -strange as when I pass a white embowered house, and the -road is muffled with straw, and I hear by chance that -some one unknown is dying behind that open window -through which goes the thrush’s song and the children’s -homeward chatter. Neither townsman or countryman, -I cannot know them. The countryman knows their trades -and their speech, and is of their kind; the townsman’s -curiosity wins him a greeting. But in May at least I am -content, in the steep little valley made by a tributary of -the Medway, its sides wooded with oak and the flowers -glad of the sun among the lately cleared undergrowth, -and the cuckoo now in this oak and now in that, and -the turtle-doves whose voices, in the soft lulls after rain, -make the earth seem to lie out sleek in the sun, stretching -itself to purr with eyes closed. The cuckoo is gone -before we know what his cry is to tell us or to remind -us of.</p> - -<p>There are few things as pleasant as the thunder and -lightning of May that comes in the late afternoon, when -the air is as solid as the earth with stiff grey rain for an -hour. There is no motion anywhere save of this perpendicular -river, of the swaying rain-hit bough and quiver<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span>ing -leaf. But through it all the thrushes sing, and jolly -as their voices are the roars and echoes of the busy thunder -quarrying the cliffs of heaven. And then the pleasure -of being so wet that you may walk through streams and -push through thickets and be none the wetter for it.</p> - -<p>Before it is full night the light of the young moon falls -for a moment out of a troubled but silent sky upon the -young corn, and the tranquil bells are calling over the -woods.</p> - -<p>Then in the early morning the air is still and warm, -but so moist that there is a soul of coolness in the heat, -and never before were the leaves of the sorrel and wood -sanicle and woodruff, and the grey-green foliage and pallid -yellow flowers of the large celandine, so fair. The -sudden wren’s song is shrewd and sweet and banishes -heaviness. The huge chestnut tree is flowering and full -of bees. The parsley towers delicately in bloom. The -beech boughs are encased in gliding crystal. The nettles, -the millions of nettles in a bed, begin to smell of summer. -In the calm and sweet air the turtle-doves murmur and -the blackbirds sing—as if time were no more—over the -mere.</p> - -<p>The roads, nearly dry again, are now at their best, -cool and yet luminous, and at their edges coloured rosy or -golden brown by the sheddings of the beeches, those -gloves out of which the leaves have forced their way, -pinched and crumpled by the confinement. At the bend -of a broad road descending under beeches these parallel -lines of ruddy chaff give to two or three days in the year -a special and exquisite loveliness, if the weather be alternately -wet and bright and the long white roads and virgin -beeches are a temptation. What quests they propose!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span> -They take us away to the thin air of the future or to the -underworld of the past. This one takes us to the old -English sweetness and robustness of an estate of large -meadows, sound oak trees not too close together, and a -noble house within an oak-paled park. A poet and a -man lives there, one who recalls those other poets—they -are not many—who please us over the gulf of time almost -as much by the personal vigour and courage which we -know to have been theirs or is suggested by their work, -men like Chaucer, Sidney, Ben Jonson, Drayton, Byron, -William Morris, and among the living —— and —— -and ——. I think we should miss their poems more -than some greater men’s if they were destroyed. They -stand for their time more clearly than the greatest. For -example, Chaucer’s language, ideas and temper make it -impossible for us to read his work, no matter in how -remote a study or garden, shut out from time and change, -without feeling that he and all those who rode, and talked -and were young with him are skeletons or less, though -Catullus or Milton may be read with no such feeling. -Chaucer seems to remind us of what once we were. His -seems a golden age. He wrote before Villon had inaugurated -modern literature with the <span class="lock">cry—</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse"><i>Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?</i></div> -</div></div></div> - -<p class="noindent">before men appear to us to have learned how immense -is the world and time. But we, looking back, with the -help of this knowledge, see in the work of this man who -filled a little nook of time and space with gaiety, something -apart from us, an England, a happy island which his -verses made. His gaiety bathes the land in the light of a -golden age and the freshness of all the May days we can -never recover. He “led a lusty life in May”: “in his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span> -lust present was all his thought.” And the gaiety is no -less in the sorrowful passages than in the joyful; when, for -example, he compares the subjection of the fierce, proud -Troilus to love, with the whipping of a spirited horse; -when he uses the apparent commonplace about age creeping -in “always as still as stone” upon fresh youth; when -he exclaims to the false <span class="lock">Jason—</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Have at thee, Jason! now thy horne is blowe;</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p class="noindent">or cries at the fate of Ugolino’s <span class="lock">children—</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Allas, Fortune! it was greet crueltee</div> - <div class="verse">Swiche briddes for to putte in swich a cage!</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p class="noindent">Even in Griselda’s piteous <span class="lock">cry—</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">O tendre, O deere, O yonge children myne,</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p class="noindent">there is an intimation that in those words her sorrow is -being spent and that, though it will be renewed, it will be -broken up by joyfulness many times before her death. -For, as Chaucer’s laughter is assuredly never completed -by a sigh, so there is something hearty in his tears that -hints of laughter before and after. His was a sharp -surprising sorrow that came when he was forced to see -the suffering of lovely humanity. He is all gaiety; but it -has two moods. Sorrow never changes him more than -shadow changes a merry brook. In both moods he seems -to speak of a day when men had not only not so far -outstripped the lark and nightingale as we have done, -but had moments when their joy was equal to the lark’s -above the grey dew of May dawns. And thus, if we only -had to thank Chaucer for the gaiety which is left behind -in his poems, as the straw of a long-past harvest clings -to the thorns of a narrow lane, we could never be -thankful enough.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span></p> - -<p>I feel that Chaucer was the equal of those of whom he -wrote, as Homer was the equal of Achilles and Odysseus, -just as Byron was the peer of the noblest of the Doges -and of the ruined Emperor whom he addressed <span class="lock">as—</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Vain froward child of Empire! say</div> - <div class="verse">Are all thy playthings snatched away?</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p class="noindent">Byron is one of the few poets whose life it was ever -necessary to write. His acts were representative; from -his Harrow meditations on a tomb to his death on the -superb pedestal of Missolonghi, they are symbolic. His -life explains nearly everything in his poetry. The life -and the poetry together make an incomparable whole. -Most lives of poets stand to their work as a block of -unhewn marble stands to the statue finished and unveiled; -if the marble is not as much forgotten as was Pygmalion’s -when Galatea breathed and sighed. Byron’s poetry without -his life is not finished; but with it, it is like a statue -by Michael Angelo or Rodin that is actually seen to -grow out of the material. He was a man before he was -a poet. Other poets may once have been men; they are -not so now. We read their lives after their poetry and -we forget them. It is by their poetry that they survive—blithe -or pathetic or glorious, but dim, ghosts who are -become a part of the silence of libraries and lovers’ hearts. -They are dead but for the mind that enjoys and the voice -that utters their verse. I had not the smallest curiosity -about Mr. Swinburne when he was alive and visible. -When I think of him, I think of Rosamund speaking to -Eleanor or Tristram to Isoud; he has given up his life -to them. But with Byron it is different. If all record of -him could be destroyed, more than half of him would be -lost. For I think that it is upon the life and the portraits<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span> -and the echoes that are still reverberating in Europe, that -we found our belief that he is a great man. Without them -he would be an interesting rhetorician, perhaps little more. -There are finer poems than his “Mazeppa,” but the poet -is the equal of that wild lover and of the great King who -slept while the tale was told.</p> - -<p>And Shelley, too, is an immortal sentiment. Men may -forget to repeat his verses; they can never be as if Shelley -had never been. He is present wherever love and rapture -are. He is a part of all high-spirited and pure audacity of -the intellect and imagination, of all clean-handed rebellion, -of all infinite endeavour and hope. The remembered -splendour of his face is more to us than Parliaments; one -strophe of his odes is more nourishing than a rich man’s -gold....</p> - -<p>Under those oaks in May I could wish to see these -men walking together, to see their gestures and brave -ways. It is the poet there who all but creates them for -me. But only one can I fairly see because I have seen -him alive and speaking. Others have sent up their -branches higher among the stars and plunged their roots -deeper among the rocks and waters. But he and Chaucer -and Jonson and Byron have obviously much plain -humanity in their composition. They have a brawn and -friendliness not necessarily connected with poetry. We -use no ceremony—as we do with some other poets—with -Morris when we <span class="lock">read—</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The days have slain the days, and the seasons have gone by,</div> - <div class="verse">And brought me the summer again; and here on the grass I lie,</div> - <div class="verse">As erst I lay and was glad ere I meddled with right and with wrong.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p class="noindent">Or the end of “Thunder in the Garden”—</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Then we turned from the blossoms, and cold were they grown:</div> - <div class="verse">In the trees the wind westering moved;</div> - <div class="verse">Till over the threshold back fluttered her gown,</div> - <div class="verse">And in the dark house was I loved.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p class="noindent">There is a humanity of this world and moment in -Morris’s feeling for Nature with which no other poet’s -except Whitman’s can be compared. Except in the greatest—the -unaccomplished things—in “Leaves of Grass” -there is no earth-feeling in the literature of our language -so majestic and yet so tender as in “The Message of the -March Wind.” With him poetry was not, as it has tended -more and more to be in recent times, a matter as exclusive -as a caste. He was not half-angel or half-bird, but a -man on close terms with life and toil, with the actual, -troublous life of every day, with toil of the hands and -brain together; in short, a many-sided citizen. He was -one whom Skarphedin the son of Njal of Bergthorsknoll -would not have disdained, and when he spoke he seemed -indignant at the feebleness of words, one that should have -used a sword and might have lamented with the still later -<span class="lock">poet—</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The Spirit stands and looks on infamy,</div> - <div class="verse">And unashamed the faces of the pit</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Snarl at their enemy;</div> - <div class="verse">Finding him wield no insupportable light,</div> - <div class="verse">And no whirled edge of blaze to hit</div> - <div class="verse">Backward their impudence, and hammer them to flight;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Although ready is he,</div> - <div class="verse">Wearing the same righteous steel</div> - <div class="verse">Upon his limbs, helmed as he was then</div> - <div class="verse indent2">When he made olden war;</div> - <div class="verse">Yet cannot now with foulness fiercely deal.</div> - <div class="verse">There is no indignation among men,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The Spirit has no scimitar</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span> - <div class="verse">Wilt thou not come again, thou godly sword,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Into the Spirit’s hands?</div> - <div class="verse">That he may be a captain of the Lord</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Again, and mow out of our lands</div> - <div class="verse indent4">The crop of wicked men....</div> - <div class="verse">O for that anger in the hands</div> - <div class="verse">Of Spirit! To us, O righteous sword,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Come thou and clear our lands,</div> - <div class="verse">O fire, O indignation of the Lord!<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></div> -</div></div></div> - -<p>Bitter it is to think of that talk and laughter of shadows -on the long lawns under those oaks; for though their -shadows are even yet better than other men’s bone or -blood, never yet did dead man lift up a hand to strike a -blow or lay a brick. In a churchyard behind I saw the -tombstone of one Robert Page, born in the year 1792 -here in Sussex, and dead in 1822—not in the Bay of -Spezzia but in Sussex. He scared the crows, ploughed -the clay, fought at Waterloo and lost an arm there, was -well pleased with George the Fourth, and hoed the corn -until he was dead. That is plain sense, and I wish I -could write the life of this exact contemporary of Shelley. -That is quite probably his great granddaughter, black-haired, -of ruddy complexion, full lips, large white teeth, -black speechless eyes, dressed in a white print dress and -stooping in the fresh wind to take clean white linen -out of a basket, and then rising straight as a hazel wand, -on tiptoe, her head held back and slightly on one side -while she pegs the clothes to the line and praises the -weather to a passer-by. She is seventeen, and of such is -the kingdom of earth.</p> - -<p>Now at the coming on of night the wind has carried -away all the noises of the world. The lucid air under the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span> -hazels of the lane is dark as if with dream, and the roadway -leads glimmering straight on to a crystal planet low -in the purple of the west. I cannot hear my footsteps, -so full charged is the silence. I am no more in this -tranquillity than one of the trees. The way seems paved -that some fair spirit may pass down in perfect beauty -and bliss and ease. The leaves will hail it and the blue -sky lean down to bless, and the planet lend its beams for -a path. Suddenly, the name of Mary is called by some -one invisible. Mary! For a little while the cry is -repeated more loudly but always sweetly; then the caller -is entranced by the name, by the sound of her own voice -and the silence into which it falls as into a well, and it -grows less and less and ceases and is dead except in the -brain of the bearer. I thought of all the music to ear -and mind of that sound of “m.” I suppose the depth -of its appeal is due to its place at the beginning of the -word “mother,” or rather to the need of the soul which -gave it that place; and it is a sound as dear to the animals -as to us, since the ewe hears it first from her lamb and -the cow from her calf as the woman from her child. It -is the main sound in “music,” “melody,” “harmony,” -“measure,” “metre,” “rhythm,” “minstrel,” “madrigal.” -It endears even sadness by its presence in “melancholy,” -“moan” and “mourn.” It makes melody on the lips of -friends and lovers, in the names of “mistress,” “comrade,” -“mate,” “companion.” It murmurs autumnally -in all mellow sounds, in the music of wind and insect and -instrument. To “me” and “mine” it owes a meaning as -deep as to “mother.” And this mild air could bear no more -melodious burden than the name that floated upon it and -sank into it, down, down, to reveal its infinite depth—Mary!</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span></p> - -<p>There are parks on both sides of the road, bounded by -hedges or high brick walls, and the public road has all -the decorum of a drive. For a mile the very ivy which is -destined to adorn the goodly wall and spread into forms -as grand as those at Godstow Nunnery is protected by -wire netting. Doves croon in the oaks: underneath, -hazel and birch flicker their new leaves over the pools of -bluebells. The swallows fly low over every tuft of the -roadside grass and glance into every bay of the wood, and -then out above the white road, from which they rebound -suddenly and turn, displaying the white rays of their -tails. Now and then a gateway reveals the park. The -ground undulates, but is ever smooth. It is of the mellow -green of late afternoon. Bronzed oak woods bound the -undulations, and here and there a solitary tree stands out -on the grass and shows its poise and complexity with the -added grace of new leaf. The cattle graze as on a painted -lawn. A woman in a white dress goes indolent and -stately towards the rhododendrons and rook-haunted elms. -The scene appears to have its own sun, mellow and serene, -that knows not moorland or craggy coast or city. Only -a thousand years of settled continuous government, of -far-reaching laws, of armies and police, of roadmaking, -of bloody tyranny and tyranny that poisons quietly without -blows, could have wrought earth and sky into such a -harmony. It is a thing as remote from me here on the -dusty road as is the green evening sky and all its tranquillity -of rose and white, and even more so because the -man in the manor house behind the oaks is a puzzle to -me, while the sky is always a mystery with which I am -content. At such an hour the house and lawns and trees -are more wonderfully fortified by the centuries of time<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span> -than by the walls and gamekeepers. They weave an -atmosphere about it. We bow the head and reverence -the labour of time in smoothing the grass, mellowing the -stone and the manners of the inhabitants, and yet an -inevitable conflict ensues in the mind between this respect -and the feeling that it is only a respect for surfaces, that a -thousand years is a heavy price to pay for the maturing -of park and house and gentleman, especially as he is most -likely to be a well-meaning parasite on those who are -concerned twenty-four hours a day about the difficulty -of living and about what to do when they are alive.</p> - -<p>No, it is the alien remote appearance of the house and -land serene in the May evening light which creates this -reverence in the mind. It is not feudalism, or the old -nobility and gentility, that we are bowing down to, but -only to Nature without us and the dream within us. It -is certainly not pure envy. Nor yet is it for the same -reason as made Borrow reflect when he saw the good -house at the end of an avenue of noble oaks near -<span class="lock">Llandovery—</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>“... A plain but comfortable gentleman’s seat with -wings. It looked south down the dale. ‘With what -satisfaction I could live in that house,’ said I to myself, ‘if -backed by a couple of thousand a year. With what -gravity could I sign a warrant in its library, and with -what dreamy comfort translate an ode of Lewis Glyn -Cothi, my tankard of rich ale beside me. I wonder -whether the proprietor is fond of the old bard and keeps -good ale. Were I an Irishman instead of a Norfolk man -I would go in and ask him.’”</p></div> - -<p>Not if he were a Welshman, either. For I at least -know that in no other man’s house should I be better off<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span> -than I am, and I lack the confidence to think I could -make any use of his income. I would as soon envy a -tramp because he has no possessions, or a navvy because -he walks like a hero as he pushes a heavy trolley before -him, his loose jacket fitting him as a mane fits a lion. -To envy a man is to misunderstand him or yourself.</p> - -<p>Nor yet is it pure admiration. That is what I feel -for something external that can be described as right, as -having absolute individuality and inevitableness of form. -For example, I admire certain groups that are the result -of what we call chance—an arrangement of fishing boats -going out to sea, first one, then at a long interval two -close together, a fourth a little behind, and then by ones -and pairs and clusters at different intervals; or the four or -five oaks left in a meadow that was once a copse; or the -fruit fallen on autumn rime; or sunset clouds that pause -darkly along the north-west in a way that will never be -seen again; or of tragic figures at such a moment as when -Polyxena, among the Grecian youths, gave her throat to -the dagger of Neoptolemus, and fell beautiful in death.</p> - -<p>No. Those houses are castles in Spain. They are -fantastic architecture. We have made them out of our -spirit stuff and have set our souls to roam their corridors -and look out of their casements upon the sea or the mountains -or the clouds. It is because they are accessible only -to the everywhere wandering irresistible and immortal part -of us that they are beautiful. There is no need for them -to be large or costly or antique. The poorest house can -do us a like service. In a town, for example, and in a -suburb, I have had the same yearning when, on a fine -still morning of May or June, in streets away from the -traffic, I have seen through the open windows a cool<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span> -white-curtained shadowy room, and in it a table with -white cloths and gleaming metal and glass laid thereon, -and nobody has yet come down to open the letters. It all -seems to be the work of spirit hands. It is beautiful and -calm and celestial, and is a profound pleasure—tinged by -melancholy—to see. It gives a sense of fitness—for what? -For something undivined, imperfectly known, guessed at, -or hoped for, in ourselves; for a wider and less tainted -beauty, for a greater grace. Or it may not be a house at -all, but a hill-top five miles off, up which winds a white -road in two long loops between a wood and the turf. -The grass is smooth and warm and bright at the summit -in the blue noon; or in the horizontal sunbeams each stem -is lit so that the hill is transmuted into a glowing and -insubstantial thing; and then, at noon or evening, something -in me flies at the sight and desires to tread that holy -ground. It is an odd world where everything is fleeting -yet the soul desires permanence even for fancies so -unprofitable as this.</p> - -<p>And so these thoughts at the sight of the great houses -mingle with the thoughts that grow at twilight and fade -gradually away in the windless night when the sky is soft-ridged -all over with white clouds and in the dark vales -between them are the stars. Then, for it is Saturday, -follows another pleasure of the umbrageous white country -roads at night—the high contented voices of children -talking to father and mother as they go home from the -market town. The parents move dark-clothed, silent, -laden; the children flit about them with white hats or -pinafores. Their voices travel far and long after they -are invisible in the mist that washes over the fields in long -white firths, but die away as the misty night blots out<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span> -the hills, the clouds, the stars, the trees, and everything -but the branches overhead and the white parsley flowers -floating along the hedge. There is no breath of wind. -The owls are quiet. The air is full of the scent of holly -flower and may and nettles and of the sound of a little -stream among the leaves.</p> - - - -<div class="chapter"> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span></p> - - - - - - -<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER VIII<br /> - -<span class="smaller">JUNE—HAMPSHIRE—THE GOLDEN AGE—TRAHERNE</span></h2> -</div> - - -<h3>HAMPSHIRE.</h3> - -<p>Now day by day, indoors and out of doors, the conquest -of spring proceeds to the music of the conquerors. -One evening the first chafer comes to the lamp, and his -booming makes the ears tremble with dim apprehension. -He climbs, six-legged and slow, up the curtain, supporting -himself now and then by unfurling his wings, or if -not he falls with a drunken moan, then begins to climb -again, and at last blunders about the room like a ball that -must strike something, the white ceiling, the white paper, -the lamp, and when he falls he rests. In his painful -climbing he looks human, as perhaps a man looks angelic -to an angel; but there is nothing lovelier and more surprising -than the unfurling of his pinions like a magic -wind-blown cloak out of that hard mail.</p> - -<p>Another day the far-off woods in a hot, moist air first -attain their rich velvet mossiness, and even near at hand -the gorse-bushes all smouldering with bloom are like -clouds settled on the earth, having no solidity, but just -colour and warmth and pleasantness.</p> - -<p>The broad-backed chestnuts bloom. On the old cart-lodge -tiles the vast carapace of the house-leek is green -and rosy, and out of the midst of it grow dandelions and -grass, and the mass of black mould which it has accumulated -in a century bends down the roof.</p> - -<p>The hawthorn-bloom is past before we are sure that it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span> -has reached its fulness. Day after day its warm and -fragrant snow clouded the earth with light, and yet we -waited, thinking surely to-morrow it will be fairer still, -and it was, and the next day we thought the same and -we were careless as in first love, and then one day it lay -upon the grass, an empty shell, the vest of departed loveliness, -and another year was over. The broad grass is full -of buttercups’ gold or it is sullen silvery under a burning -afternoon sun, without wind, the horizon smoky, the blue -sky and its white, still clouds almost veiled by heat; the -red cattle are under the elms; the unrippled water slides -under sullen silvery willows.</p> - -<p>The night-haze peels off the hills and lets the sun in -upon small tracts of wood—upon a group of walnuts in -the bronze of their fine, small leaf—upon downland grass, -and exposes blue sky and white cloud, but then returns -and hides the land, except that the dewy ground-ash and -the ivy and holly gleam; and two cuckoos go over crying -and crying continually in the hollow vale.</p> - -<p>Already the ash-keys hang in cool, thick bunches under -the darker leaves. The chestnut-bloom is falling. The -oak-apples are large and rosy. The wind is high, and the -thunder is away somewhere behind the pink mountains -in the southern sky or in the dark drifts overhead. And -yet the blue of the massy hangers almost envelops the -beechen green; the coombes and the beeches above and -around their grassy slopes of juniper are soft and dim, -and far withdrawn, and the nightjar’s voice is heard as if -the wind there were quiet. The rain will not come; the -plunging wind in the trees has a sound of waterfalls all -night, yet cannot trouble the sleep of the orange-tip -butterfly on the leopard’s-bane’s dead flower.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span></p> - -<p>Now the pine blooms in the sandy lands, above the -dark-fronded brake and glaucous-fruited whortleberry, the -foxgloves break into bell after bell under the oaks and -birches. The yellow broom is flowering and scented, and -the white lady’s bedstraw sweetens the earth’s breath. -The careless variety of abundance and freshness makes -every lane a bride. Suddenly, in the midst of the sand, -deep meadows gleam, and the kingfisher paints the air -with azure and emerald and rose above the massy water -tumbling between aspens at the edge of a neat, shaven -lawn, and, behind that, a white mill and miller’s house -with dark, alluring windows where no one stirs.</p> - -<p>June puts bronze and crimson on many of her leaves. -The maple-leaves and many of the leaves of thorn and -bramble and dogwood are rosy; the hazel-leaves are rosy-brown; -the herb-robert and parsley are rose-red; the -leaves of ash and holly are dark lacquered. The copper -beeches, opulently sombre under a faintly yellowed sky, -seem to be the sacred trees of the thunder that broods -above. Presently the colour of the threat is changed to -blue, which soiled white clouds pervade until the whole -sky is woolly white and grey and moving north. There -is no wind, but there is a roar as of a hurricane in the -trees far off; soon it is louder, in the trees not so remote; -and in a minute the rain has traversed half-a-mile of -woods, and the distant combined roar is swallowed up by -the nearer pattering on roof and pane and leaf, the dance -of leaves, the sway of branches, the trembling of whole -trees under the flood. The rain falls straight upon the -hard road, and each drop seems to leap upward from it -barbed. Great drops dive among the motionless, dusty -nettles. The thunder unloads its ponderous burden upon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span> -the resonant floor of the sky; but the sounds of the -myriad leaves and grass-blades drinking all but drowns -the boom, the splitting roar, and the echo in the hills. -When it is over it has put a final sweetness into the -blackbird’s voice and into the calm of the evening garden -when the voice of a singer does but lay another tribute -at the feet of the enormous silence. Frail is that voice -as the ghost-moth dancing above the grass so faithfully -that it seems a flower attached to a swaying stem, or as -the one nettle-leaf that flutters in a draught of the hedge -like a signalling hand while all the rest of the leaves are as -if they could not move again, or as the full moon that is -foundering on a white surf in the infinite violet sky. -More large and more calm and emptier of familiar things -grows the land as I pass through it, under the hoverings -of the low-flying but swiftly-turning nightjar, until at -midnight only a low white mist moves over the gentle -desolation and warm silence. The mist wavers, and -discloses a sky all strewn with white stars like the flowers -of an immense jessamine. It closes up again, and day is -born unawares in its pale arms, and earth is for the -moment nothing but the tide of downs flowing west and -the branch of red roses that hangs heavily laden and -drowsed with its weight and beauty over my path, dipping -its last spray in the dew of the grass.</p> - -<p>The day is a Sunday, and no one is on foot or on wheel -in the broad arable country that ripples in squares of -green, or brown, or yellow, or grey, to the green Downs -and their dark, high-perched woods. As if for some -invisible beholder, the green elders and their yellow-green -flower-buds make their harmony with the yellow-lichened -barns against which they lean; the grass and the noble<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span> -trees, the groups of wayside aspen, the line of horse-chestnuts, -the wych-elms on both sides of the road, the -one delicate sycamore before the inn and the company of -sycamores above the cross—the spacious thatch and tiles -of the farmyard quadrangle—the day newly painted in -white and blue—the green so green in the hedges, and -the white and purple so pure in the flowers—all seem to -be meant for eyes that know nothing of Time and of -what “brought death into the world and all our woe.” -And in this solitude the young birds are very happy. -They have taken possession of the thick hedges, of the -roadside grass, of the roads themselves. They flutter and -run and stumble there; they splash in the pools and in -the dust, which not a wheel nor a foot has marked. -These at least are admitted into the kingdom along with -that strange wildfowl that lives “to maintain the trade -and mystery of typographers.”</p> - -<p>Such a day, in the unblemished summer land, invariably -calls up thoughts of the Golden Age. As mankind has -looked back to a golden age, so the individual, repeating -the history of the race, looks back and finds one in his -own past. Historians and archæologists have indeed made -it difficult for men of our time to look far back for a -golden age. We are shown a skull with supraciliary -prominences and are told that its owner, though able to -survive the mammoth by means of tools of flint, lived like -the Tasmanian of modern times; and his was no Golden -Age. Then we look back to heroic ages which poetry -and other arts have magnified—to the Greece of Homer -or Pheidias, to the Ireland of Cuchulain, to the Wales of -Arthur, to the England which built the great cathedrals -or produced Chaucer, Sir Philip Sidney, Izaak Walton.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span></p> - -<p>In the same way, few men can now look back to their -childhood like Traherne and say that</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>“All appeared new and strange at first, inexpressibly -rare and delightful and beautiful. I was a little stranger -which at my entrance into the world was saluted and -surrounded with innumerable joys. My knowledge was -Divine. I knew by intuition those things which since -my Apostasy I collected again by the highest reason. My -very ignorance was advantageous. I seemed as one -brought into the Estate of Innocence. All things were -spotless and pure and glorious; yea, and infinitely mine, -and joyful and precious. I knew not that there were any -sins or complaints or laws. I dreamed not of poverties, -contentions or vices. All tears and quarrels were hidden -from mine eyes. Everything was at rest, free and immortal. -I knew nothing of sickness or death or rents or -exaction, either for tribute or bread.... All Time was -Eternity, and a perpetual Sabbath. Is it not strange, that -an infant should be heir of the whole world and see -those mysteries which the books of the learned never -unfold?”<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></p></div> - -<p>We blink, deliberately or not, unpleasant facts in our -own lives, as in the social life of Greece or the Middle -Ages. Some have no need to do so; robustly or sensitively -made, their childish surroundings have been such as to -meet their utmost needs or to draw out their finest powers -or to leave them free. Ambition, introspection, remorse -had not begun. The vastness and splendour and gloom -of a world not understood, but seen in its effects and -hardly at all in its processes, made a theatre for their -happiness which—especially when seen through a mist of -years—glorify it exceedingly, and it becomes like a ridge -of the far-off downs transfigured in golden light, so that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span> -we in the valley sigh at the thought that where we have -often trod is heaven now. Such beauties of the earth, -seen at a distance and inaccessibly serene, always recall -the equally inaccessible happiness of childhood. Why -have we such a melting mood for what we cannot reach? -Why, as we are whirled past them in a train, does the -sight of a man and child walking quietly beside a reedy -pond, the child stooping for a flower and its gossip -unheard—why should we tremble to reflect that we have -never tasted just that cloistered balm?</p> - -<p>Perhaps the happiest childhoods are those which pass -completely away and leave whole tracts of years without -a memory; those which are remembered are fullest of -keen joy as of keen pain, and it is such that we desire for -ourselves if we are capable of conceiving such fantastic -desires. I confess to remembering little joy, but to much -drowsy pleasure in the mere act of memory. I watch the -past as I have seen workless, homeless men leaning over -a bridge to watch the labours of a titanic crane and -strange workers below in the ship running to and fro and -feeding the crane. I recall green fields, one or two -whom I loved in them, and though no trace of such -happiness as I had remains, the incorruptible tranquillity -of it all breeds fancies of great happiness. I recall many -scenes: a church and churchyard and black pigs running -down from them towards me in a rocky lane—ladslove -and tall, crimson, bitter dahlias in a garden—the sweetness -of large, moist yellow apples eaten out of doors—children: -I do not recall happiness in them, yet the moment that I -return to them in fancy I am happy. Something like this -is true also of much later self-conscious years. I cannot—I -am not tempted to—allow what then spoiled the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span> -mingling of the elements of joy to reappear when I look -back. The reason, perhaps, is that only an inmost true -self that desires and is in harmony with joy can perform -these long journeys, and when it has set out upon them -it sheds those gross incrustations which were our curse -before.</p> - -<p>Many are the scenes thus to be recalled without spot or -stain. It is a May morning, warm and slightly breezy -after midnight rain. In the beech-woods the trees are -unloading the dew, which drops from leaf to leaf and -down on to the lemon-tinged leaves of dark dog’s-mercury. -At the edge of the wood the privet branches are -bent down by the weight of raindrops of the size of peas. -The dewy white stitchwort stars and the feathered grasses -are curved over on the banks. The sainfoin is hoary and -sparkling as I move. Already the sun is hot and the sky -blue, with faint white clouds in whirls. And in the -orchard-trees and drenched luxuriant hedges the garden-warbler -sings a subdued note of rushing, bubbling liquidity -as of some tiny brook that runs in quick pulsations among -the fleshy-leaved water-plants. The bird’s head is uplifted; -its throat is throbbing; it moves restlessly from -branch to branch, but always renews its song on the new -perch; being leaf-like, it is not easily seen. And sometimes -through this continuous jargon the small, wild song -of the blackcap is heard, which is the utmost expression -of moist warm dawns in May thickets of hawthorn-bloom -and earliest roses. On such a dawn the very spirit -bathes in the dew and nuzzles into the fragrance with -delight; but it is no sooner left behind with May than it -has developed within me into an hour and a scene of -utmost grace and bliss, save that I am in it myself.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span></p> - -<p>It is curious, too, how many different kinds of Eden -or Golden Age Nature has in her gift, as if she silently -recorded the backward dreams of each generation and -reproduced them for us unexpectedly. It is, for instance, -an early morning in July. The cows pour out from the -milking-stalls and blot out the smell of dust with their -breath in the white road between banks of hazel and -thorn. The boy who is driving them to the morning’s -pasture calls to them monotonously, persuasively, in turn, -as each is tempted to crop the roadside sward: “Wo, -Cherry! Now, Dolly! Wo, Fancy! Strawberry!... -Blanche!... Blossom!... Cowslip!... Rosy! -Smut!... Come along, Handsome!... Wo, Snowdrop!... -Lily!... Darky!... Roany!... Come -along, Annie!” Here the road is pillowed with white -aspen-down, there more fragrant than pines with the -brown sheddings of yew, and here thick with the dry -scent of nettle and cow-parsnip, or glorious in perfect -mingling of harebell and foxglove among the bracken -and popping gorse on the roadside. The cows turn into -the aftermath of the sainfoin, and the long valley echoes -to their lowing. After them, up the road, comes a gypsy-cart, -and the boy hangs on the gate to see the men and -women walking, black-haired, upright, bright-eyed, and -on the name-board of the cart the words: “Naomi Sherwood, -Burley, Hampshire.” These things also propose -to the roving, unhistoric mind an Eden, one still with us, -one that is passing, not, let us hope, the very last.</p> - -<p>Some of these scenes, whether often repeated or not, -come to have a rich symbolical significance; they return -persistently and, as it were, ceremoniously—on festal days—but -meaning I know not what. For example, I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span> -never see the flowers and scarlet-stained foliage of herb-robert -growing out of old stone-heaps by the wayside -without a feeling of satisfaction not explained by a long -memory of the contrast between the plant and the raw -flint; so also with the drenched lilac-bloom leaning out -over high walls of unknown gardens; and inland cliffs, -covered with beech, jutting out westward into a bottomless -valley in the mist of winter twilights, in silence and -frost. Something in me belongs to these things, but I -hardly think that the mere naming of them will mean -anything except to those—many, perhaps—who have -experienced the same. A great writer so uses the words -of every day that they become a code of his own which -the world is bound to learn and in the end take unto -itself. But words are no longer symbols, and to say -“hill” or “beech” is not to call up images of a hill or -a beech-tree, since we have so long been in the habit of -using the words for beautiful and mighty and noble things -very much as a book-keeper uses figures without seeing -gold and power. I can, therefore, only try to suggest -what I mean by the significance of the plant in the stone-heap, -the wet lilac, the misty cliff, by comparing it with -that of scenes in books where we recognize some power -beyond the particular and personal. All of Don Quixote’s -acts have this significance; so have the end of Mr. Conrad’s -story of <i>Youth</i> and the opening of Mr. Hudson’s -<i>El Ombu</i>—the old man sitting on a summer’s day under -the solitary tree to tell the history “of a house that had -been.” Malory’s <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> is full of scenes like this. -For ten centuries, from the battle of Badon to the writing -of <i>Morte d’Arthur</i>, these stories were alive on the lips -of many kinds of men and women in many lands, from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span> -Connemara to Calabria. Many of these men and women -survive only in the turns which their passionate hearts -gave to these ghostly, everlastingly wandering tales. -Artists have worked upon them. Bards have sung them, -and the sound of their harping is entangled in the words -that have reached us to-day. This blending of many -bloods is suggested by the Saracen in the <i>Morte d’Arthur</i> -who was descended from Hector and Alexander and -Joshua and Maccabæus; by Taliesin, whose “original -country is the region of the summer stars,” who was -with Noah and Alexander and at the birth of Christ. -And thus has the tale become so full in the ear of -humanity, so rich in scenes designed to serve only an -immediate purpose, yet destined by this grace to move all -kinds of men in manifold ways. Such is the chess-playing -in <i>The Dream of Rhonabwy</i>; the madness of Tristram -when he ran naked in the wood many days, but was lured -by the music of a damsel playing on his own harp; the -speech of Arthur at the scattering of his knights in the -Sangraal quest; Launcelot’s fighting with the black -knights against the white; Launcelot’s adventures ending -at the castle of Carbonek, where he put on all his arms -and armour and went—“and the moon shone clear”—between -the lions at the gate and forced open the door, -and saw the “Holy Vessel, covered with red samite, and -many angels about it”; and Arthur and Guenevere watching -the dead Elaine in the barge; and in the wars of -Arthur and Launcelot, the scene opening with the words: -“Then it befell upon a day in harvest-time, Sir Launcelot -looked over the walls, and spake on high unto King -Arthur and Sir Gawaine....”</p> - -<p>No English writer has expressed as well as Traherne<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span> -the spiritual glory of childhood, in which Wordsworth -saw intimations of immortality. He speaks of “that -divine light wherewith I was born” and of his “pure -and virgin apprehensions,” and recommends his friend to -pray earnestly for these gifts: “They will make you -angelical, and wholly celestial.” It was by the “divine -knowledge” that he saw all things in the peace of -<span class="lock">Eden—</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>“The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which -never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it -had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and -stones of the street were as precious as gold; the gates -were at first the end of the world. The green trees when -I saw them first through one of the gates transported and -ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made -my heart to leap and almost mad with ecstasy; they were -such strange and wonderful things. The Men! O what -venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! -Immortal Cherubims! And young men glittering and -sparkling angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life -and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the street, and -playing, were moving jewels. I knew not that they -were born or should die; but all things abided eternally -as they were in their proper places. Eternity was manifest -in the light of the day, and something infinite behind -everything appeared, which tallied with my expectation -and moved my desire....”</p></div> - -<p>Yet was this light eclipsed. He was “with much ado” -perverted by the world, by the temptation of men and -worldly things and by “opinion and custom,” not any -“inward corruption or depravation of Nature.”</p> - -<p>For he tells us how he once entered a noble dining-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span>room -and was there alone “to see the gold and state and -carved imagery,” but wearied of it because it was dead, -and had no motion. A little afterwards he saw it “full -of lords and ladies and music and dancing,” and now -pleasure took the place of tediousness, and he perceived, -long after, that “men and women are, when well understood, -a principal part of our true felicity.” Once again, -“in a lowering and sad evening, being alone in the field, -when all things were dead quiet,” he had the same weariness, -nay, even horror. “I was a weak and little child, -and had forgotten there was a man alive in the earth.” -Nevertheless, hope and expectation came to him and comforted -him, and taught him “that he was concerned in all -the world.” That he was “concerned in all the world” -was the great source of comfort and joy which he found -in life, and of that joy which his book pours out for us. -Not only did he see that he was concerned in all the -world, but that river and corn and herb and sand were so -concerned. God, he says, “knoweth infinite excellencies” -in each of these things; “He seeth how it relateth -to angels and men.” In this he anticipated Blake’s -<i>Auguries of Innocence</i>. He seems to see the patterns -which all living things are for ever weaving. He would -have men strive after this divine knowledge of things and -of their place in the universe.</p> - -<p>He came to believe that “all other creatures were such -that God was Himself in their creation, that is, Almighty -Power wholly exerted; and that every creature is indeed -as it seemed in my infancy, not as it is commonly -apprehended.”</p> - -<p>Yet he feels the superiority of man’s soul to the things -which it apprehends: “One soul in the immensity of its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span> -intelligence is greater and more excellent than the whole -world.” Even so Richard Jefferies prayed that his soul -“might be more than the cosmos of life.” The soul is -greater than the whole world because it is capable of -apprehending the whole world, because it is spiritual, -and the spiritual nature is infinite. Thus Traherne was -led to the splendid error of making the sun “a poor little -dead thing.” Or perhaps it was a figure of speech used -to convince the multitude of his estimation of man’s soul -as above all visible things. In the same spirit he speaks -of “this little Cottage of Heaven and Earth as too small -a gift, though fair,” for beings of whom he says: “Infinity -we know and feel by our souls; and feel it so naturally -as if it were the very essence and being of the soul”; and -again, with childlike simplicity and <span class="lock">majesty—</span></p> - -<p>“Man is a creature of such noble principles and severe -expectations, that could he perceive the least defect to be -in the Deity, it would infinitely displease him.”</p> - -<p>He could not well have thought of man except loftily, -since he was himself one whom imagination never deserted—imagination -the greatest power of the mind by -which not poets only live and have their <span class="lock">being—</span></p> - -<p>“For God,” says he, “hath made you able to create -worlds in your own mind which are more precious unto -Him than those which He created; and to give and -offer up the world unto Him, which is very delightful -in flowing from Him, but made more in returning to -Him.”</p> - -<p>That power to create worlds in the mind is the -imagination, and is the proof that the creature liveth and -is divine. “Things unknown,” he says, “have a secret -influence on the soul,” and “we love we know not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span> -what.” The spirit can fill the whole world and the stars -be your jewels: “You never enjoy the world aright, till -the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed -with the heavens, and crowned with the stars, and perceive -yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world.” -And our inheritance is more than the world, “because -men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as -you.” It is a social mysticism. “The world,” he says -in another place, “does serve you, not only as it is the -place and receptacle of all your joys, but as it is a great -obligation laid upon all mankind, and upon every person -in all ages, to love you as himself; as it also magnifieth -all your companions.” His is the true “public mind,” as -he calls it. “There is not,” he says in another place—“there -is not a man in the whole world that knows God, -or himself, but he must honour you. Not only as an -Angel or as a Cherubim, but as one redeemed by the -blood of Christ, beloved by all Angels, Cherubims, and -Men, the heir of the world, and as much greater than the -Universe, as he that possesseth the house is greater than -the house. O what a holy and blessed life would men -lead, what joys and treasures would they be to each other, -in what a sphere of excellency would every man move, -how sublime and glorious would their estate be, how full -of peace and quiet would the world be, yea, of joy and -honour, order and beauty, did men perceive this of themselves, -and had they this esteem for one another!”</p> - -<p>Here, as in other passages, he seems to advance to the -position of Whitman, whom some have blamed for making -the word “divine” of no value because he would -apply it to all, whereas to do so is no more than to lay -down that rule of veneration for men—and the other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span> -animals—which has produced and will produce the -greatest revolutions.</p> - -<p>This conception of universal divinity sprang from his -doctrine of Love. By love we can be at one with the -divine power which he calls God. “Love,” he says, “is -the true means by which the world is enjoyed: our love -to others, and others’ love to us.” Why, even the love -of riches he excuses, since “we love to be rich ... that -we thereby might be more greatly delightful.” And just -as Richard Jefferies says that Felise loved before ever she -loved a man, so Traherne says: “That violence wherewith -a man sometimes doteth upon one creature is but a -little spark of that love, even towards all, which lurketh in -his nature.... When we dote upon the perfections and -beauties of some one creature, we do not love that too -much, but other things too little.” It is this love by -which alone the commonwealth of all forms of life can -be truly known, and men are like God when they are -“all life and mettle and vigour and love to everything,” -and “concerned and happy” in all things. His feeling -of the interdependence of all the world is thus inseparable -from his doctrine of love; love inspires it; by love -alone can it be real and endure. “He that is in all and -with all can never be desolate.” And, nevertheless, he -cannot always be thinking of the universe—he thought -that the sun went round the earth—and just as he regards -man as superior to other forms of life, so, perhaps, he -has a filial love of “this cottage of Heaven and Earth,” -the brown land and blue sky, and one of the most beautiful -of his meditations is where he <span class="lock">says—</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>“When I came into the country, and being seated -among silent trees, and meads, and hills, had all my time<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span> -in mine own hands, I resolved to spend it all, whatever -it cost me, in the search of happiness, and to satiate that -burning thirst which Nature had enkindled in me from -my youth. In which I was so resolute, that I chose rather -to live upon ten pounds a year, and go in leather clothes, -and feed upon bread and water, so that I might have all -my time clearly to myself, than to keep many thousands -per annum in an estate of life where my time would be -devoured in care and labour. And God was so pleased -to accept of that desire, that from that time to this, I have -had all things plentifully provided for me, without any -care at all, my very study of Felicity making me more -to prosper, than all the care in the whole world. So that -through His blessing I live a free and a kingly life as if -the world were turned again into Eden, or much more, -as it is at this day.”</p></div> - -<p>Traherne is remarkable in many ways, but for nothing -more than for his mingling of man and nature in the -celestial light of infancy. He begins, indeed, with the -corn—the “orient and immortal wheat”—but he goes -on to the dust and stones and gates of the town, and then -to the old men and the young men and the children. But -it was only on “some gilded cloud or flower” that -Vaughan saw “some shadows of eternity”; he longs to -travel back to his childish time and to a city of the soul, -but a shady city of palm-trees. Wordsworth, though he -says that “every common spirit” was “apparell’d in -celestial light” in his early childhood, only mentions -“meadow, grove and stream”; it is a tree, a single field, -a flower, that reminds him of his loss; it is the fountains, -meadows, hills and groves which he is anxious to assure -of his lasting love. Perhaps many people’s memories in -this kind are of Nature more than of men. Even the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span> -social Lamb is at his deepest in recalling the child who -was solitary in the great house and garden of Blakesmoor. -With some the reason for this priority of Nature is that -her solitudes are the most rich. The presence of other -children and of adults is comparatively commonplace, -and in becoming, permanently or temporarily, part of a -community, the spirit makes some sacrifice. Provided, -then, that a child is happy and at ease in the solitude of -Nature, it is more open than in company to what is afterwards -regarded as spiritual intercourse. But above all, -our memories of Nature are seldom or never flawed by -the seeming triviality, the dislikes, the disgusts, the misunderstandings -which give to memories of human society -something of dulness and the commonplace. Thinking -of ourselves and other children, we may also think of -things which make idealization impossible. Thinking of -ourselves in a great wood or field of flowers ever so long -ago, it is hard not to exaggerate whatever give-and-take -there was between the spirit of the child and the vast pure -forces of the sun and the wind. In those days we did not -see a tree as a column of a dark stony substance supporting -a number of green wafers that live scarcely half a -year, and grown for the manufacture of furniture, gates, -and many other things; but we saw something quite -unlike ourselves, large, gentle, of foreign tongue, without -locomotion, yet full of the life and movement and sound -of the leaves themselves, and also of the light, of the -birds, and of the insects; and they were givers of a clear, -deep joy that cannot be expressed. The brooding mind -easily exalts this joy with the help of the disillusions -and the knowledge and the folly and the thought of later -years. A little time ago I heard of the death of one<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span> -whom I had once seemed to know well, had roamed and -talked and been silent with him, and I should have gone -on doing so had he not gone far away and died. And -when I heard of his death I kept on recalling his face -and figure to my mind under familiar conditions, in the -old rooms, by the same river, under the same elms. As -before, I saw him in the clothes which he used to wear, -smiling or laughing or perhaps grim. But wherever he -was and whatever his look, there was always something—the -shadow of a shadow, but awful—in his face which -made me feel that had I only seen it (and I felt that I -ought to have seen it), in those days, I should have known -he was to die early, with ambitions unfulfilled, far away.</p> - -<p>And in this same way will the brain work in musing -of earlier times. All that has come after deepens that -candid brow of the child as a legend will darken a bright -brook.</p> - -<p>I once saw a girl of seven or eight years walking alone -down a long grassy path in an old garden. On one hand -rose a peaceful long slope of down; on the other, beyond -the filberts, a high hedge shut out all but the pale blue -sky, with white clouds resting on its lower mist like -water-lilies on a still pool. Turning her back to the -gabled house and its attendant beeches, she walked upon -the narrow level path of perfect grass. The late afternoon -sun fell full upon her, upon her brown head and -her blue tunic, and upon the flowers of the borders at -either side, the lowly white arabis foaming wild, the -pansy, the white narcissus, the yellow jonquil and daffodil, -the darker smouldering wallflowers, the tall yellow -leopard’s-bane, the tufts of honesty among the still dewy -leaves of larkspur and columbine. But here and there,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span> -as she walked, the light was dimmed by the clusters of -cool white humming cherry-blossom hanging out of the -hot sky. In front of her the cherry-trees seemed to meet -and make a corridor of dark stems on either hand, paved -green and white and gold, and roofed by milky white -clouds that embowered the clear, wild warble of black-caps. -Farther on, the flowers ceased and the grass was -shadowed by new-leaved beeches, and at length involved -in an uncertain mist of trees and shadows of trees, -and there the cuckoo cried. For the child there was no -end to the path.</p> - -<p>She walked slowly, at first picking a narcissus or two, -or stooping to smell a flower and letting her hair fall over -it to the ground; but soon she was content only to brush -the tips of the flowers with her outstretched hands, or, -rising on tiptoe, to force her head up amongst the lowest -branches of cherry-bloom. Then she did nothing at all -but gravely walk on into the shadow and into Eternity, -dimly foreknowing her life’s days. She looked forward -as one day she would look back over a broad sea of years, -and in a drowsy, haunted gloom, full of the cuckoo’s -note, saw herself going always on and on among the -interlacing shadows of tree trunks and branches and joys -and pleasures and pains and sorrows that must have an -end, she knew not how. She stopped, not venturing into -that strange future under the beeches. She stared into -the mist, where hovered the phantoms of the big girl, the -young woman, the lover ... which in turn she was to -become. Under the last cherry-tree something went out -of her into the shadow, and those phantoms fed upon her -blood as she stood still. But presently in the long beech -corridors the gloom began to lighten and move and change<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span> -to a glinting blue that approached her. “Pee-oi,” shouted -the peacock, now close at hand; “pee-oi ... pee-oi,” as -he passed her by, and turning, she also shouted “pee-oi,” -frightening the cuckoo from the beeches, as she ran back -among the flowers to the house.</p> - -<p>What is to come of our Nature-teaching in schools? -What does it aim at? Whence does it arise? In part, -no doubt, it is due to our desire to implant information. -It is all very well for the poet to <span class="lock">laugh—</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">When Science has discovered something more</div> - <div class="verse">We shall be happier than we were before;</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p class="noindent">but that is the road we are on at a high rate of speed. -If we are fortunate we shall complete our inventory of -the contents of heaven and earth by the time when the -last man or woman wearing the last pair of spectacles -has decided that, after all, it is a very good world and one -which it is quite possible to live in. That, however, is an -end which would not in itself be a sufficient inducement -to push on towards it; still less can such a vision have set -us upon the road.</p> - -<p>Three things, perhaps, have more particularly persuaded -us to pay our fare and mount for somewhere— -three things which are really not to be sharply distinguished, -though it is convenient to consider them separately. -First, the literary and philosophical movement -imperfectly described as the romantic revival and return -to Nature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. -Poets and philosophers need private incomes, State porridge -and what not, but literature and philosophy is a -force, and for a century it has followed a course which -was entered in the period of the French Revolution. -This literature shows man in something like his true<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span> -position in an infinite universe, and shows him particularly -in his physical environment of sea, sky, mountain, rivers, -woods, and other animals. Second, the enormous, astonishing, -perhaps excessive, growth of towns, from which -the only immediate relief is the pure air and sun of the -country, a relief which is sought by the urban multitudes -in large but insufficient numbers and for too short a time. -Third, the triumph of science, of systematized observation. -Helped, no doubt, by the force of industrialism—to -which it gave help in return—science has had a great -triumph. At one time it was supposed to have fatally -undermined poetry, romance, religion, because it had confused -the minds of some poets and critics.</p> - -<p>These three things considered, Nature-study is inevitable. -Literature sends us to Nature principally for joy, -joy of the senses, of the whole frame, of the contemplative -mind, and of the soul, joy which if it is found -complete in these several ways might be called religious. -Science sends us to Nature for knowledge. Industrialism -and the great town sends us to Nature for health, that we -may go on manufacturing efficiently, or, if we think right -and have the power, that we may escape from it. But it -would be absurd to separate joy, knowledge and health, -except as we separate for convenience those things which -have sent us out to seek for them; and Nature-teaching, -if it is good, will never overlook one of these three. Joy, -through knowledge, on a foundation of health, is what -we appear to seek.</p> - -<p>There is no longer any need to hesitate in speaking of -joy in connection with schools, yet might we not still -complain, as Thomas Traherne did two hundred and fifty -years <span class="lock">ago—</span></p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>“There was never a tutor that did professly teach -Felicity, though that be the mistress of all other sciences. -Nor did any of us study these things but as aliena, which -we ought to have studied as our enjoyments. We studied -to inform our Knowledge, but knew not for what end -we so studied. And for lack of aiming at a certain end -we erred in the manner.”</p></div> - -<p>If we cannot somehow have a professor of Felicity we -are undone. Perhaps Nature herself will aid. Her presence -will certainly make for felicity by enlarging her -pupil for a time from the cloistered life which modern -towns and their infinite conveniences and servitudes encourage. -Tolstoy has said that in the open air “new -relations are formed between pupil and teacher: freer, -simpler and more trustful”; and certainly his walk on -a winter night with his pupils, chatting and telling tales -(see <i>The School at Yasnaya Polyana</i>, by Leo Tolstoy), -leaves an impression of electrical activity and felicity in -the young and old minds of that party which is hardly to -be surpassed. And how more than by Nature’s noble and -uncontaminated forms can a sense of beauty be nourished? -Then, too, the reading of great poetry might well be -associated with the study of Nature, since there is no -great poetry which can be dissevered from Nature, while -modern poets have all dipped their pens in the sunlight -and wind and great waters, and appeal most to those who -most resemble them in their loves. The great religious -books, handed down to us by people who lived in closer -intercourse with Nature than many of us, cannot be -understood by indoor children and adults. Whether connected -with this or that form of religion or not, whether -taken as “intimations of immortality” or not, the most -profound and longest remembered feelings are often those<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span> -derived from the contact of Nature with the child’s -mind.</p> - -<p>Of health, though there are exactly as many physicians -as patients, it is unnecessary to say anything, except that -one of the pieces of knowledge—I do not speak of information—which -science has left to us is that movement -and the working of the brain in pure air and sunlight is -good for body and soul, especially if joy is aiding.</p> - -<p>Knowledge aids joy by discipline, by increasing the -sphere of enjoyment, by showing us in animals, in plants, -for example, what life is, how our own is related to -theirs, showing us, in fact, our position, responsibilities -and debts among the other inhabitants of the earth. -Pursued out of doors where those creatures, moving and -still, have their life and their beauty, knowledge is real. -The senses are invited there to the subtlest and most -delightful training, and have before them an immeasurable -fresh field, not a field like that of books, full of old -opinions, but one with which every eye and brain can -have new vital intercourse. It is open to all to make -discoveries as to the forms and habits of things, and care -should be taken to preserve the child from the most verbose -part of modern literature, that which repeats in -multiplied ill-chosen words stale descriptions of birds and -flowers, etc., coupled with trivial fancies and insincere -inventions. Let us not take the study, the lamp and the -ink out of doors, as we used to take wild life—having -killed it and placed it in spirits of wine—indoors. Let us -also be careful to have knowledge as well as enthusiasm -in our masters. Enthusiasm alone is not enthusiasm. -There must, at some stage, be some anatomy, classification, -pure brain-work; the teacher must be the equal in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span> -training of the mathematician, and he must be alive, -which I never heard was a necessity for mathematicians. -But not anatomy for all, perhaps; for some it might be -impossible, and a study of colours, curves, perfumes, -voices—a thousand things—might be substituted for it.</p> - -<p>Yet Nature-study is not designed to produce naturalists, -any more than music is taught in order to make musicians. -If you produce nothing but naturalists you fail, and you -will produce very few. The aim of study is to widen -the culture of child and man, to do systematically what -Mark Pattison tells us in his dry way he did for himself, -by walking and outdoor sports, then—at the late age of -seventeen—by collecting and reading such books as <i>The -Natural History of Selborne</i>, and finally by a slow process -of transition from natural history into “the more abstract -poetic emotion ... a conscious and declared poetical -sentiment and a devoted reading of the poets.” Geology -did not come for another ten years, “to complete the -cycle of thought, and to give that intellectual foundation -which is required to make the testimony of the eye, roaming -over an undulating surface, fruitful and satisfying. -When I came in after years to read <i>The Prelude</i> I recognized, -as if it were my own history which was being told, -the steps by which the love of the country boy for his -hills and moors grew into poetical susceptibility for all -imaginative presentations of beauty in every direction.” -The botany, etc., would naturally be related to the neighbourhood -of school or home; for there is no parish or -district of which it might not be said, as Jefferies and -Thoreau each said of his own, that it is a microcosm. By -this means the natural history may easily be linked to a -preliminary study of hill and valley and stream, the posi<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span>tions -of houses, mills and villages, and the reasons for them, -and the food supply, and so on, and this in turn leads -on to—nay, involves—all that is most real in geography -and history. The landscape retains the most permanent -marks of the past, and a wise examination of it should -evoke the beginnings of the majestic sentiment of our -oneness with the future and the past, just as natural -history should help to give the child a sense of oneness -with all forms of life. To put it at its lowest, some such -cycle of knowledge is needed if a generation that insists -more and more on living in the country, or spending many -weeks there, is not to be bored or to be compelled to -entrench itself behind the imported amusements of the -town.</p> - - - -<div class="chapter"> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span></p> - - - - - - -<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER IX<br /> - -<span class="smaller">HISTORY AND THE PARISH—HAMPSHIRE—CORNWALL</span></h2> -</div> - - -<p>Some day there will be a history of England written -from the point of view of one parish, or town, or great -house. Not until there is such a history will all our -accumulations of information be justified. It will begin -with a geological picture, something large, clear, architectural, -not a mass of insignificant names. It must be -imaginative: it might, perhaps, lean sometimes upon Mr. -Doughty’s <i>Dawn in Britain</i>. The peculiar combination of -soil and woodland and water determines the direction and -position and importance of the ancient trackways; it will -determine also the position and size of the human settlements. -The early marks of these—the old flint and -metal implements, the tombs, the signs of agriculture, the -encampments, the dwellings—will have to be clearly -described and interpreted. Folk-lore, legend, place-names -must be learnedly, but bravely and humanly used, -so that the historian who has not the extensive sympathy -and imagination of a great novelist will have no chance -of success. What endless opportunities will he have for -really giving life to past times in such matters as the line -made by the edge of an old wood with the cultivated -land, the shapes of the fields, with their borders of streams -or hedge or copse or pond or wall or road, the purpose -and interweaving of the roads and footpaths that suggest -the great permanent thoughts and the lesser thoughts and -dreams of the brain.... As the historic centuries are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span> -reached, the action of great events, battles, laws, roads, -invasions, upon the parish—and of the parish upon them—must -be shown. Architecture, with many of its local -characteristics still to be traced, will speak as a voice out -of the stones of castle, church, manor, farm, barn and -bridge. The birds and beasts cannot be left out. The -names of the local families—gentle and simple—what -histories are in them, in the curt parish registers, in tombstones, -in the names of fields and houses and woods. Better -a thousand errors so long as they are human than a thousand -truths lying like broken snail-shells round the anvil -of a thrush. If only those poems which are place-names -could be translated at last, the pretty, the odd, the -romantic, the racy names of copse and field and lane and -house. What a flavour there is about the Bassetts, -the Boughtons, the Worthys, the Tarrants, Winterbournes, -Deverills, Manningfords, the Suttons: what -goodly names of the South Country—Woodmansterne, -Hollingbourne, Horsmonden, Wolstanbury, Brockenhurst, -Caburn, Lydiard Tregoze, Lydiard Millicent, Clevancy, -Amesbury, Amberley (I once tried to make a beautiful -name and in the end it was Amberley, in which Time -had forestalled me); what sweet names Penshurst, Frensham, -Firle, Nutley, Appleshaw, Hambledon, Cranbrook, -Fordingbridge, Melksham, Lambourn, Draycot, Buscot, -Kelmscot, Yatton, Yalding, Downe, Cowden, Iping, -Cowfold, Ashe, Liss.... Then there are the histories -of roads. Every traveller in Hampshire remembers the -road that sways with airy motion and bird-like curves -down from the high land of clay and flint through the -chalk to the sand and the river. It doubles round the -head of a coombe, and the whole descent is through beech<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span> -woods uninterrupted and all but impenetrable to the eye -above or below except where once or twice it looks -through an arrow slit to the blue vale and the castled -promontory of Chanctonbury twenty miles south-east. As -the road is a mere ledge on the side of a very steep hill -the woods below it hurry down to a precipitous pit full -of the glimmering, trembling and murmuring of innumerable -leaves and no sight or sound of men. It is said to -have been made more than half a century ago to take the -place of the rash straight coach road which now enters it -near its base. A deeply-worn, narrow and disused track -joining it more than half-way down suggests that the -lower part was made by the widening of an old road; but -much of the upper half is new. Certainly the road as it -now is, broad and gently bending round the steep coombe, -is new, and it was made at the expense of the last of a -family which had long owned the manor house near the -entrance of the coombe. His were all the hanging beech -woods—huge as the sky—upon the hill, and through them -the road-makers conducted this noble and pleasant way. -But near the top they deviated by a few yards into another -estate. The owner would not give way. A lawsuit -was begun, and it was not over when the day came for -the road to be open for traffic according to the contract or, -if not, to pass out of the defaulter’s hands. The day -passed; the contract was broken; the speculation had -failed, and the tolls would never fill the pockets of the -lord of the manor. He was ruined, and left his long -white house by the rivulet and its chain of pools, his -farms and cottages, his high fruit walls, his uncounted -beeches, the home of a hundred owls, his Spanish chestnuts -above the rocky lane, his horse-chestnut and sycamore<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span> -stately in groups, his mighty wych elms, his apple trees -and all their mistletoe, his walnut trees, and the long -bay of sky that was framed by his tall woods east and -north and west.</p> - -<p>There are many places which nobody can look upon -without being consciously influenced by a sense of their -history. It is a battlefield, and the earth shows the scars -of its old wounds; or a castle or cathedral of distinct -renown rises among the oaks; or a manor house or -cottage, or tomb or woodland walk that speaks of a dead -poet or soldier. Then, according to the extent or care -of our reading and the clearness of our imagination, we -can pour into the groves or on the turf tumultuous or -silent armies, or solitary man or woman. It is a deeply-worn -coast; the spring tide gnaws the yellow cliff, and -the wind files it with unceasing hiss, and the relics of -every age, skull and weapon and shroudpin and coin and -carven stone, are spread out upon the clean, untrodden -sand, and the learned, the imaginative, the fanciful, the -utterly unhistoric and merely human man exercises his -spirit upon them, and responds, if only for a moment. In -some places history has wrought like an earthquake, in -others like an ant or mole; everywhere, permanently; -so that if we but knew or cared, every swelling of the -grass, every wavering line of hedge or path or road were -an inscription, brief as an epitaph, in many languages and -characters. But most of us know only a few of these -unspoken languages of the past, and only a few words in -each. Wars and parliaments are but dim, soundless, and -formless happenings in the brain; toil and passion of -generations produce only an enriching of the light within -the glades, and a solemnizing of the shadows.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span></p> - -<p>Out of a whole century or age we remember nothing -vividly and in a manner that appeals to the eye, except -some such picture as that which Gerald of Wales gives -of a Welsh prince, Cyneuric, son of Rhys. He was tall -and handsome, fair-complexioned, his hair curled; his -dress was a thin cloak, and under that a shirt, his legs -and feet being bare, regardless of thistle and brier; a man -to whom nature and not art had given his beauty and -comely bearing. Outside Wales, and in ages far removed -from the twelfth century, this figure of a man will follow -us, and help to animate any wild scene that is coloured by -antiquity. It is some such man, his fair hair perhaps -exchanged for black, and his nobility more animal and -clothed in skins, that we see, if we see a man at all, when -we muse deeply upon the old road worn deep into the -chalk, among burial mound and encampment; we feel -rather than see the innumerable companies of men like -this, following their small cattle to the stream or the dew-pond, -wearing out the hard earth with their naked feet -and trailing ash staves. Going up such a road, between -steep banks of chalk and the roots and projecting bases -of beeches whose foliage meets overhead—a road worn -twenty feet deep, and now scarce ever used as a footpath -except by fox and hare—we may be half-conscious that -we have climbed that way before during the furrowing -of the road, and we move as in a dream between this age -and that dim one which we vainly strive to recover.</p> - -<p>But because we are imperfectly versed in history, we are -not therefore blind to the past. The eye that sees the -things of to-day, and the ear that hears, the mind that -contemplates or dreams, is itself an instrument of an -antiquity equal to whatever it is called upon to appre<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span>hend. -We are not merely twentieth-century Londoners -or Kentish men or Welshmen. We belong to the days -of Wordsworth, of Elizabeth, of Richard Plantagenet, of -Harold, of the earliest bards. We, too, like Taliesin, have -borne a banner before Alexander, have been with our -Lord in the manger of the ass, have been in India, and -with the “remnant of Troia,” and with Noah in the ark, -and our original country is “the region of the summer -stars.” And of these many folds in our nature the face -of the earth reminds us, and perhaps, even where there are -no more marks visible upon the land than there were in -Eden, we are aware of the passing of time in ways too -difficult and strange for the explanation of historian and -zoologist and philosopher. It is this manifold nature that -responds with such indescribable depth and variety to the -appeals of many landscapes.</p> - -<p>We come to a huge, flat-bottomed, grassy coombe, -smooth as a racecourse, that winds out of the cornland -into the heart of the Downs. It is like the bed of a river -of great depth. At its entrance beeches clothe either side; -but presently they cease, and up the steep juniper slopes -go the paths of hares, of the herds and flocks of earliest -ages and of the men and women and children also, -whose children’s children’s children have forgotten them -though not perhaps their philosophy. The grass of the -slope is mingled with small sweet herbage, the salad -burnet rosy-stemmed, the orange bird’s-foot trefoil, the -purple thyme, the fine white flax, the delicatest golden -hawk-bit, and basil and marjoram, and rosettes of crimson -thistles, all sunny warm and fragrant, glittering and glowing -or melting into a simmering haze, musical with grasshoppers -and a-flutter with blue butterflies, so that the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span> -earth seems to be a thick-furred, genial animal. At length -the windings shut out the plain, and the coombe is a green -hall roofed by the hot blue sky. Its walls are steeper than -ever, and the burrowings of the rabbits have streaked the -grasses with long splashes—like those made by sea-birds -on rocks—of white chalk. The curves of these walls are -like those of the flight of the swifts that dive overhead. -Here there are no human paths, no sign of house, of -grave, of herd, of cultivation. It is the world’s end, and -the rabbits race up and down as in a dream of solitude.</p> - -<p>Yet the mind is not discontented and unfed. This is -no boundless solitude of ocean where one may take a kind -of pleasure</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">To float for ever with a careless course</div> - <div class="verse">And think himself the only being alive.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p class="noindent">It is not an end but a beginning that we have reached. -These are the elements—pure earth and wind and sunlight—out -of which beauty and joy arise, original and -ancient, for ever young. Their presence restores us not -to the Middle Ages, not to the days of Mr. Doughty’s -heroic princes and princesses of Britain,<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> not to any dim -archæologist’s world of reeking marsh and wood, of -mammoth and brutish men, but to a region out of space -and out of time in which life and thought and physical -health are in harmony with sun and earth, fragrant as -the flowers in the grass, blithe as the grasshopper, swift -as the hares, divine; and out of it all arises a vision of the -man who will embody this thought, a man whom human -infelicity, discontented with the past, has placed in a -golden age still farther back, for the sufficient reason<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span> -that in every age he has been a dream, and our dreaming -is of the dawn or the night, always disappointed but -undaunted by the day that follows. And so no storied -valley or hillside is richer in humanity than this coombe. -It is one of the countless Edens where we are in contact -not with the soldier and ploughman and mason that -change the surface of the earth, but with prophet and poet -who have ever lived to trace to Nature and to the early -ages the health and vigour of men. There is the greatest -antiquity of all, peace and purity and simplicity, and in the -midst is the mother Earth, the young mother of the world, -with a face like Ceres before she had lost Persephone -in the underworld. In fact, so blessed is this solitary -hall that after climbing out it is mournful to see the -rabbit-worn tunnels and the Roman camp on the ridge.</p> - - -<h3>CORNWALL.</h3> - -<p>In Cornwall, where the wrinkles and angles of the -earth’s age are left to show, antiquity plays a giant’s part -on every hand. What a curious effect have those ruins, -all but invisible among the sands, the sea-blue scabious, the -tamarisk and rush, though at night they seem not -inaudible when the wild air is full of crying! Some that -are not nearly as old are almost as magical. One there -is that stands near a great water, cut off from a little town -and from the world by a round green hill and touched by -no road but only by a wandering path. At the foot of this -hill, among yellow mounds of sand, under blue sky, the -church is dark and alone. It is not very old—not five -centuries—and is of plainest masonry: its blunt short spire -of slate slabs that leans slightly to one side, with the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span> -smallest of perforated slate windows at the base, has a -look of age and rusticity. In the churchyard is a rough -grey cross of stone—a disc supported by a pillar. It is -surrounded by the waving noiseless tamarisk. It looks -northward over the sandhills at a blue bay, guarded on the -west by tall grey cliffs which a white column surmounts.</p> - -<p>For a time the nearer sandhills have rested and clothed -themselves in bird’s-foot trefoil, thyme, eyebright and -short turf: but once the church was buried beneath them. -Between the round hill and the church a tiny stream -sidles along through a level hiding-place of flags and -yellow flag flowers, of purple figwort and purple orchis -and green grass.</p> - -<p>A cormorant flies low across the sky—that sable bird -which seems to belong to the old time, the time of badger -and beaver, of ancient men who rose up out of the crags -of this coast. To them, when the cuckoo first called -one April, came over the blue sea a small brown ship, -followed by three seals, and out of it descended a Christian -from Ireland, black-haired, blue-eyed, with ready -red lips and deep sweet voice and spoke to them, all alone. -He told them of a power that ruled the blue waters and -shifting sands, who could move the round green hill to -the rock of the white gulls; taller and grimmer than the -cloven headland yet sweet and gentle as the fennel above; -deep-voiced as the Atlantic storm, tender also as the sedgewarbler -in the flags below the hill; whose palace was -loftier than the blue to which the lark was now soaring, -milder and richer than the meadows in May and everlasting; -and his attendants were more numerous and -bright than the herring under a moon of frost. The milkpails -should be fuller and the grass deeper and the corn<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span> -heavier in the car if they believed in this; the pilchards -should be as water boiling in the bay; and they should -have wings as of the white birds that lounged about the -precipices of the coast. And all the time the three seals -lay with their heads and backs above the shallows and -watched. Perhaps the men believed his word; perhaps -they dropped him over the precipice to see whether he -also flew like a gull: but here is the church named after -him.</p> - -<p>All along the coast (and especially where it is lofty and -houseless, and on the ledges of the crags the young grey -gulls unable to fly bob their heads seaward and try to -scream like their parents who wheel far and near with -double yodeling cry), there are many rounded barrows -looking out to sea. And there are some amidst the sandhills, -bare and corrugated by the wind and heaved up like -a feather-bed, their edges golden against the blue sky or -mangily covered by drab marram grass that whistles -wintrily; and near by the blue sea, slightly roughened as -by a barrow, sleeps calm but foamy among cinder-coloured -isles; donkeys graze on the brown turf, larks -rise and fall and curlews go by; a cuckoo sings among -the deserted mines. But the barrows are most noble on -the high heather and grass. The lonely turf is full of -lilac scabious flowers and crimson knapweed among the -solid mounds of gorse. The brown-green-grey of the dry -summer grass reveals myriads of the flowers of thyme, of -stonecrop yellow and white, of pearly eyebright, of golden -lady’s fingers, and the white or grey clover with its purest -and earthiest of all fragrances. Here and there steep -tracks descend slantwise among the thrift-grown crags -to the sea, or promise to descend but end abruptly in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span> -precipices. On the barrows themselves, which are either -isolated or in a group of two or three, grow thistle and -gorse. They command mile upon mile of cliff and sea. -In their sight the great headlands run out to sea and sinking -seem to rise again a few miles out in a sheer island, -so that they resemble couchant beasts with backs under -water but heads and haunches upreared. The cliffs are -cleft many times by steep-sided coves, some with broad -sand and shallow water among purple rocks, the outlet -of a rivulet; others ending precipitously so that the stream -suddenly plunges into the black sea among a huddle of -sunless boulders. Near such a stream there will be a grey -farm amid grey outbuildings—with a carved wooden eagle -from the wreckage of the cove, or a mermaid, once a -figure-head with fair long hair and round bosom, built -into the wall of a barn. Or there is a briny hamlet -grouped steeply on either side of the stream which gurgles -among the pebbles down to the feet of the bearded fisherman -and the ships a-gleam. Or perhaps there is no stream -at all, and bramble and gorse come down dry and hot to -the lips of the emerald and purple pools. Deep roads -from the sea to the cliff-top have been worn by smuggler -and fisherman and miner, climbing and descending. Inland -shows a solitary pinnacled church tower, rosy in the -warm evening—a thin line of trees, long bare stems and -dark foliage matted—and farther still the ridges of misty -granite, rough as the back of a perch.</p> - -<p>Of all the rocky land, of the sapphire sea white with -quiet foam, the barrows are masters. The breaking away -of the rock has brought them nearer to the sea as it has -annihilated some and cut off the cliff-ways in mid-career. -They stand in the unenclosed waste and are removed from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span> -all human uses and from most wayfaring. Thus they -share the sublimity of beacons and are about to show that -tombs also have their deaths. Linnet and stonechat and -pipit seem to attend upon them, with pretty voices and -motions and a certain ghastliness, as of shadows, given to -their cheerful and sudden flittings by the solemn neighbourhood. -But most of their hold upon the spirit they -owe to their powerful suggestion that here upon the high -sea border was once lived a bold proud life, like that of -Beowulf, whose words, when he was dying from the -wounds of his last victory, were: “Bid the warriors raise -a funeral mound to flash with fire on a promontory above -the sea, that it may stand high and be a memorial by -which my people shall remember me, and seafarers driving -their tall ships through the mist of the sea shall say: -‘Beowulf’s Mound.’”</p> - -<p>In Cornwall as in Wales, these monuments are the -more impressive, because the earth, wasting with them -and showing her bones, takes their part. There are days -when the age of the Downs, strewn with tumuli and -the remnants of camp and village, is incredible; or rather -they seem in the course of long time to have grown -smooth and soft and kind, and to be, like a rounded -languid cloud, an expression of Earth’s summer bliss of -afternoon. But granite and slate and sandstone jut out, -and in whatsoever weather speak rather of the cold, drear, -hard, windy dawn. Nothing can soften the lines of -Trendreen or Brown Willy or Carn Galver against the -sky. The small stone-hedged ploughlands amidst brake -and gorse do but accentuate the wildness of the land from -which they have been won. The deserted mines are frozen -cries of despair as if they had perished in conflict with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span> -the waste; and in a few years their chimneys standing -amidst rotted woodwork, the falling masonry, the engine -rusty, huge and still (the abode of rabbits, and all overgrown -with bedstraw, the stern thistle and wizard henbane) -are in keeping with the miles of barren land, littered with -rough silvered stones among heather and furze, whose -many barrows are deep in fern and bramble and foxglove. -The cotton grass raises its pure nodding white. The old -roads dive among still more furze and bracken and bramble -and foxglove, and on every side the land grows no such -crop as that of grey stones. Even in the midst of occasional -cornfield or weedless pasture a long grey upright -stone speaks of the past. In many places men have set up -these stones, roughly squaring some of them, in the form -of a circle or in groups of circles—and over them beats the -buzzard in slow hesitating and swerving flight. In one place -the work of Nature might be mistaken for that of man. -On a natural hillock stands what appears to be the ruin -of an irregularly heaped wall of grey rock, roughened -by dark-grey lichen, built of enormous angular fragments -like the masonry of a giant’s child. Near at hand, -bracken, pink stonecrop, heather and bright gold tormentil -soften it; but at a distance it stands black against the -summer sky, touched with the pathos of man’s handiwork -overthrown, yet certainly an accident of Nature. It -commands Cape Cornwall and the harsh sea, and St. Just -with its horned church tower. On every hand lie cromlech, -camp, circle, hut and tumulus of the unwritten -years. They are confused and mingled with the natural -litter of a barren land. It is a silent Bedlam of history, -a senseless cemetery or museum, amidst which we walk -as animals must do when they see those valleys full of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span> -skeletons where their kind are said to go punctually to -die. There are enough of the dead; they outnumber the -living; and there those trite truths burst with life and -drum upon the tympanum with ambiguous fatal voices. -At the end of this many-barrowed moor, yet not in it, -there is a solitary circle of grey stones, where the cry of the -past is less vociferous, less bewildering, than on the moor -itself, but more intense. Nineteen tall, grey stones stand -round a taller, pointed one that is heavily bowed, amidst -long grass and bracken and furze. A track passes close -by, but does not enter the circle; the grass is unbent -except by the weight of its bloom. It bears a name that -connects it with the assembling and rivalry of the bards -of Britain. Here, under the sky, they met, leaning upon -the stones, tall, fair men of peace, but half-warriors, -whose songs could change ploughshare into sword. -Here they met, and the growth of the grass, the perfection -of the stones (except that one stoops as with age), -and the silence, suggest that since the last bard left it, -in robe of blue or white or green—the colours of sky and -cloud and grass upon this fair day—the circle has been -unmolested, and the law obeyed which forbade any but -a bard to enter it. Sky-blue was the colour of a chief -bard’s robe, emblematic of peace and heavenly calm, and -of unchangeableness. White, the colour of the Druid’s -dress, was the emblem of light, and of its correlatives, -purity of conduct, wisdom, and piety. Green was the -colour of the youthful ovate’s robe, for it was the emblem -of growth. Their uniformity of colour signified perfect -truth. And the inscription upon the chair of the bards -of Beisgawen was, “Nothing is that is not for ever and -ever.” Blue and white and green, peace and light and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span> -growth—“Nothing is that is not for ever and ever”—these -things and the blue sky, the white, cloudy hall of -the sun, and the green bough and grass, hallowed the -ancient stones, and clearer than any vision of tall bards -in the morning of the world was the tranquil delight of -being thus “teased out of time” in the presence of this -ancientness.</p> - -<p>It is strange to pass from these monumental moors -straight to the sea which records the moments, not the -years or the centuries. In fine weather especially its -colour—when, for example, it is faintly corrugated and of -a blue that melts towards the horizon into such a hue -that it is indistinguishable from the violet wall of dawn—is -a perpetual astonishment on account of its unearthliness -and evanescence. The mind does not at once accept the -fact that here underneath our eyes is, as it were, another -sky. The physical act of looking up induces a special -mood of solemnity and veneration, and during the act -the eyes meet with a fitting object in the stainless heavens. -Looking down we are used to seeing the earth, the road, -the footpath, the floor, the hearth; but when, instead, it is -the sea and not any of these things, although our feet -are on firm land, the solemnity is of another kind. In its -anger the sea becomes humanized or animalized: we see -resemblances to familiar things. There is, for instance, -an hour sometimes after sunset, when the grey sky coldly -lights the lines of white plumes on a steely sea, and they -have an inevitable likeness to a trampling chivalry that -charges upon a foe. But a calm sea is incomparable except -to moods of the mind. It is then as remote from the -earth and earthly things as the sky, and the remoteness -is the more astonishing because it is almost within our<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span> -grasp. It is no wonder that a great idea was expressed by -the fortunate islands in the sea. The youthfulness, the -incorruptibility of the sea, continually renewing itself, the -same from generation to generation, prepares it as a fit -sanctuary of the immortal dead. So at least we are apt -to think at certain times, coming from the heavy, scarred, -tormented earth to that immense aëry plain of peacock -blue. And yet at other times that same unearthliness -will suggest quite other thoughts. It has not changed -and shrunken and grown like the earth; it is not sun-warmed: -it is a monster that has lain unmoved by time, -sleeping and moaning outside the gates within which men -and animals have become what they are. Actually that -cold fatal element and its myriad population without a -sound brings a wistfulness into the mind as if it could -feel back and dimly recall the dawn of time when the -sea was incomprehensible and impassable, when the earth -had but lately risen out of the waters and was yet again -to descend beneath: it becomes a type of the waste where -everything is unknown or uncertain except death, pouring -into the brain the thoughts that men have had on -looking out over untrodden mountain, forest, swamp, in -the drizzling dawn of the world. The sea is exactly -what it was when mountain, forest, swamp were imperturbable -enemies, and the sight of it restores the ancient -fear. I remember one dawn above all others when this -restoration was complete. When it was yet dark the -wind rose gustily under a low grey sky and a lark sang -amidst the moan of gorse and the creak of gates and the -deeply-taken breath of the tide at the full. Nor was it -yet light when the gulls began to wheel and wind and -float with a motion like foam on a whirlpool or inter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span>woven -snow. They wheeled about the masts of fishing-boats -that nodded and kissed and crossed in a steep cove -of crags whose black edges were slavered by the foam of -the dark sea; and there were no men among the boats or -about the grey houses that looked past the walls of the -cove to the grim staircase and sea-doors of a black headland, -whose perpendicular rocks stood up far out of the -reach of the wings fashioned in the likeness of gigantic -idols. The higher crags were bushy and scaly with -lichen, and they were cushioned upon thrift and bird’s-foot -trefoil and white bladder campion. It was a bristling sea, -not in the least stormy, but bristling, dark and cold -through the slow colourless dawn, dark and cold and -immense; and at the edge of it the earth knelt, offering up -the music of a small flitting bird and the beauty of small -flowers, white and gold, to those idols. They were -terrible enough. But the sea was more terrible; for it was -the god of whom those rocks were the poor childish -images, and it seemed that the god had just then disclosed -his true nature and hence the pitiful loveliness of the -flowers, the pitiful sweetness of the bird that sang among -the rocks at the margin of the kind earth.</p> - -<p>Now and then the sea will startle by some resemblance -to the earth. Thus I have come unexpectedly in sight -of it on a strange coast and have not known that it was -the sea. A gale from the north-east was blowing, and -it was late afternoon in mid-winter. The land was sandy -moorland, treeless and dark with iron-coloured heather. -A mile away I saw rising up into the sky what seemed -a peaty mountain in Cardiganshire, as it would be in a -tempest of rain, and it was only when I was near the cliff -and could see the three long walls of white waves towards<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span> -the shore that I knew it was the sea. More common is -the calm dark-blue sea in mid-summer, over which go -criss-cross bands of lighter hue, like pale moorland paths -winding about a moor.</p> - -<p>In a stern land like Cornwall that so often refuses the -consolations of grass and herb and tree, the relentings are -the more gracious. These are to be found in a whole -valley where there are sloping fields of corn and grass -divided by green hedges, and woods rich and misty and -warm, and the bones of the land are buried away until -it ends in a bay where high and cavernous dark rocks -stand on either side of blue water and level sand. Often -all the sweetness of the country round seems to have run -into one great roadside hedge as dewdrops collect in the -bosom of a leaf. The stones of the original wall are -themselves deeply hidden in turf, or from the crevices -ferns descend and the pale blooms of pennywort rise up; -the lichen is furry and the yellow or pink stonecrop is -neat and dense; ivy climbs closely up and hangs down in -loose array. Up from the top of the wall or mound rise -bramble and gorse and woodbine over them, or brier and -thorn and woodbine again; and the tallest and massiest -of foxgloves cleave through these with their bells, half -a hundred of them in rows five deep already open and -as many more yet in bud, dense as grapes, dewy, murmurous; -and below the foxgloves are slender parsleys, -rough wood sage and poppies. At the foot of the wall, -between it and the road, is a grassy strip, where the -yarrow grows feathery with gilded cinquefoil and tormentil—or -above nettles as dense as corn rise large discs -of white hog parsnip flower, a coarse and often dirty -flower that has a dry smell of summer—or bramble and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span> -brier arch this way and that their green and rosy and -purple stems, bright leaves, flowers pink and white. Only -the shin-breaking Cornish stiles of stone, interrupting the -hedge and giving a view of barren hills or craggy-sided -sea, destroy the illusion created by this exuberance of herb -and bush and the perfume of woodbine and rose.</p> - -<p>Nowhere is the stateliness or grace or privacy of trees -more conspicuous than about the Cornish towns and -farms. The tall round-topped elms above Padstow, for -example, would be natural and acceptable unconsciously -elsewhere; but above those crossing lines of roof they -have an indescribable benevolence. The farmhouses are -usually square, dry and grey, being built of slate with -grey-slated roofs painted by lichen; some are whitewashed; -in some, indeed, the stones are of many greys and -blues, with yellowish and reddish tinges, hard, but warm -in the sun and comforting to look at when close to the -sea and some ruinous promontory; few are screened by -ivy or climbing rose. The farm buildings are of the same -kind, relieved by yellow straw, the many hues of hay, -the purple bracken stacks, the dark peat. The gates are -coarse and mean, of iron or of cheap or rough wood, -lightly made, patched, held together by string, and owing -their only charm to the chance use of the curved ribs -of ships as gate-posts. But to many of the buildings -sycamore and ash and apple trees bent above tall grass -lend their beauty of line, of mass, of colour, of shade, -of sound and of many motions. I can never forget the -rows of ash trees, the breezy sycamores and the tamarisks -by ancient Harlyn, with its barrows on the hill, its ruins -of chapel and church among rushes and poppies, its little -oak wood by the sandy river mouth where the men of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span> -old time buried their dead, the poppied corn, the white -gulls and their black shadows wheeling over sunny turf. -The file of lean woods seen between Perranporth and -St. Agnes inland. The sycamores above the farm near -Towan cross where the road dips and the deep furrow of -a little valley winds, with hay upon its slopes, out to sea. -The green wood, long and beautiful, below the gentle -brown slopes of Hudder Down. The several companies -of trees in the valley by the Red River, and the white -farm of Reskajeage near by, under ash and elm, sycamore -and wych-elm and lime, a rough orchard of apples and a -gnarled squat medlar to one side—the trees grouped as -human figures are when they begin to move after some -tense episode. The wych-elm, sycamore and ash round -the tower of Gwithian church and in amongst the few -thatched cottages alongside the yellow towans and violet -sea. In a land of deserted roofless houses with solid -chimneys that no man wants, the narrow copse of small -spindly oaks upholding with bare crooked stems as of -stone a screen of leaves, above a brooklet that runs to -the sea through dense rush and foxglove and thistle where -the sedge-warbler sings. The long low mound of green -wood nearest to Land’s End. Between Tregothal and -Bosfranken, the wet copse in a narrow valley, where red -campion and bracken and bramble are unpenetrated among -flowery elders, sallows, thorns and sycamores. A farm -that has a water-mill and water gloomy and crystal under -sycamore and ash. The thin halting procession of almost -branchless trees on the ridge of the Beacon above Sancreed—a -procession that seems even at mid-day to move in -another world, in the world and in the age of the stone -circles and cairns and cromlechs of the moor beyond.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span> -The sycamore and elder that surround and tower above -Tregonebris near Boscawen Un. The avenue of ash and -elm and wych-elm and sycamore, very close together, -leading from grey Nancothan mill, where the dark-brown -water mingles its noise with the rustling trees. -The wych-elms and golden-fruited sycamores about the -roads near St. Hilary, and the long avenue of ash up to -the church itself, and the elms through which the evening -music floats, amidst the smell of hay, in a misty mountained -sunset.</p> - -<p>Under the flaming fleeces of a precipitous sky, in a -windless hush and at low tide, I descended to a narrow -distinct valley just where a stream ran clear and slow -through level sands to a bay, between headlands of rocks -and of caves among the rocks. The sides of the valley -near the sea were high and steep and of grass until their -abrupt end in a low but perpendicular wall of rock just -above the river sands. Inland the valley began to wind -and at the bend trees came darkly trooping down the -slopes to the water. Immediately opposite the ford—the -wet sands being unscathed by any foot or hoof or wheel—a -tributary ran into the river through a gorge of its own. -It was a gorge not above a hundred feet across, and its -floor was of sand save where the brook was running down, -and this floor was all in shadow because the banks were -clothed in thick underwood and in ash, sycamore, wych-elm -and oak meeting overhead. And in these sands also -there was no footprint save of the retreated sea. There -was no house, nor wall, nor road. And there was no -sound in the caverns of foliage except one call of a cuckoo -as I entered and the warbling of a blackbird that mused -in the oaks and then laughed and was silent and mused<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span> -again and filled the mind with the fairest images of solitude—solitude -where a maid, thinking of naught, unthought -of, unseen, combs out her yellow hair and lets -her spirit slip down into the tresses—where a man fearful -of his kind ascends out of the deeps of himself so that his -eyes look bravely and his face unstiffens and unwrinkles -and his motion and gesture is fast and free—where a -child walks and stops and runs and sings in careless joy -that takes him winding far out into abysses of eternity -and makes him free of them, so that years afterward the -hour and place and sky return, and the eternity on which -they opened as a casement, but not the child, not the -joy.</p> - -<p>I like trees for the cool evening voices of their many -leaves, for their cloudy forms linked to earth by stately -stems—for the pale lifting of the sycamore leaves in -breezes and also their drooping, hushed and massed -repose, for the myriad division of the light ash leaves—for -their straight pillars and for the twisted branch work, -for their still shade and their rippling or calm shimmering -or dimly glowing light, for the quicksilver drip of dawn, -for their solemnity and their dancing, for all their sounds -and motions—their slow-heaved sighs, their nocturnal -murmurs, their fitful fingerings at thunder time, their -swishing and tossing and hissing in violent rain, the roar -of their congregations before the south-west wind when -it seems that they must lift up the land and fly away -with it, for their rustlings of welcome in harvest heat—for -their kindliness and their serene remoteness and -inhumanity, and especially the massiest of the trees that -have also the glory of motion, the sycamores, which are -the chief tree of Cornwall, as the beeches and yews are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span> -of the Downs, the oaks of the Weald, the elms of the -Wiltshire vales.</p> - -<p>Before I part from trees I should like to mention those -of mid-Somerset—and above all, the elms. I am thinking -of them as they are at noon on the hottest days of haymaking -at the end of June. The sky is hot, its pale blue -without pity and changing to a yellow of mist near the -horizon. The land is level and all of grass, and where -the hay is not spread in swathes the grass is almost -invisible for the daisies on its motionless surface. Here and -there the mower whirrs and seems natural music, like the -grasshopper’s, of the burning earth. Through the levels -wind the heavy-topped grey willows of a hidden stream. -In the hedges and in the wide fields and about the still, -silent farmhouses of stone there are many elms. They -are tall and slender despite their full mounded summits. -They cast no shade. In the great heat their green is all -but grey, and their leaves are lost in the mist which their -mingling creates. Grey-hooded, grey-mantled, they -seem to be stealing away over the fields to the sanctuary -of the dark-wooded hills, low and round and lapped -entirely in leaves, which stand in the mist at the edge of -the plain—to be leaving that plain to the possession of -the whirring mower and the sun of almighty summer.</p> - -<p>Sycamores solemnized the Cornish farm in the -twilight, where I asked the farmer’s wife if she could let -us have two beds for the night. She stood in the doorway, -hands on hips, watching her grandchildren’s last -excited minutes of play in the rickyard.</p> - -<p>“He’s the master,” she replied, pointing to the farmer -who was talking to his carter, between the rickyard -and the door, under the sycamores.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span></p> - -<p>“Two beds?”</p> - -<p>“That is what we should like,” said my friend -and I.</p> - -<p>“What do you want with two beds?” he asked with -a tinge of scorn as well as of pity in his frank amusement. -“My missus and I have only had one bed these forty -years.”</p> - -<p>Here he laughed so gaily that he could not have -embarrassed the very devil of puritanism, and turning to -his man he called forth a deep bass laughter and from -his wife a peal that shook her arms so that she raised -them to the sides of the porch for better support; the -children also turned their laughter our way.</p> - -<p>“But perhaps one of you kicks in his sleep?... We -don’t.... Come inside. I dare say you are tired.... -Good-night, John. Now, children, up with you.”</p> - -<p>I think they were the most excellent pair of man and -woman I ever saw. Both were of a splendid physical -type, she the more energetic, black-haired, black-eyed, -plump and tall and straight; he the more enduring, fair-haired -and bearded, blue-eyed, hardly her equal in height, -certainly not in words. In forty years neither had overpowered -the other. They had not even agreed to take -separate paths, but like two school-boys, new friends, they -could afford to contend together in opinions without fear -of damage or of lazy truce. He had ploughed and sowed -and reaped: she had borne him seven children, had baked -and churned and stitched. They had loved sweet things -together, and, with curses at times, their children and the -land. Physical strength and purity—that were in them -the whole of morality—seemed to have given them that -equality with the conditions of life which philosophy has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span> -done nothing but talk about. They of all men and -women had perhaps jarred least upon the music of the -spheres. They had the right and power to live, and the -end was laughter.</p> - -<p>In all those years they had been separated but once. -Until four years ago she had not been out of Cornwall -except to bury her mother, who had suddenly died in -London. Two hundred pounds fell to her share on that -death and the money arrived one morning after the -harvest thanksgiving. For a week she continued to go -about her work in the old way save that she sent rather -hurriedly for a daughter who had just left her place as -cook in Exeter. At the end of the week, having stored -the apples and shown her daughter how to use the -separator, she walked in to Penzance in her best clothes -but without even a handbag; her husband was out with -his gun. By the next day she was at Liverpool. She sent -off a picture postcard, with a little note written by the -shopkeeper, saying that she would be back by Christmas, -and telling her husband to sell the old bull. Then she -sailed for New York. She saw Niagara; she visited her -nephew, John Davy, at Cincinnati; she spent two weeks -in railway travelling west and south, and saw the Indians. -Four days before Christmas she was back in the rickyard, -driving before her a young bull and carrying in her hand -a bunch of maize.</p> - -<p>“Well, Ann, you’re back before your time,” said her -husband, after praising the beast.</p> - -<p>“Yes, Samuel, and I feel as if I could whitewash the -dairy, that I do,” said she.</p> - -<p>“Suppose you wait till to-morrow,” proposed Sam -Davy.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span></p> - -<p>“I think I will, for I can hear that Mary is behind -with the separator.”</p> - -<p>“She’s a good girl, but she hasn’t got your patience, -my dear.”</p> - -<p>“Oh, here, Sam, here’s the change,” she said, giving -him the bunch of maize.</p> - -<hr class="tb hidden" /> - -<p>In Cornwall many of the women looked less English -than the men. The noticeable men were fair-haired -and, of fair complexion, blue-eyed and rather small-headed, -upright and of good bearing. The noticeable -women had black hair, pale, seldom swarthy, faces, very -dark eyes. Perhaps the eyes were more foreign than -anything else in them: they were singularly immobile -and seldom changed in expression with their voices. -Several of the dark-eyed, black-haired women had a -beauty of a fearless character like gypsy women, in -their movement and expression. But the wives of small -farmers and miners on piecework look old very soon -and are puckered and shadowy in the face. Some of -these middle-aged and old women suggested an early -and barbarous generation. The eyes were small and -deep-set, and the face narrowed forward like an animal’s; -which gave the whole a peering expression of suspicion -and even alarm. The eyes of most human beings are -causes of bewilderment and dismay if curiously looked at; -but the strangest I ever saw were in an old Cornish -woman. They were black and round as a child’s, with -a cold brightness that made them seem not of the -substance of other eyes, but like a stone. They were -set in a narrow, bony face of parchment among grey -hair crisp and disarrayed. I saw them only for a few<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span> -minutes while I asked a few questions about the way, -and it was as much as I could do to keep up the conversation, -so much did those motionless eyes invite me -to plunge into an abyss of human personality—such -intense loneliness and strangeness did they create, since -they proclaimed shrilly and clearly that beyond a desire -to be fed and clothed we had nothing in common. Had -they peered up at me out of a cromlech or hut at Bosporthennis -I could not have been more puzzled and -surprised.</p> - -<p>Men and women were hospitable and ready to smile -as the Welsh are; and they have an alluring naïveté as -well as some righteousness. One family was excessively -virtuous or had a wish to appear so: I do not know which -alternative to like the less, since it was in a matter of -game. They rented land on a large estate and had a -right to the rabbits: the hares were sacred to the great -landowner. The farmer’s wife assured me that one of -her sons had lately brought in a lame hare and proposed -to put it out of its pain, but that she had said: “No, -take it out and let it die outside anywhere. The best -thing is to be afraid in things of this kind and then you -won’t go wrong.” Doing much the same kind or quantity -of manual work as their husbands and being much -out of doors, the women’s manners were confident and -free. Their speech was as a rule fluent and grammatical -and clearly delivered, with less accent than in any part -of England. Coming into a mining village one day and -wanting tea, I asked a woman who was drawing water -from a farmyard well if she could make me some, thinking -she was the farmer’s wife. She said she would, but -took me to one of a small row of cottages over the way,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span> -where her husband was half-naked in the midst of his -Saturday wash. Taking no notice of him she led me into -the sitting-room and, with a huge loaf held like a violin, -began buttering and cutting thin slices while she talked -to me, to the little children and to her husband, from the -adjacent kitchen. She was tall, straight as a pillar, black-haired, -with clear untanned but slightly swarthy skin, -black eyes, kindly gleaming cheeks and red lips smiling -above her broad breast and hips. Her clothes were black -but in rags that hardly clung to her shoulders and waist. -She was barely five and twenty, but had six young children -about her, one in a cradle by the hearth and another still -crawling at her feet. Her only embarrassment came -when I asked to pay for my tea—she began adding up the -cost, a pennyworth of bread and butter, a halfpennyworth -of tea, etc.! The kitchen consisted simply of a large -grate and baking oven, plain tables and chairs on a flagged -floor. But the sitting-room was a museum—with photographs -of a volunteer corps, of friends and relations on -the wall over the fire; foxgloves in jam-pots surrounded -by green crinkled paper in the fireplace; on the mantelpiece, -cheap little vases and scraps of ore and more photographs. -On the walls were three pictures: one of two -well-dressed children being timidly inspected by fallow -deer; another of a grandmother showing a book to a child -whose attention is diverted by the frolics of two kittens -at her side; and a third of Jesus, bleeding and crowned -with thorns, high on a cross over a marble city beneath a -romantic forest ridge, behind which was the conflagration -of a crimson sunset.</p> - -<p>Other sitting-rooms were similarly adorned, with the -addition of a picture of John Wesley as a child escaping<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span> -from the window of a burning house, with many anxious -men holding up their hands from below. The smell of -flowers and of sun-warmed furniture and old upholstery -mingles in such rooms.</p> - -<p>But the kitchens are often as charming as in Wales. I -remember one especially near Carn Galver. The farmhouse -was of whitened stone under a steep thatch. In -front were fuchsia trees in the corner of a stony yard; to -one side, the haystacks and piles of furze and bracken -and peat. The farmer’s wife was carrying peat on an -iron hook into the kitchen and I followed her. A pan -of yellow scalded cream stood inside. The fireplace was -a little room in itself, with seats at each side and a little -fire of wood and three upright turves in one corner of -the great stone hearth: over the fire the kettle boiled. -Horse ornaments of polished brass surmounted the fireplace. -The wallpaper had given up its pattern long since -to a smoky uneven gold; nailed to it were calendars and -lists of fairs and sales; against it were two small tables, -one to support a Bible and an almanac, the other spread -with a white cloth on which was a plate and a bowl of -cream. Behind the door and between it and the fire was -a high-backed settle of dark wood, with elbow-rests. The -floor was flagged and sanded. The light came in through -a little square window on to the Bible by the opposite -wall, and through the open door on to the figure of the -housewife, a woman of forty. A delicate white face -shone beneath a broad untrimmed straw hat that was tied -tightly under her chin so as to hide her ears and most of -her black hair. Her black skirt was kilted up behind; a -white apron contrasted with black shoes, black stockings -and black clothes. At first her face was hardly seen,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span> -not only because but a part of it emerged from the shell -of her hat, but because the spirit that emanated from it -was more than the colour and features and so much in -harmony with the sea and crag and moor and dolmen -of her land. It is evading an insuperable difficulty to say -that this spirit was not so much human as fay. It was -the spirit of which her milky complexion, the bright -black eyes, white teeth and fine red lips of her readily -smiling and naïvely watching fearless face, her slender -form, her light and rapid movements upon small feet, -were only the more obvious expressions. Her spirit -danced before her—not quite visibly, not quite audibly—as -she moved or spoke or merely smiled; if it could have -been seen it would have been a little singing white flame -changing to blue and crimson in its perpetual flickering. -It was a spirit of laughter, of laughter unquenchable since -the beginning of time, of laughter in spite of and because -of all things, the laughter of life like a jewel in desolate -places. It was a spirit most ancient and yet childlike, -birdlike: it belonged to a world outside any which other -human beings ever seemed to touch, but the laughter in -it made it friendly, for it was far deeper than humour, it -was gaiety of heart. Her goings to and fro on those light -feet had the grace, quickness, suddenness of a bird, of a -wren that slips from twig to twig and jets out its needle -of song, of a moorhen flicking its tail and hooting sharply. -Her laugh startled and delighted like the laugh of the -woodpecker as it leaps across the glades—like the whistling -of birds up amongst the dark clouds and the moon. But -most of all she called to mind the meadow pipit of her -own crags, that rises from green ledges out over the sea -and then, falling slantwise with body curved like a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span> -crescent, utters his passionate pulsating song, so rapid -and passionate that it seems impossible and unfit that it -should end except in death, yet suddenly ceasing as it -lands again upon the samphire or the thrift. The spirit -was as quicksilver in the corners of her eyes, as quicksilver -in the heart. Such a maid she must have been as the -bard would have thought to send out the thrush to woo -for him, when he heard the bird of ermine breast singing -from the new-leaved hazel at dawn, on the edge of a -brook among the steep woods—singing artfully with a -voice like a silver bell—solemnly, too, so as to seem to -be performing a sacrifice—and amorously, bringing balm -to lovers’ hearts and inspiring the bard to send by him a -message to the sun of all maidens that she, white as the -snow of the first winter night, should come out to the -green woods to him. She had lived for generations on -the moor, for generations upon generations, and this was -what she had gained from heather and furze and crag and -seawind and sunshine tempered by no trees—inextinguishable -laughter. But she was inarticulate. She milked the -cows, made butter, baked bread, kept the peat fire burning -and tended her children. When she talked, I asked for -more cream. Perhaps after several more generations have -passed she will be a poet and astonish the world with a -moorland laughter of words that endure.</p> - -<hr class="tb hidden" /> - -<p>Everything in that house was old or smooth and bright -with use, and the hollowed threshold of the doorway in -the sun put me in mind of a hundred old things and of -their goodliness to mortal eyes—the wrecked ship’s ribs, -their bolt-holes rusty, that stand among nettles as gate-posts—the -worn dark stones that rock to the tread among<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span> -the ripples of an umbrageous ford—many a polished stile -and gate—the group of rigid but still gracious bowery -thorns dotted with crimson haws in the middle of a -meadow, their holes and lower branches rubbed hard and -smooth and ruddy like iron by the cows—the ash staff -beginning to bend like its master, the old man upon the -roads who once wore scarlet and wound the horn for Mr. ——’s -hounds. Odd it is how old use sanctifies a little -thing. There was once a hut where a good man, but a -poor and a weak and unwise, stayed all one fair summer -and talked of English roads—he was a lord of the roads, -at least of South Country roads—and of ships, which -he knew. Now on the first night of his stay, needing -a candlestick he kicked off the top of a pointed wooden -paling, so as to make a five-angled piece on which he -stuck the candle in its own grease. All through his stay -he used the candlestick, when he read the <i>Divina Commedia</i> -and <i>Pantagruel</i> and <i>Henry Brocken</i> and recollected -airs of Italy and Spain, amidst the sound of nightjars and -two leafy streams: the light flickered out as he mused -about the open sea, calm but boundless and without -known harbour, on which he was drifting cheerfully, -regardless of Time, pied with nights and days. The hut -was burnt and the man went—to drown a little afterwards -with a hundred unlike himself in the sea—but -among nettle and dock the candlestick was picked up -safe. It had broken off straight and the simple shape -was pleasant; it was dark with age; along with the mound -and little pillar of wax remaining it had the shape of a -natural thing; and it was his.</p> - -<p>Animate as well as inanimate things are open to this -sanctification by age or use. I am not here thinking of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span> -ceremonious use—for which I have small natural respect, -so that I have been denied the power of appreciating -either a great religious pomp or the dancing of Mademoiselle -Genée. But some men, particularly sailors and -field labourers, but also navvies and others who work -heavily with their hands, have this glory of use. Their -faces, their clothes, their natures all appear to act and -speak harmoniously, so that they cause a strong impression -of personality which is to be deeply enjoyed in a world -of masks, especially of black clerical masks. One of -the best examples of this kind was a gamekeeper who -daily preceded me by twenty or thirty yards in a morning -walk up through a steep wood of beeches. He was a short, -stiffly-built and stoutish man who wore a cap, thick skirted -coat and breeches, leather gaiters and heavy boots, all -patched and stained, all of nearly the same colour as his -lightish-brown hair and weathered skin, but not so dark -as the gun over his shoulder. The shades of this colour -were countless and made up like the colour of a field -of ripe wheat, which they would have resembled had they -not been liberally dusted all over, just as his brown beard -was grizzled. He went slowly up, swinging slightly at -the shoulders and always smoking a pipe of strong shag -tobacco of which the fumes hovered in the moist air with -inexpressible sweetness and a good brown savour: if I may -say so, the fit emanation of the brown woodland man -who, when he stood still, looked like the stump of a tree.</p> - - - -<div class="chapter"> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span></p> - - - - - - -<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER X<br /> - -<span class="smaller">SUMMER—SUSSEX</span></h2> -</div> - - -<p>Far up on the Downs the air of day and night is -flavoured by honeysuckle and new hay. It is good to -walk, it is good to lie still; the rain is good and so is the -sun; and whether the windy or the quiet air be the better -let us leave to a December judgment to decide. One day -the rain falls and there is no wind, and all the movement -is in the chaos of the dark sky; and thus is made the -celestial fairness of an earth that is brighter than the -heavens; for the green and lilac of the grasses and the -yellow of the goat’s-beard flowers glow, and the ripening -corn is airy light. But next day the sun is early hot. -The wet hay steams and is sweet. The beams pour into -a southward coombe of the hills and the dense yew is -warm as a fruit-wall, so that the utmost of fragrance is -extracted from the marjoram and thyme and fanned by the -coming and going of butterflies; and in contrast with this -gold and purple heat on flower and wing, through the -blue sky and along the hill-top moist clouds are trooping, -of the grey colour of melting snow. The great shadows -of the clouds brood long over the hay, and in the darker -hollows the wind rustles the dripping thickets until mid-day. -On another morning after night rain the blue sky -is rippled and crimped with high, thin white clouds by -several opposing breezes. Vast forces seem but now to -have ceased their feud. The battle is over, and there are -all the signs of it plain to be seen; but they have laid -down their arms, and peace is broad and white in the sky,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span> -but of many colours on the earth—for there is blue of -harebell and purple of rose-bay among the bracken and -popping gorse, and heather and foxglove are purple above -the sand, and the mint is hoary lilac, the meadow-sweet -is foam, there is rose of willow-herb and yellow of fleabane -at the edge of the water, and purple of gentian and -cistus yellow on the Downs, and infinite greens in those -little dense Edens which nettle and cow-parsnip and -bramble and elder make every summer on the banks of -the deep lanes. A thousand swifts wheel as if in a fierce -wind over the highest places of the hills, over the great -seaward-looking camp and its three graves and antique -thorns, down to the chestnuts that stand about the rickyards -in the cornland below.</p> - -<p>These are the hours that seem to entice and entrap the -airy inhabitants of some land beyond the cloud mountains -that rise farther than the farthest of downs. Legend -has it that long ago strange children were caught upon the -earth, and being asked how they had come there, they -said that one day as they were herding their sheep in a -far country they chanced on a cave; and within they -heard music as of heavenly bells, which lured them on -and on through the corridors of that cave until they -reached our earth; and here their eyes, used only to a -twilight between a sun that had set for ever and a night -that had never fallen, were dazed by the August glow, -and lying bemused they were caught before they could -find the earthly entrance to their cave. Small wonder -would this adventure be from a region no matter how -blessed, when the earth is wearing the best white wild -roses or when August is at its height.</p> - -<p>The last hay-waggon has hardly rolled between the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span> -elms before the reaper and the reaping-machines begin -to work. The oats and wheat are in tents over all the -land. Then, then it is hard not to walk over the brown -in the green of August grass. There is a roving spirit -everywhere. The very tents of the corn suggest a -bivouac. The white clouds coming up out of the yellow -corn and journeying over the blue have set their faces -to some goal. The traveller’s-joy is tangled over the -hazels and over the faces of the small chalk-pits. The -white beam and the poplar and the sycamore fluttering -show the silver sides of their leaves and rustle farewells. -The perfect road that goes without hedges under elms -and through the corn says, “Leave all and follow.” How -the bridges overleap the streams at one leap, or at three, -in arches like those of running hounds! The far-scattered, -placid sunsets pave the feet of the spirit with many -a road to joy; the huge, vacant halls of dawn give a sense -of godlike power.</p> - -<p>But it is hard to make anything like a truce between -these two incompatible desires, the one for going on and -on over the earth, the other that would settle for ever, -in one place as in a grave and have nothing to do with -change. Suppose a man to receive notice of death, it -would be hard to decide whether to walk or sail until the -end, seeing no man, or none but strangers; or to sit—alone—and -by thinking or not thinking to make the -change to come as little as is permitted. The two desires -will often painfully alternate. Even on these harvest days -there is a temptation to take root for ever in some corner -of a field or on some hill from which the world and the -clouds can be seen at a distance. For the wheat is as -red as the most red sand, and up above it tower the elms,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span> -dark prophets persuading to silence and a stillness like their -own. Away on the lesser Downs the fields of pale oats -are liquid within their border of dark woods; they also -propose deep draughts of oblivion and rest. Then, again, -there is the field—the many fields—where a regiment of -shocks of oats are ranked under the white moon between -rows of elms on the level Sussex land not far from the -sea. The contrast of the airy matter underfoot and the -thin moon overhead, with the massy dark trees, as it were, -suspended between; the numbers and the order of the -sheaves; their inviolability, though protected but by the -gateway through which they are seen—all satisfy the -soul as they can never satisfy the frame. Then there are -the mists before heat which make us think of autumn or -not, according to our tempers. All night the aspens have -been shivering and the owls exulting under a clear full -moon and above the silver of a great dew. You climb -the steep chalk slope, through the privet and dog-wood -coppice; among the scattered junipers—in this thick -haze as in darkness they group themselves so as to make -fantastic likenesses of mounted men, animals, monsters; -over the dead earth in the shade of the broad yews, and -thence suddenly under lightsome sprays of guelder-rose -and their cherry-coloured berries; over the tufted turf; -and then through the massed beeches, cold and dark as a -church and silent; and so out to the level waste cornland -at the top, to the flints and the clay. There a myriad -oriflammes of ragwort are borne up on all stems of equal -height, straight and motionless, and near at hand quite -clear, but farther away forming a green mist until, -farther yet, all but the flowery surface is invisible, and -that is but a glow. The stillness of the green and golden<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span> -multitudes under the grey mist, perfectly still though a -wind flutters the high tops of the beech, has an immortal -beauty, and that they should ever change does not enter -the mind which is thus for the moment lured happily into -a strange confidence and ease. But the sun gains power -in the south-east. It changes the mist into a fleeting -garment, not of cold or of warm grey, but of diaphanous -gold. There is a sea-like moan of wind in the half-visible -trees, a wavering of the mist to and fro until it is dispersed -far and wide as part of the very light, of the blue -shade, of the colour of cloud and wood and down. As -the mist is unwoven the ghostly moon is disclosed, and a -bank of dead white clouds where the Downs should be. -Under the very eye of the veiled sun a golden light and -warmth begins to nestle among the mounds of foliage at -the surface of the low woods. The beeches close by have -got a new voice in their crisp, cool leaves, of which every -one is doing something—cool, though the air itself is -warm. Wood-pigeons coo. The white cloud-bank gives -way to an immeasurable half-moon of Downs, some bare, -some saddle-backed with woods, and far away and below, -out of the ocean of countless trees in the southern veil, a -spire. It is a spire which at this hour is doubtless moving -a thousand men with a thousand thoughts and hopes and -memories of men and causes, but moves me with the -thought alone that just a hundred years ago was buried -underneath it a child, a little child whose mother’s mother -was at the pains to inscribe a tablet saying to all who pass -by that he was once “an amiable and most endearing -child.”</p> - -<p>And what nights there are on the hills. The ash-sprays -break up the low full moon into a flower of many<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span> -sparks. The Downs are heaved up into the lighted sky—surely -they heave in their tranquillity as with a slowly -taken breath. The moon is half-way up the sky and -exactly over the centre of the long curve of Downs; just -above them lies a long terrace of white cloud, and at their -feet gleams a broad pond, the rest of the valley being -utterly dark and indistinguishable, save a few scattered -lamps and one near meadow that catches the moonlight -so as to be transmuted to a lake. But every rainy leaf -upon the hill is brighter than any of the few stars above, -and from many leaves and blades hang drops as large and -bright as the glowworms in their recesses. Larger by a -little, but not brighter, are the threes and fours of lights -at windows in the valley. The wind has fallen, but a -mile of woods unlading the rain from their leaves make -a sound of wind, while each separate drop can be heard -from the nearest branches, a noise of rapt content, as if -they were telling over again the kisses of the shower. -The air itself is heavy as mead with the scent of yew and -juniper and thyme.</p> - - - -<div class="chapter"> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span></p> - - - - - - -<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER XI<br /> - -<span class="smaller">HAMPSHIRE—AN UMBRELLA MAN</span></h2> -</div> - - -<p>A beggar is a rich man on some of these August days, -especially one I know, whom first I met some Augusts -ago now. A fine Sunday afternoon had sprinkled the -quiet and thinly-peopled land with black-dressed men and -white-dressed women, the older married couples and their -trains of children keeping chiefly to the roads and most -straightforward paths, the younger, with one child or -none, choosing rather the green lanes, while the lovers -and the boys found out tall hedge-sides and the footpaths -across which more than one year’s growth of hazel had -spread, so that the shortest of the maids must stoop. -Many showers following a dry season made miles of the -country as clean and fragrant as a garden. Honeysuckle -and privet were in every hedge with flowers that bring a -thrill of summer bridals on their scent. The brisk wind -was thymy from the Downs. The ragwort was in its -glory; it rose tall as a man in one straight leap of dark-foliaged -stem, and then crowned itself in the boldest and -most splendid yellows derived from a dark golden disc -and almost lemon rays; it was as if Apollo had come -down to keep the flocks of a farmer on these chalk hills -and his pomp had followed him out of the sky. A few -birds still sang; one lark now and then, a cirl-bunting -among the topmost haws of a thorn, chiffchaffs in the -bittersweet and hazel of the little copses.</p> - -<p>There was apparently comfort, abundance and quiet<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span> -everywhere. They were seen in the rickyards where -grand haystacks, newly thatched, stood around ancient -walnut-trees. Even the beeches had a decorous look in -their smooth boles and perfect lavish foliage. The little -patches of flowery turf by the roadside and at corners -were brighter and warmer than ever, as the black bees -and the tawny skipper butterflies flew from bloom to -bloom of the crimson knapweed. Amplest and most -unctuous of all in their expression of the ceremonious -leisure of the day and the maturity of the season were -the cart-horses. They leaned their large heads benignly -over the rails or gates; their roan or chestnut flanks were -firm and polished; manes, tails and fetlocks spotless; now -and then they lifted up their feet and pressed their toes -into the ground, showing their enormous shoes that shone -and were of girth sufficient to make a girdle for the -lightest of the maids passing by.</p> - -<p>Sunday with not too strict a rod of black and white -ruled the land and made it all but tedious except in the -longest of the green lanes, which dipped steeply under -oaks to a brook muffled in leaves and rose steeply again, -a track so wet in spring—and full of the modest golden -green of saxifrage flowers—that only the hottest Sunday -ever saw it disturbed except by carter and horses. In a -hundred yards the oak-hidden windings gave the traveller -a feeling of reclusion as if he were coiled in a spool; very -soon a feeling of possession ripened into one of armed -tyranny if another’s steps clattered on the stones above. -Sometimes in a goodly garden a straight alley of shadows -leads away from the bright frequented borders to—we -know not quite whither, and perhaps, too much delighted -with half-sad reverie, never learn, smother even the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span> -guesses of fancy, lest they should bring some old unpleasant -truth in their train; but if the fancy will thread -the alley and pass the last of the shadows it is into some -such lane as this that it would gladly emerge, to come at -last upon the pure wild. It seemed that I had come -upon the pure wild in this lane, for in a bay of turf -alongside the track, just large enough for a hut and -thickly sheltered by an oak, though the south-west sun -crept in, was a camp. Under the oak and at the edge -of the tangled bramble and brier and bracken was a low -purple light from those woodside flowers, self-heal and -wood-betony. A perambulator with a cabbage in it stood -at one corner; leaning against it was an ebony-handled -umbrella and two or three umbrella-frames; underneath -it an old postman’s bag containing a hammer and other -tools. Close by stood half a loaf on a newspaper, several -bottles of bright water, a black pot of potatoes ready for -boiling, a tin of water steaming against a small fire of -hazel twigs. Out on the sunny grass two shirts were -drying. In the midst was the proprietor, his name revealed -in fresh chalk on the side of his perambulator: -“John Clark, Hampshire.”</p> - -<p>He had spent his last pence on potatoes and had -been given the cabbage. No one would give him work -on a Sunday. He had no home, no relations. Being deaf, -he did not look for company. So he stood up, to get dry -and to think, think, think, his hands on his hips, while -he puffed at an empty pipe. During his meditation a -snail had crawled half-way up his trousers, and was now -all but down again. He was of middle height and build, -the crookedest of men, yet upright, like a branch of -oak which comes straight with all its twistings. His head<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span> -was small and round, almost covered by bristly grey hair -like lichen, through which peered quiet blue eyes; -the face was irregular, almost shapeless, like dough being -kneaded, worn by travel, passion, pain, and not a few -blows; where the skin was visible at all through the -hair it was like red sandstone; his teeth were white and -strong and short like an old dog’s. His rough neck -descended into a striped half-open shirt, to which was -added a loose black waistcoat divided into thin perpendicular -stripes by ribs of faded gold; his trousers, loose -and patched and short, approached the colour of a hen -pheasant; his bare feet were partly hidden by old black -boots. His voice was hoarse and, for one of his enduring -look, surprisingly small, and produced with an effort and -a slight jerk of the head.</p> - -<p>He was a Sussex man, born in the year 1831, on June -the twenty-first (it seemed a foppery in him to remember -the day, and it was impossible to imagine with what -ceremony he had remembered it year by year, during half -a century or near it, on the roads of Sussex, Kent, Surrey -and Hampshire). His mother was a Wild—there were -several of them buried not far away under the carved -double-headed tombstones by the old church with the -lancet windows and the four yews. He was a labourer’s -son, and he had already had a long life of hoeing and -reaping and fagging when he enlisted at Chatham. He -had kept his musket bright, slept hard and wet, and -starved on thirteenpence a day, moving from camp to -camp every two years. He had lost his youth in battle, -for a bullet went through his knee; he lay four months -in hospital, and they took eighteen pieces of bone out of -his wound—he was still indignant because he was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span> -described as only “slightly wounded” when he was discharged -after a “short service” of thirteen years. He -showed his gnarled knee to explain his crookedness. -Little he could tell of the battle except the sobbing of -the soldier next to him—“a London chap from Haggerston -way. Lord! he called for his mother and his God -and me to save him, and the noise he made was worse -than the firing and the groaning of the horses, and I was -just thinking how I could stop his mouth for him when a -bullet hits me, and down I goes like a baby.”</p> - -<p>He had been on the road forty years. For a short time -after his discharge he worked on the land and lived in a -cottage with his wife and one child. The church bells -were beginning to ring, and I asked him if he was going -to church. At first he said nothing, but looked down at -his striped waistcoat and patched trousers; then, with a -quick violent gesture of scorn, he lifted up his head and -even threw it back before he spoke. “Besides,” he said, -“I remember how it was my little girl died——My -little girl, says I, but she would have been a big handsome -woman now, forty-eight years old on the first of -May that is gone. She was lying in bed with a little bit -of a cough, and she was gone as white as a lily, and I -went in to her when I came home from reaping. I saw -she looked bad and quiet-like—like a fish in a hedge—and -something came over me, and I caught hold of both her -hands in both of mine and held them tight, and put my -head close up to hers and said, ‘Now look here, Polly, -you’ve got to get well. Your mother and me can’t stand -losing you. And you aren’t meant to die; such a one -as you be for a lark.’ And I squeezed her little hands, and -all my nature seemed to rise up and try to make her get<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span> -well. Polly she looked whiter than ever and afraid; -I suppose I was a bit rough and dirty and sunburnt, for -’twas a hot harvest and ’twas the end of the second week -of it, and I was that fierce I felt I ought to have had my -way.... All that night I thought I had done a wrong -thing trying to keep her from dying that way, and I tell -you I cried in case I had done any harm by it.... That -very night she died without our knowing it. She was a -bonny maid, that fond of flowers. The night she was -taken ill she was coming home with me from the Thirteen -Acre, where I’d been hoeing the mangolds, and she had -picked a rose for her mother. All of a sudden she looks -at it and says, ‘It’s gone, it’s broke, it’s gone, it’s gone, -gone, gone,’ and she kept on, ‘It’s broke, it’s gone, it’s -gone,’ and when she got home she ran up to her mother, -crying, ‘The wild rose is broke, mother; broke, gone, -gone,’ she says, just like that,” said the old man, in a -high finical voice more like that of a bird than a child....</p> - -<p>“Then my old woman—well, she was only a bit of -a wench too; seventeen when we were married—she -took ill and died within a week after.... There was a -purpose in it.... It was then the end of harvest. I -spent all my wages down at the Fighting Cocks, and -then I set out to walk to Mildenhall in Wiltshire, where -my wife came from. On the way I met a chap I had -quarrelled with in Egypt, and he says to me, ‘Hullo, -Scrammy-handed Jack,’ with a sort of look, and I, not -thinking what I did, I set about him, and before I knew it -he was lying there as might be dead, and I went and gave -myself up, and I don’t mind saying that I wished I might -be hanged for it. However, I did six months. That was -how I came to be in the umbrella line. I took up with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span> -a chap who did a bit of tinkering and umbrella-mending -and grinding in the roving way, and a job of hoeing or -mowing now and then. He died not so very long after -in the year of the siege of Paris, and I have been alone -ever since. Nor I haven’t been to church since, any more -than a blackbird would go and perch on the shoulder of -one of those ladies with feathers and wings and a bit of a -fox in their hats.”</p> - -<p>Labourer, soldier, labourer, tinker, umbrella man, he -had always wandered, and knew the South Country -between Fordingbridge and Dover as a man knows his -garden. Every village, almost every farmhouse, especially -if there were hops on the land, he knew, and could see -with his blue eyes as he remembered them and spoke their -names. I never met a man who knew England as he -did. As he talked of places his eyes were alight and -turned in their direction, and his arm stretched out to -point, moving as he went through his itinerary, so that -verily, wherever he was, he seemed to carry in his head -the relative positions of all the other places where he had -laboured and drunk and lit his solitary fire. “Was you -ever at H——?” he said, pointing to the Downs, through -which he seemed to see H—— itself. “General ——, that -commanded us, lived there. He died there three years -ago at the age of eighty-eight, and till he died I was -always sure of a half-crown if I called there on a Christmas -Eve, as I generally managed to do.” Of any place -mentioned he could presently remember something significant—the -words of a farmer, a song, a signboard, a wonderful -crop, the good ale—the fact that forty-nine years -ago the squire used to go to church in a smock frock. -All the time his face was moved with free and broad<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span> -expressions as he thought and remembered, like an -animal’s face. Living alone and never having to fit himself -into human society, he had not learnt to keep his face -in a vice. He was returning—if the grave was not too -near at the age of seventy-seven—to a primeval wildness -and simplicity. It was a pleasure to see him smoke—to -note how it eased his chest—to see him spit and be the -better for it. The outdoor life had brought him -rheumatism, but a clear brain also and a wild purity, a -physical cleanliness too, and it was like being with a well-kept -horse to stand beside him; and this his house was -full of the scent of the bracken growing under the oaks. -Earth had not been a kind but a stern mother, like some -brawny full-bosomed housewife with many children, -who spends all her long days baking and washing, and -making clothes, and tending the sick one, and cutting -bread and pouring out tea, and cuffing one and cuddling -another and listening to one’s tale, and hushing their -unanimous chatter with a shout or a bang of her enormous -elbow on the table. The blows of such a one are shrewd, -but they are not as the sweetness of her nursing voice for -enduring in the memory of bearded men and many-childed -women.</p> - -<p>Once or twice again I met him in later summers near -the same place. The last time he had been in the infirmary, -and was much older. His fire was under the -dense shelf of a spruce bough in a green deserted road -worn deep in the chalk, blocked at both ends, and trodden -by few mortal feet. Only a few yards away, under -another spruce, lay a most ancient sheep who had apparently -been turned into the lane to browse at peace. She -was lame in one leg, and often fed as she knelt. Her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span> -head was dark grey and wise, her eyes pearly green and -iridescent with an oblong pupil of blackish-blue, quiet, yet -full of fear; her wool was dense but short and of a cinder -grey; her dark horny feet were overgrown from lack of -use. She would not budge even when a dog sniffed at -her, but only bowed her head and threatened vainly to -butt. She was huge and heavy and content, though -always all alone. As she lay there, her wool glistening -with rain, I had often wondered what those eyes were -aware of, what part she played in the summer harmonies -of night and day, the full night heavens and cloudless -noon, storm and dawn, and the long moist heat of dewy -mornings. She was now shorn, and the old man watched -her as he drank the liquor in which a cabbage and a piece -of bacon had been boiled. “I often thinks,” he said, -“that I be something like that sheep ... ‘slightly -wounded’ ... but not ‘short service’ now ... haha! -... left alone in this here lane to browse a bit while -the weather’s fine and folks are kind.... But I don’t -know but what she is better off. Look there,” he said, -pointing to a wound which the shearer had made in one of -her nipples, where flies clustered like a hideous flower of -crape, “I have been spending this hour and more flicking -the flies off her.... Nobody won’t do that for me—unless -I come in for five shillings a week Old Age Pension. -But I reckon that won’t be for a roving body like -me without a letter-box.” In the neighbouring field a -cart-horse shook herself with a noise of far-off thunder -and laughed shrilly and threw up her heels and raced along -the hedge. A bee could be seen going in and out of the -transparent white flowers of convolvulus. The horse had -her youth and strength and a workless day before her; the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span> -bee its business, in which was its life, among sunbeams -and flowers; and they were glad. The old man smacked -his lips as he drained the salty broth, tried three times to -light his empty pipe and then knocked out the ashes and -spat vigorously, and took a turn up the lane alone in the -scent of the bracken.</p> - - - -<div class="chapter"> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span></p> - - - - - - -<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER XII<br /> - -<span class="smaller">CHILDREN OF EARTH—HAMPSHIRE AND SUSSEX</span></h2> -</div> - - -<p>At the end of the lane, at the head of one of the -beechen chalky coombes, just where the beeches cease -and the flinty clay begins, stands a thatched cottage under -five tall ash-trees. A grassy lane runs by, but on three -sides the place is surrounded by huge naked concave -sweeps of grey ploughland which take the February -sunshine and cloud shadow as delicately as beaten silver. -The walls are of grey-white soft stone, but only a little -of them is visible, because the steep thatch sweeps almost -to the ground and overhangs the gables, in each of which -is a small window and under one a door. In hot summer -or windy winter, if the field happens to be without a crop, -the earth is of the same colour as the thatch, and the -cottage looks as if it were the work—like a mole-hill—of -some creature that has worked underground and risen -up just there and rested, peering out of the two dark -windows upon the world. It is impossible to find any -point of view from which any house can be seen along -with this, except one—the ash-trees, the tall hazels of the -lane, or the swelling fields hide them away. But the -pewits loop their flight every spring over and round about -the cottage, and the dark eyes under the thatch can -always see a hare, and often half-a-dozen. Whether the -ashes are purple in spring, yellow in autumn or grey in -winter, whether the surrounding fields are bare, or green -with turnips, or yellow with charlock, or empurpled gold -with ripe wheat, the cottage is always the same stubborn,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span> -dull, simple mound raised up out of the earth. The -one other house is not so high; nor has it eyes; nor do -an old man and a girl and two children go in and out of -it; it is, in fact, not a house of the living, but of the dead, -a round tumulus at the edge of the hill.</p> - -<p>The grey mound of the dead and the grey house of the -living are at their best in the midst of winter and in the -midst of summer. Standing upon the tumulus in -the north-west wind, the cottage could be seen huddled -under the lashing trees. Many a thousand beech-trees -on the steep slopes below gave out a roar, and it was a -majestic position to be up there, seeing and feeling that -the strong wind was scouring the world with a stream -miles deep and miles wide. Far underneath, two beechen -promontories with bald white brows projected into the -vast valley; not really much lower than the hill of the -tumulus, but seeming so in that more than Amazonian -stream of air. Beyond these promontories the broad land -was washed bright and clear. Nearer at hand the thrice -cleaned traveller’s-joy was as silken foam surging upon -the surface of black yews and olive hazels. The kestrel -swayed and lunged in his flight. Branches gleamed, hard -and nervously moving. Rain-pools glittered, and each -brittle stem and flower of a dead plant, each grass-blade -and brown lock of beech or oak-leaf, gave out its little -noise to join the oceanic murmur of the earth. Now -and then a dead leaf took flight, rose high and went out -over the valley till it was invisible, never descending, in -search of the moon. Near the horizon a loose white -drift went rapidly just over the summits of the highest -woods; but in the upper air were the finest flowers of the -wind—hard white flowers of cloud, flowers and mad<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span> -tresses and heaven-wide drapery of gods, and some small -and white like traveller’s-joy, as if up there also they -travelled and knew the houseless joy along the undulating -highway of the deep wind. And the little house -was as a watch-tower planted in the middle swirl of the -current that was scouring valley and wood and sky and -water and, as far as it could, the dull eyes and duller -brains of men.</p> - -<p>In summer I saw it at the end of one of those days of -sun and wind and perfectly clear air when the earth -appears immensely heavy and great and strong—so that -for a moment it is possible to know the majesty of its -course in space—and the sheep very light, like mere -down, as they crawl in a flock over the grass. Swathes -and wisps of white cloud were strewn over the high blue -sky as if by haymakers. But the lanes were deep, and for -miles at a time nearly shut out the sky, and all the day -the lanes were empty and wholly mine. Here the high -banks were thickly grown with wild parsnip, and its -umbels of small yellow-green flowers, fragrant and a little -over-sweet, were alive and, as it were, boiling over with -bees and the sunniest flies. There the hazel was laced with -white bryony, whose leaves and pale tendrils went hovering -and swimming and floating over the hedge. In one -place an elder-tree stood out of the hedge, stiff, with few -branches, and every leaf upon them red as a rose. Wherever -there was a waste strip beside the road the tall -yellow ragwort grew densely, each of the nearer flowers -as hard and clear as brass, the farther ones dimly glowing -and half lost in the green mist of their leaves and the -haze of the brightness of their multitudes. Where the -road changed into an unused lane the grass was tall, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span> -under the hazels, yet fully seen, were the wild basil and -marjoram and centaury and knapweed and wood-betony, -and over them hung moths of green crimson-spotted silk. -There, too, were the plants that smell most of the dry -summer—the white parsleys and the white or rosy cow-parsnip, -the bedstraws white and yellow, the yellow mugwort. -Now and then the hedges gave way and on either -hand was open turf; sloping steep and rough on one side, -grooved by ancient paths of men and cattle, dotted by -thorns, with the freshly flowering traveller’s-joy over -them, ash-trees at the top; on the other side, level, skirted -by cloudy wych-elms and having at one corner a white -inn half shadowed by a walnut, and two sycamores and -cattle below them; and at another, a stately autumnal -house veiled by the cedars and straight yews on its darkly -glowing lawn.</p> - -<p>All these things I saw as if they had been my own, -as if I were going again slowly through old treasures -long hidden away, so that they were memoried and yet -unexpected. Nothing was too small to be seen, and -ascending the chalk hill among the beeches every white -flint was clear on the sward, each in its different shape—many -chipped as the most cunning chisel would be proud -to chip them; one, for example, carved by the loss of, -two exquisitely curved and balanced flakes into the likeness -of a moth’s expanded upper wings.</p> - -<p>A dark beech alley, paved with the gold and green of -moss and walled by crumbling chalk, brought me to the -tumulus. There lay the old house in shadow, its ash -crests lighted yellow by horizontal beams that caught -here the summit of a wood, and there the polished grass -stems on a rising field. It was the one house, and at that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span> -hour it gathered to itself all that can be connected with -a home. It was alone, but its high cool thatch was full -of protection and privacy, sufficient against sun or rain -or wind or frost, yet impregnated with free air and light. -Its ash-trees communed with the heavens and the setting -sun. The wheat glowed at its gates. The dark masses -of the lower woods enhanced by a touch of primeval -gloom and savagery the welcoming expression of the -house. Slowly the light died out of the ash-tops and the -wheat turned to a mist. The wood seemed to creep up -close and lay its shadows over the house. But, stronger -than the wood and the oncoming tide of night that -enveloped it, the spirits of roof and wall and hearth were -weaving a spell about the house to guard it, so that it -looked a living, breathing, dreaming thing. Nimble, -elvish, half-human but wholly kind small spirits I fancied -them, creeping from corners in stone and thatch and -rafter, at war with those that dwelt in lonely and dark -places, that knew not fire and lamp and human voices -save as invaders. For a little while there was a pause, -a suspense, a hesitation—Could the small spirits win?—Were -not the woods older and more mighty?—Was not -that long black bar of cloud across the cold west something -sinister, already engulfing the frail white moon? -But suddenly, as if the life of the house had found a -powerful voice, one eye in the nearer gable was lit by -a small lamp and a figure could be guessed behind it. -The first Promethean spark of fire stolen from the gods -was hardly a more signal victory than that at which the -house and I rejoiced when the white light glimmered -across the corn. It seemed the birth of light.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span></p> - -<hr class="tb hidden" /> - -<p>The man who lives under that roof and was born there -seventy years ago is like his house. He is short and -immensely broad, black-haired, with shaved but never -clean-shaven face creased by a wide mouth and long, -narrow black eyes—black with a blackness as of cold, -deep water that had never known the sun but only the -candle-light of discoverers. His once grey corduroys and -once white slop are stained and patched to something like -the colour of the moist, channelled thatch and crumbling -“clunch” of the stone walls. He wears a soft felt hat -with hanging broad brim of darker earthy hues; it might -have been drawn over his face and ears in his emergence -from his native clay and flint. Only rarely does his eye—one -eye at a time—gloom out from underneath, always -accompanied by a smile that slowly puckers the wrinkled -oak-bark of his stiff cheeks. His fingers, his limbs, his -face, his silence, suggest crooked oak timber or the -gnarled stoles of the many times polled ash. It is barely -credible that he grew out of a child, the son of a woman, -and not out of the earth itself, like the great flints that -work upwards and out on to the surface of the fields. -Doubtless he did, but like many a ruined castle, like his -own house, he has been worn to a part of the earth itself. -That house he will never give up except by force, to go -to workhouse or grave. They want him to go out for a -few days that it may be made more weather-tight; but -he fears the chances and prefers a rickety floor and -draughty wall. He is half cowman, half odd-job man—at -eight shillings a week—in his last days, mending -hedges, cleaning ditches, and carrying a sack of wheat -down the steep hill on a back that cannot be bent any -farther. Up to his knees in the February ditch, or cutting<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span> -ash-poles in the copse, he is clearly half converted into -the element to which he must return.</p> - -<p>When the underwood is for sale it is a pleasure to read -the notices fixed to the doors of barn and shed, with the -names of the copses and woods. At Penshurst lately, for -example, I saw these <span class="lock">names—</span></p> - -<ul> -<li>Black Hoath Wood.</li> -<li>Heronry Pond.</li> -<li>Marlpit Field.</li> -<li>Tapner’s Wood.</li> -<li>Ashour Farm.</li> -<li>Sidney’s Coppice.</li> -<li>Weir Field.</li> -<li>Well Place.</li> -</ul> - - -<p>I was back in Sidney’s time, remembering that genial -poem of Ben Jonson’s, “To Penshurst,” and especially -the <span class="lock">lines—</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Thy copse too, named of Gamage, thou hast there,</div> - <div class="verse">That never fails to serve thee season’d deer,</div> - <div class="verse">When thou wouldst feed or exercise thy friends.</div> - <div class="verse">The lower land, that to the river bends,</div> - <div class="verse">Thy sheep, thy bullocks, kine, and calves do feed;</div> - <div class="verse">The middle grounds thy mares and horses breed.</div> - <div class="verse">Each bank doth yield thee conies; and the tops</div> - <div class="verse">Fertile of wood, Ashore and Sidney’s copps,</div> - <div class="verse">To crown thy open table, doth provide</div> - <div class="verse">The purple pheasant with the speckled side, ...”</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p class="noindent">and so onward to that opulence and ease three centuries -<span class="lock">old—</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Then hath thy orchard fruit, thy garden flowers,</div> - <div class="verse">Fresh as the air, and new as are the hours.</div> - <div class="verse">The early cherry, with the later plum,</div> - <div class="verse">Fig, grape, and quince, each in his time doth come;</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span> - <div class="verse">The blushing apricot and woolly peach</div> - <div class="verse">Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach.</div> - <div class="verse">And though thy walls be of the country stone,</div> - <div class="verse">They’re reared with no man’s ruin, no man’s groan;</div> - <div class="verse">There’s none, that dwell about them, wish them down;</div> - <div class="verse">But all come in, the farmer and the clown;</div> - <div class="verse">And no one empty handed, to salute</div> - <div class="verse">Thy lord and lady, though they have no suit.</div> - <div class="verse">Some bring a capon, some a rural cake,</div> - <div class="verse">Some nuts, some apples; some that think they make</div> - <div class="verse">The better cheeses, bring them; or else send</div> - <div class="verse">By their ripe daughters, whom they would commend</div> - <div class="verse">This way to husbands; and whose baskets bear</div> - <div class="verse">An emblem of themselves, in plum or pear....”</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p>Almost to such a time as that does the old man carry -back the thoughts. His old master was the fifth in the -direct line to work one farm in the vale; he left money in -his will to pay for new smocks, all of the best linen, to be -worn by the labourers who should carry him to the grave.</p> - -<p>The old man has three companions under that roof. -The hand that lit the lamp is his daughter’s, the youngest -by the second wife, whom he married when he was fifty. -The other two are her children, and she is unmarried. -She earns no money except by keeping a few fowls and -bees. When the younger child was born—the old man -having to go six miles out at midnight for the parish -doctor—the married women commented: “There’s forgiveness -for the first, but not for the second; no”: for -the first showed indiscretion, carelessness, youth; the -second, helplessness. The old man can hardly leave the -children, and though he is deaf he will, when he is told -that the baby is crying, go to the room and listen carefully -for the pleasure of the infant voice. That voice means -colder winter nights for him and less cheer of meat and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span> -ale. But for all young life he has a passion equal to a -mother’s, so he laces up his boots and does not grieve. -See him in the dim outlying barn with the sick heifer -which is sure to die. The wet killed several in the open -field; this one is to die on dry hay. She lies with stiff, -high-ridged back, patient and motionless, except that her -ears move now and then like birds—they alone seem alive. -There is a deep blue gleam in her eyes. Her head is -stretched forward upon the ground. She is alone. -Through the open door the sunlight falls, and the swallows -fly in and out or hang twittering at the dark beams -over her head. Twice a day the cowman comes to the -door and salutes her with deep, slow voice, hearty and -blithe: “Hoho! Cowslip; how’s Cowslip?” He pulls -away the foul hay from under her and puts in fresh, -talking now in a high falsetto voice as to a child; he raises -her head that she may lap the bucket of gruel, still talking -unintelligible baby talk interlarded with her pretty -name. She holds up her head for a minute or two, -heartened by her moist lips and full stomach and that -friend’s voice. He stands in the doorway watching and -silent now, as her head slowly sinks down, and she sighs -while her limbs find their position of least pain. “She’s -going to die,” he mutters in the deep voice as he goes.</p> - -<p>A very different earth child, an artist, used to live in -a cottage at the foot of the opposite Downs. The village -itself, whether you saw it from its own street or from the -higher land, was wrought into such a rightness of form -as few other artists than Time ever achieve; it made a -music to which the hands unconsciously beat time. But -though apparently complete in itself, it was as part of a -huge and gentle harmony of sky, down and forest that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[205]</a></span> -the village was most fascinating. Like all beautiful things -in their great moments the whole scene was symbolic, -not only in the larger sense by expressing in an outward -and visible way an inward grace, but in the sense that it -gathered up into itself the meanings which many other -scenes only partly and in a scattered way expressed.</p> - -<p>Two roads of a serpentining form that was perpetually -alluring from afar climbed the Down from the village -and, skirting the forest, ended in the white mountains of -the moon. At the tail of one of these roads the artist -lived. His work still further enlarged the harmony of -sky and down and village. For a short time I used to -wonder why it was that when I entered his studio the -harmony was prolonged into something even more huge -and gentle than seemed to have been designed. How came -it that he could safely hang his pictures on the wall of -the Down, as practically they were hung?</p> - -<p>It is not enough to say merely that it was because they -did not, as some landscapes seem to do, enter into competition -with Nature. The spirit that raised and sculptured -the Downs, that entered the beech and made a -melody of its silent towering and branching, that kept the -sky above alive and beautiful with the massiveness of -mountains and the evanescence of foam, was also in this -man’s fingers. He was a great lover of these things, and -in his love for them combined the ecstasy of courtship -with the understanding of marriage. But he loved them -too well to draw and paint them. He was not of -those who tear themselves from a mistress to write a -sonnet on her face. No. He painted the images which -they implanted—such was their love of him and his of -them—in his brain. There many a metamorphosis as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[206]</a></span> -wonderful as Ovid’s was made. The beech-trees mingled -with the fantasies of the brain and brought forth holes that -are almost human forms, branches that are thoughts and -roots that are more than wood. Often, I think, he hardly -looked at Nature as he walked, except to take a careless -pleasure in the thymy winds, in the drama of light and -shade on the woods and hills, in the sound of leaves and -birds and water. Within him these things lived a new -life until they reached forms as different from their -beginnings as we are from Palæolithic man. They -attained to that beauty of which, as I have said, Nature -was so little jealous, by this evolution. Some of his -pictures of the leaf-dappled branch-work of beeches -always remind me of the efflorescence of frost on a -window-pane, and the comparison is not purely fantastic -but has a real significance.</p> - -<p>And yet the landscapes of this metamorphosis are not, -as might have been expected, decorations that have lost -all smell of earth and light of sun and breath of breeze. -Decorative they certainly are, and I know few pictures -which are less open to the accusation of being scraps from -Nature, which it is more impossible to think of extending -beyond the limits of the frame. But such is the personality -of the artist that all this refinement only made more -powerful than ever the spirit of the motionless things, -the trees, the pools, the hills, the clouds. Frankly, there -is a deep fund of what must narrowly, and for the -moment only, be called inhumanity in the artist, or he -could not thus have reinforced or intensified the inhumanity -of Nature. Consider, for example, his “Song of the -Nightingale.” Those woods are untrodden woods as -lonely as the sky. They are made for the nightingale’s<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></span> -song to rule in solitude under the crescent moon. No -lovers walk there. Mortal who enters there must either -a poet or a madman be.</p> - -<p>Look again at his “Castle in Spain,” how it is perched -up above that might of forest, like a child that has climbed -whence it can never descend. And the little house at the -edge of the high, dark wood—in “The Farm under the -Hill”—is as frail and timid as if it heard the roaring -of wild beasts, and the little white road winds into the -darkness as to death. So, too, with the children who -make a pretence of playing hoops at the edge of just -such another wood, though mortal has never come out of -it since the beginning of the world. The ship in the -“Fall of the Leaf” is subdued to the spirit of autumn -as is the poet subdued to the immense scenes of “Alastor.” -To introduce an elvish figure, as he has done, in “Will -o’ the Wisp” was an unnecessary aid to the elvishness -of the scene itself. Indeed, his human or fantastic figures -seem to be sometimes as much out of place as a Yankee -at the court of King Arthur, though there are two notable -exceptions—“The Sower” and “The Weed Burner”—both -figures towards which idolatry might be excusable, -so nobly do they represent labour in the field. And even -in “The Weed Burner” the boy seems bemused by the -motion and savour of the smoke that curdles up through -the autumn air. The picture of a forest pool is magical, -but it repudiates the fairy altogether. Nothing would be -more out of place here than the kind of sucking harlequin -or columbine which is commonly foisted upon us as a -fairy; for here is something more desirable, the very -forces which begot the fairies upon a different age from -ours. Even when he draws a house it is, I think, for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a></span> -the house’s sake, for the sake of whatever soul it has -acquired, which men cannot take away. Was there ever -such an inn as “The Wispers”? The landlord is dead, -the casks are dry, a rat has littered on the top stair of the -cellar, and the landlord <span class="lock">says—</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“’Tis late and cold, stir up the fire:</div> - <div class="verse">Sit close, and draw the table nigher;</div> - <div class="verse">Be merry, and drink wine that’s old,</div> - <div class="verse">A hearty medicine ’gainst a cold:</div> - <div class="verse">Your beds of wanton down the best,</div> - <div class="verse">Where you shall tumble to your rest;</div> - <div class="verse">I could wish you wenches too,</div> - <div class="verse">But I am dead, and cannot do.</div> - <div class="verse">Call for the best the house may ring,</div> - <div class="verse">Sack, white, and claret let them bring,</div> - <div class="verse">And drink apace, while breath you have;</div> - <div class="verse">You’ll find but cold drink in the grave:</div> - <div class="verse">Plover, partridge, for your dinner,</div> - <div class="verse">And a capon for the sinner,</div> - <div class="verse">You shall find ready when you’re up,</div> - <div class="verse">And your horse shall have his sup:</div> - <div class="verse">Welcome, welcome, shall fly round,</div> - <div class="verse">And I shall smile, though underground.”</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p>I like the inn, but the spider loves it, and his webs bar -the door against all but ghostly travellers. The barn, -again, with its doorway opening upon the summer night, -has a life of its own. The two figures at the door are -utterly dwarfed by its ancientness, its space, and the -infinite silence without.</p> - -<p>The picture in which there is most humanity is that of -a high wall, ruinous and overgrown. The deep gap in it -is tragical. But even here I am not sure that it is a -wall that was raised by hand of mason, and as to the -inhabitants who left it desolate I feel more doubtful still,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[209]</a></span> -I believe it was built in a dream, long ago lost in some -victory gained by the forest over men, and quite forgotten -until this artist thought it would be a happy lair for a -faun. He has not shown us the faun—I wish he had; -he ought to know what it was like—but that gap is its -gateway out from the forest into the dew of the river -lawns.</p> - -<p>It induces an awful sense of the infinite variety of -human character to think of the love of earth first in this -man and then in that cowman old. I wonder tolerance is -not deeper as well as wider than it is.</p> - - - -<div class="chapter"> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[210]</a></span></p> - - - - - - -<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER XIII<br /> - -<span class="smaller">AUGUST—GOING WEST—HAMPSHIRE AND WILTSHIRE</span></h2> -</div> - - -<p>Rain begins as I set out and mount under the beeches. -The sky is dark as a ploughed field, but the leaves overhead -are full of light like precious stones. The rain -keeps the eyes down so that they see one by one the little -things of the wayside, the strings of the grey-green and -of the scarlet bryony berries, the stony bark of the young -ash unveiled by the moving leaves, the million tall straight -shoots which the strong nature of ash and hazel has soared -into since the spring. Then follows field after field of -corn, of sheep among hurdled squares, of mustard in -flower, of grass, interrupted now and then by the massed -laurels and rhododendrons and the avenues of monkey -puzzles that announce the pleasure grounds of the rich. -It is a high land of too level clay, chiefly blest in that -it beholds the Downs, their saddles of woodland, and, -through the deepest passes, the sea and an island rising -out of it like an iceberg; and that it is traversed by the -Pilgrims’ Way, which gathers to itself Canterbury-bells -and marjoram under its hazels, and pours traveller’s-joy -cloudily over the ash and brier that overhang the side of -an old chalk pit, long, straight and even like a wall. Just -here are many grassy lanes between hazel and blackthorn -hedges. An old farmhouse with ivied chimneys and ten -blind windows in front stands bereaved with weedy -garden, but for miles the air sounds with poultry and -the building of bungalows in deal and iron for strangers.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[211]</a></span> -It is not a stranger that rides by. I think his fathers must -have been in this land when Wolf Hanger was not a -strange name for the beeches over the hill. He is a tall -straight man with long narrow face, clear, not too -irregular features, sallow complexion, black hair and black -drooping moustache, and flashing eyes as dark as privet -berries in autumn dews.</p> - -<p>Now it is a woodland country, of broad wooded common -and low undulating Downs crowned or fringed by woods: -this is “Swineherd’s County” according to the gypsies. -Houses are few and stand either well off the road or with -scarcely a dividing line between their gardens and the -commons from which they have been filched. Their -linen and red flannel flap under enormous beeches where -an old track makes its way betwixt them. The children -living here, the generations of them who have been bred -in the little flint house, are children of the woods, their -minds half made by the majestic but dark and deep-voiced -trees that stand over them day and night and by the -echoes—you may hear them summoning the echoes at -evening out of the glades and see them pause as if dazed -by the wild reply. Opposite the door is a close untrodden -tangle of brier and thorn and bramble under oaks where -the dead leaves of many autumns lie untouched even by -the wind—so dense is the underwood—that sighs continually -in the topmost boughs: at the edge nettles with -translucent leaves waver and nod above mossy banks. -Not far off is a Woodland Farm, a group of houses and -barns and sheds built of flint and wood and thatched, -aloof. A man enters one of the cavernous sheds with a -pail; a thick, bent, knotty man, with bushy dark hair and -beard and bright black eyes, a farmer, the son’s son of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[212]</a></span> -one who rebuilt the house when the woods were darker -and huger still. Life is a dark simple matter for him; -three-quarters of his living is done for him by the dead; -merely to look at him is to see a man live generations -thick, so to speak, and neither Nature nor the trumpery -modern man can easily disturb a human character of that -density. As I watch him going to and fro I lose sight -of everything away from his rude house and the tall -woods, because they and he are so powerful—he has the -trees as well as his ancestors at his back—and it is no -flight of fancy to see him actually cut off from all the -world except the house and woods, and yet holding his -own, able to keep his fire burning, his larder full, his -back covered and his house dry. I feel but a wraith as I -pass by. I wonder what there is worth knowing that he -does not know, with his bright eyes, bright long teeth, -stiff limbs capable of unceasing toil, and that look of -harmony with day and night. I see him looking on as -the wounded trooper—two hundred and fifty years, a -trifle, ago—drains the water just lifted from the well; -look at his gallant face, his delicate ardour as of another -race, bright dress, restless blue eyes, his helplessness after -the defeat in a cavalry fight about nothing at all. The -cornet rides away and the woodland fellow puts all his -nature into the felling of a beech as into an object worthy -of cold steel, and as he plies his axe he smiles at the thought -of that brave, that silly face and sleek hair. He smiles -to-day as he sees a youth go by with proud looks of -command, incapable, as he well understands, of commanding -anything except perhaps a wife or a groom or a -regiment of townsmen—yet his landlord.</p> - -<p>Rough grass and scattered thorns and lofty groups of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span> -mossy-pedestalled beeches lie on either side of the road, -and grassy tracks lead to thatched cottages in the woods. -A grey-clouded silver sky moves overhead. Along the -road the telegraph wires go humming the one shrill note -in this great harmony of men and woods and sky. -Beyond, a broad champaign of corn and grey grass heaves -from the woodland edge. The road is gay with red -polished fruit and equally red soft leaves, with darkest -purple and bronze and wine-red and green berries and -leaves, and beam foliage still pure green and white. So -high now are the unkempt hedges that the land is hid and -only the sky appears above the coloured trees: except at -a meeting of ways when a triangular patch of turf is -sacred to burdock, ragwort and thistle and—touching the -dust of the road—the lowly silverweed; an oak overhangs, -yet the little open space admits a vision of the -elephantine Downs going west in the rain. In a moment -the world is once again this narrow one of the high-hedged -lane, where I see and touch with the eye and enjoy -the shapes of each bole and branch in turn, their bone-like -shapes, their many colours of the wood itself, -wrinkled and grooved, or overlaid by pale green mould, -silver lichen or dark green moss. Each bend in the -road is different. At one all the leaves are yellow but -green-veined, the bramble, the hazel, the elder; and there -is a little chalk pit below, fresh white and overhung by -yew and the dark purple elder berries, small but distinct: -at another there is a maple of exquisite small leaves and -numerous accordingly, a fair-built tree in a lovely attitude -and surmounted by a plume, only a small plume, of -traveller’s-joy. In Swineherd’s County they call it -“Angel’s hair.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span></p> - -<p>Suddenly there is a village of thatched roofs, phlox in -the gardens, good spaces of green and of sycamore-trees -between one house and the next, and a green-weeded -crystal river pervading all with its flash and sound. The -anvil rings and the fire glows in the black smithy. The -wheel-wright’s timber leans outside his thatched shed -against an ancient elder, etherealized by lucent yellow -leaves. Before the inn a jolly ostler with bow legs and -purple neck washes the wheels of a cart, ever and anon -filling his pail from the stream and swishing the bright -water over the wheels as they spin. A decent white-haired -old man stands and watches, leaning on his stick -held almost at arm’s length so as to make an archway -underneath which a spaniel sprawls in the sun. The -men are all at the corn and he does not know what to do. -Can he read? asks the ostler, knowing the answer very -well. No! We all read now, chuckles the ostler as he -flings a pailful over the wheel. The old man is proud -at least to have lived into such a notable day: “Yes, -man reads now almost as well as master—quite as well. -They used to be dummies, the working class people, yes, -that they was. You can’t tell what will happen now.” -Meantime the ostler fills his pail and the old man having -too many thoughts to say any more, lays his blackthorn -on the bench and calls for his glass of fourpenny ale.</p> - -<p>Close by there is an entrance to the more open Downs. -The uncut hedges are so thick that the lane seems a -cutting through a wood, and soon it becomes a grassy -track of great breadth under ash-trees and amidst purple -dogwood and crimson-hearted traveller’s-joy, and finally -it is a long broad field full of wild carrot and scabious -through which many paths meander side by side until the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[215]</a></span> -last gate gives a view, under oak and hazel sprays, on to -the green undulations of hill and coombe, their sides -studded with juniper and thorn, with something of -oceanic breadth in the whole, as far as the utmost bound, -leagues away, where a line of small trees stands against -the sky in the manner of ships. The hedges in this -downland are low or broken. A few ricks stand at the -borders of stubble and grass. Sheep munch together in -square pens. There is no house, and the rain has wiped -out everything that moved save its own perpendicular -fringes waving along the hills. This solitude of grey -and brown is completed by the owner’s notice, on a frail -and tottering post: “Trespassers will be prosecuted with -the utmost rigour of the law.” Towards the farther -verge compact copses of beech begin to saddle the ridges -and invade the hollows so as to form cliffy dark sides to -the friths of pale stubble or turf amongst them. And -then the green way runs into a Roman road, and in the -twilight and rain I can see many other narrow ancient -tracks winding into the white road as straight as a sword, -losing themselves in it like children in a dragon’s mouth. -The turf alongside is mounded by tumuli; and against -the hedge a gypsy family pretend to shelter from the -windy rain; the man stands moody, holding the pony, -the women crouch with chins upon knees, the children -laugh and will not be still. They belong to the little -roads that are dying out: they hate the sword-like shelterless -road, the booming cars that go straight to the city in -the vale below. They are less at home there than the -swallows that haunt the leeward sides of the sycamores, -ever rushing up towards the trees and ever beaten back, -like children playing “I’m the king of the castle,” at the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[216]</a></span> -verge of the city. There, by the inn piano, soldiers and -their friends and women sing with vague pathos songs -about “Mother” and “Dear Love” and “Farewell” -and “Love is all” and “The girls,” while the streets -glitter and gurgle with rain. Just before night the sky -clears. It is littered with small dark clouds upon rose, -like rocks on a wild and solitary coast of after-tempest -calm, and it is infinitely remote and infinitely alluring. -Those clouds are the Islands of the Blest. Even so alluring -might be this life itself, this world, if I were out of it. -For a moment I fancy how I might lean and watch it all, -being dead. For a moment only, since the poverty of -death is such that we cannot hope from it such a gift of -contemplation from afar, cannot hope even that once out -of the world we may turn round and look at it and feel -that we are not of it any more, nor hope that we shall -know ourselves to be dead and be satisfied. Rain shrouds -the islands of the sky: the singers find them in their song.</p> - -<p>In the morning the ground is beautiful with blue light -from one white-clouded pane of sky that will not be -hidden by the tumultuous rain. Outside the city the -new thatch of the ricks shines pale in the sodden land, -which presently gives way to a great water with leaning -masts and a majestic shadowy sweep of trees down to the -flat shore, to level green marsh and bridges crossing the -streams that are announced by ripples in the sun, by -swishing sedge, by willows blenching. Beyond is forest -again. First, scattered cottages and little yellow apples -beaming pale on crooked trees; then solitudes of heather -and bracken, traversed and lighted by blue waters, ponds -and streams among flats of rushes; and beyond, at either -hand, woods on low and high land endlessly changing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[217]</a></span> -from brightness to gloom under windy clouds. The -roads are yellow, and oaks and beeches hang over them in -whispering companies. The wind reigns, in the high -magnificent onset of the clouds, in the surging trees, in -the wings of rooks and daws, in bowing sedges and cotton -grass, in quivering heather and grass, in rippling water, in -wildly flying linen; yet in the open there is a strange -silence because the roar in my ears as I walk deafens me -to all sound.</p> - -<p>White ponies graze by dark waters and stir the fragrance -of the bog myrtle. The rises of the heathery moor -are scarred yellow where the gravel is exposed. Sometimes -great beeches, plated with green lichen and grey, -wave their stiffening foliage overhead; or there is a group -of old hollies encircled by coeval ivy whose embraces -make them one, and both seem of stone. Sometimes the -yellow road runs green-edged among heather and gorse, -shadowed by pines that shake and plunge in the wind but -are mute. A white fungus shines damp in the purple -moor. There are a myriad berried hawthorns here, more -gorse, more heather and bracken. The tiny pools beneath -are blown into ripples like a swarming of bees, but the -infuriate streams cannot trouble the dark water and broad -lily leaves in their bays. Other pools again are tranquil -and lucid brown over submerged moss and pennywort -and fallen leaves, worlds to themselves with a spirit -indwelling in the pure element. Presently, denser trees -hold back the wind save in their tempestuous crests, and -now the road is carpeted with pine needles and nothing -can be seen or felt but the engulfing sound of wind and -rain. The pines are interrupted by tall bracken, hollies -and thorns, by necks of turf and isolated hawthorns<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[218]</a></span> -thereon; and far away the light after rain billows grandly -over the mounded forest. Many a golden stream pours -through the dark trees. Oaks succeed, closing in lichened -multitudes about a grassy-rutted ferny road, but -suddenly giving way to beeches pallid and huge. One -lies prone across the road, still green of leaf, having torn -up a mound of earth and bracken and bramble as large -as a house in its upheaval. Others have lost great -branches, and the mossy earth is ploughed by their fall. -They seem to have fought in the night and to be slumbering -with dreams of battle to come; and their titanic -passions keep far away the influence of the blue sky and -silver clouds that laugh out unconcerned after the rain.</p> - -<p>After them birches and birchlings grow out of the -heather backed by a solid wall of oaks. And again there -are many beeches over mossy golden turf, and one tree -of symmetrical rounded foliage makes a circle of shade -where nothing grows, but all about it a crowd of dwarf -brackens twinkle and look like listeners at an oracle. -Beyond, countless pillars of dark pines tower above green -grass. Then the road forks; a shapely oak, still holding -up dead arms through clouds of greenery, stands at one -side; at the other a green road wanders away under -beeches in stately attitudes and at ceremonious distance -from one another: straight ahead, open low meadows -surround a reedy water where coot and moorhen cry to -each other among willow islets and the reflex of a bright -and windy heaven. And yet once more the road pierces -the dense woodland roar, form and colour buried as it -were in sound, except where a space of smoothest turf -expands from the road, and out of the crimson berries of -an old thorn comes the voice of a robin singing persist<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[219]</a></span>ently; -and past that, inevitably, is a cottage among the -beeches. More cottages are set in the moorland that -rolls to an horizon of ridgy oak away from small green -meadows behind the cottages. These give way to treeless -undulations like gigantic long barrows, coloured by sand, -by burnt gorse and by bracken; farther away a wooded -hump all dark under threatenings of storm; and farthest -of all, the Downs, serene and pale. The plough begins -to invade the forest. The undulations sink to rest in a -land of corn and cloud, of dark green levels, of windy -whitened abeles, and a shining flood gilded by a lofty -western sky of gold and grey. Beside the darkling waters -couches an old town with many windows looking under -thatch and tile upon grave streets, ending in a spread of -the river where great horses wading lift their knees high -as they splash under a long avenue of aspens and alarm -the moorhens. Beautiful looks the running river under -the night’s hunting of the clouds and the few bright stars, -and beautiful again, broad blue, or streaked, or shadowy, -or glittering, or reed-reflecting, beside a white mill or -company of willows, under the breezes and pearl of -dawn; and I wish there were a form for saluting a new -country’s gods and the <i>adhuc ignota ... flumina</i>.</p> - -<p>Two roads go northward against the stream; the main -road straight or in long curves on one side of the river, -the other on the opposite bank in a string of fragments -zigzagging east and west and north. These fragments -connect houses or groups of houses with one another, and -it looks as if only by accident they had made the whole -which now connects two towns. Their chief business -is to serve the wheels and feet of those bound upon -domestic or hamlet but not urban business. Seen upon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[220]</a></span> -the map the road sets out straight for a town far north; -but in two miles the hospitality of a great house seems to -draw it aside, then of “The Plough”; emerging again it -wanders awhile before returning to its northward line; -and this it does time after time, and as often as it pauses -a lesser road runs out of it to the great road across the -river. There are scores of such parallel roads—sometimes -the lesser is in part, or entirely, a footpath—in -England, and in avoiding the dust, the smell, the noise, -the insolence of the new traffic, the lesser are an invaluable -aid. This one proceeds without rise or fall through -the green river levels, but looks up to a ridge of white-scarred -purple moor away from the stream, with oak and -thatched cottages below the heather. It creeps in and -out like an old cottage woman at a fair and sees everything. -It sees all the farms and barns. It sees the portly -brick house and its gardens bounded by high fruit walls -and its walnut-trees in front, on the bank of a golden -brook that sings under elms and sallows; the twenty-four -long white windows, the decent white porch, the large -lawns, the pond and its waterfowl sounding in the reeds, -the oaks and acacias, the horse mowing the lawn lazily, -the dogs barking behind the Elizabethan stables. It sees -the broad grassy borders—for this is not a road cut by a -skimping tailor—and the woods of oak and ash and hazel -which the squirrel owns, chiding, clucking and angrily -flirting his tail at those who would like to share his nuts. -At every crossing road these grassy borders, which are in -places as broad as meadows so that cattle graze under -their elms, spread out into a green; and round about are -yellow thatched cottages with gardens full of scarlet -bean flowers and yellow dahlias; and a pond reflects the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[221]</a></span> -blue and white sky, wagtails flutter at the edge and geese -launch themselves as if for a voyage. The only sound -upon the road is made by the baker’s cart carrying a -fragrant load.</p> - -<p>After ten miles the road crosses the river and wanders -even farther from the highway. Here there are more -woods of hazel and oak, and borders where sloe and -blackberry shine, polished by rain, among herbage of -yellow ragwort and flea-bane, purple knapweed, yellowing -leaves. The gateways show steep meadows between -the woods. One shows two lovers of sixteen years old -gathering nuts in the warm sun, the silence, the solitude. -The boy bends down and she steps quickly and carelessly -upon his back to reach a cluster of six, and then descending -looks away for a little while and turns her left cheek -to him, softly smiling wordless things to herself, so that -her lover could not but lean forward and kiss her golden -skin where it is most beautiful beneath her ear and her -looped black hair. There is a maid whose ways are so -wonderful and desirable that it would not be more wonderful -and desirable if Helen had never grown old and -Demeter had kept Persephone. For a day white-throated -convolvulus hides all the nettles of life. Of all the -delicate passing things I have seen and heard—the slow, -languid, gracious closing and unclosing of a pewit’s -rounded wings as it chooses a clod to alight on; the sound -of poplar leaves striving with the sound of rain in a -windy summer shower; the glow of elms where an autumn -rainbow sets a foot amongst them; the first fire of -September lighted among men and books and flowers—not -one survives to compare with this gateway vision of a -moment on a road I shall never travel again. To rescue<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[222]</a></span> -such scenes from time is one of the most blessed offices -of books, and it is a book that I remember now as I -think of that maiden smiling, a book<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> which <span class="lock">says—</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>And I could tell thee stories that would make thee -laugh at all thy trouble, and take thee to a land of which -thou hast never dreamed. Where the trees have ever -blossoms, and are noisy with the humming of intoxicated -bees. Where by day the suns are never burning, and by -night the moon-stones ooze with nectar in the rays of the -camphor-laden moon. Where the blue lakes are filled -with rows of silver swans, and where, on steps of lapis-lazuli, -the peacocks dance in agitation at the murmur of -the thunder in the hills. Where the lightning flashes -without harming, to light the way to women, stealing -in the darkness to meetings with their lovers, and the -rainbow hangs for ever like an opal on the dark blue -curtain of the clouds. Where, on the moonlit roofs of -crystal palaces, pairs of lovers laugh at the reflection of -each other’s lovesick faces in goblets of red wine, breathing -as they drink air heavy with the fragrance of the -sandal, wafted from the mountain of the south. Where -they play and pelt each other with emeralds and rubies, -fetched at the churning of the ocean from the bottom -of the sea. Where rivers, whose sands are always golden, -flow slowly past long lines of silent cranes that hunt for -silver fishes in the rushes on their banks. Where men are -true, and maidens love for ever, and the lotus never -fades....</p></div> - -<p>The great old books do the same a hundred times. -Take <i>The Arabian Nights</i> for example. They are full -of persons, places and events depicted with so strong an -appeal to our eyes and to that part of our intelligence<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[223]</a></span> -which by its swiftness and simplicity corresponds to our -eyes, that no conceivable malversation by a translator -can matter much. They are proof against it, just as -our tables and chairs and walking-sticks are proof against -the man who tears our books and cracks our glass cases -of artificial grapes or stuffed kingfishers when we move -to a new house. This group of women is beyond the -reach of time or an indifferent <span class="lock">style—</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>Ten female slaves approached with a graceful and -conceited gait, resembling moons, dazzling the sight, and -confounding the imagination. They stood in ranks, -looking like the black-eyed damsels of Paradise; and after -them came ten other female slaves, with lutes in their -hands, and other instruments of diversion and mirth; and -they saluted the two guests, and played upon the lutes, -and sang verses; and every one of them was a temptation -to the servants of God....</p></div> - -<p>A hundred others flock to my mind, competing for -mention like a company of doves for a mere pinch of -seed—Rose-in-Bloom sitting at a lattice to watch the -young men playing at ball, and throwing an apple to -Ansal Wajoud, “bright in countenance, with laughing -teeth, generous, wide-shouldered”; or that same girl letting -herself down from her prison and escaping over the -desert in her most magnificent apparel and a necklace of -jewels on her neck; Sindbad returning home rich from -every voyage, and as often, in the midst of the luxuries -of his rest, going down to the river by Bagdad and seeing -a fair new ship and embarking for the sake of profit and -of beholding the countries and islands of the world.</p> - -<p>These clear appeals come into the tales like white<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[224]</a></span> -statues suddenly carven to our sight among green -branches. But they are also something more than a -satisfaction to our love of what is large, bright, coloured, -in high relief. Every one knows how, at a passage like -that in the <i>Æneid</i>, when the exiled Æneas sees upon the -new walls of the remote city of Carthage pictures of -that strife about Troy in which he was a great part, or -at a verse in a ballad <span class="lock">like—</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“It was na in the ha’, the ha’;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">It was na in the painted bower;</div> - <div class="verse">But it was in the good greenwood,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Amang the lily flower.”</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p class="noindent">—how the cheek flushes and the heart leaps up with a -pleasure which the incidents themselves hardly justify. -We seem to recognize in them symbols or images of -ideas which are important to mortal minds. They are -of a significance beyond allegories. They are as powerful, -and usually as mysterious in their power, as the landscape -at sight of which the gazer sighs in his joy, he knows not -why. In such passages the <i>Nights</i> abound.</p> - -<p>One of the finest is in <i>Seifelmolouk and Bedia Eljemal</i>. -The hero and his memlooks were captured by a gigantic -Ethiopian king. Some were eaten. The survivors so -pleased the king by the sweetness of their voices while -they were crying and lamenting that they were hung up -in cages for the king to hear them. Seifelmolouk and -three of his companions the king gave to his daughter, -and when the youth sat thinking of the happy past, and -crying over it, she was overjoyed at the singing of her -little captive. Perhaps more pleasing still is the door in -the grass which has only to be removed to discover a -splendid subterranean palace and a “woman whose aspect<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[225]</a></span> -banished from the heart all anxiety and grief and -affliction,” even when the finder is the son of a king -cutting wood in a forest, far from his lost home and -from those who know him as the son of a king. The -incognito appearances of the great Caliph make scenes of -the same class. A young man sits with his mistress, and -the sound of her lovely singing draws four darwishes to -the door; he descends and lets them in; they promise to -do him an immense and undreamed-of <span class="lock">service—</span></p> - -<p>“Now these darwishes,” says the tale, “were the -Khalifeh Harun Er-Rashid, and the Wezir Ja’far El-Barmeki, -and Abu-Nuwas El-Hasan, the son of Hani, -and Mesrur the Executioner.”</p> - -<p>Then there is that page where Nimeh and the Persian -sage open a shop in Damascus, and stock it with costly -things, and the sage sits with the astrolabe before him, -“in the apparel of sages and physicians”—to wait for -Nimeh’s lover, or some one who has news of her, to -appear. Of a more subtly appealing charm is a sentence -in the story of “Ala-ed-din,” where a man tells -the father of one who is supposed to have been executed -that another was actually slain in his stead, “for I -ransomed him, by substituting another, from among such -as deserved to be put to death.” A good book might be -made of the stories of such poor unknown men in famous -books as this prisoner who was of those that deserved -to die.</p> - -<p>Lofty, strange, and infinite in its suggestiveness is the -tale of Kamar-ez-Zeman and the Princess Budur. Two -demons, an Efrit and an Efritch, contend as to the -superiority in beauty of a youth and a girl whom they -watch asleep in widely remote parts of the earth; and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[226]</a></span> -they carry them through the midnight sky and lay the -two side by side to judge. On the morrow, the youth -longs for the girl and the girl for the youth. Of their -dreams, the King, the father of the youth, says: “Probably -it was a confused dream that thou sawest in sleep,” -and the father of the girl chains her up as mad. But in -the end, after many wanderings and impediments, they -transcend the separation of space and are married. -Noblest of all, perhaps, is one of the short “Anecdotes” -about the discovery of a terrestrial paradise.</p> - -<p>Abd-allah went out to seek a straying camel, and -chanced upon a superb and high-walled city lying silent -in the desert. And when the Caliph inquired about that -city, a learned man told him that it was built by Sheddad, -the King. This prince was fond of ancient books, and -took delight in nothing so much as in descriptions of -Paradise, so that his heart enticed him to make one like -it on the earth. Under him were a hundred thousand -kings, and under each of them were a hundred thousand -soldiers, and he furnished them with the measurements -and set them to collect the materials of gold and silver -and ruby and pearl and chrysolite. For twenty years -they collected. Then he sought a fit place among rivers -on a vast open plain. In twenty years they built the -city and finished its impregnable fortifications. For -twenty years he laboured in equipping himself, his -viziers, his harem and his troops for the occupation of -this Paradise. Then when he was rejoicing on his way, -“God sent down upon him and upon the obstinate -infidels who accompanied him a loud cry from the heaven -of his power, and it destroyed them all by the vehemence -of its sound. Neither Sheddad nor any of those who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[227]</a></span> -were with him arrived at the city or came in sight of it, -and God obliterated the traces of the road that led to it; -but the city remaineth as it was in its place until the -hour of the judgment.”...</p> - -<p>Beyond the gateway the Downland and the corn -begins, and with it the rain, so that the great yellow-banded -bee hangs long pensive on the lilac flower of the -scabious. Hereby is a farm with a wise look in its -narrow window on either side of the white door under -the porch; the walls of the garden and the farmyard -are topped with thatch; opposite rises up a medlar tree, -russet-fruited: and those two eyes of the little farm peep -out at the stranger. From the next hill-top the land -spreads out suddenly—an immense grey hedgeless land -of pasture and ploughland and stubble with broadcast -shadows of clouds and lines, and clumps of dark-blue -trees a league apart. These woods are of pine and thorn -and elder and beam, and some yew and juniper, haunted -by the hare and the kestrel, by white butterflies going in -and out, by the dandelion’s down. Sometimes under the -pines a tumulus whispers a gentle <i>siste viator</i> and the -robin sings beside. Far away, white rounds of cloud -bursting with sunlight are lifted up out of the ground; -born of earth they pause a little upon the ridge and then -take flight into the blue profound, their trains of shadow -moving over the corn sheaves, over the ploughs working -along brown bands of soil, the furzy spaces, the deeply -cloven grassy undulations, the lines of yews and of corn-stacks. -Slowly a spire like a lance-head is thrust up -through the Downs into the sky.</p> - -<p>Beyond the spire a huge woody mound rises up from -the low flowing land, huge and carved all round by an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[228]</a></span> -entrenchment as if by the weight of a crown that it had -worn for ages. Certainly it wears no crown to-day. Not -a human being lives there; they have all fled to the riverside -and the spire, leaving their ancient home to the -triumphs of the wide-flowering traveller’s-joy, to the play -of children on the sward within its walls, and to the -archæologist: and very sad and very noble it looks at -night when it and the surrounding Downs lift up their -dark domes of wood among the mountains of the sky, -and the great silence hammers upon the ears.</p> - -<p>Then a hedgeless road traverses without interrupting -the long Downs. One after another, lines of trees thin -and dark and old come out against the pale bright sky of -late afternoon and file away, beyond the green turf and -roots and the grey or yellow stubble. As the sun sets, -dull crimson, at the foot of a muslin of grey and gold -which his course has crimsoned, the low clouds on the -horizon in the north become a deathly blue white belonging -neither to day nor to night, while overhead the light-combed -cloudlets are touched faintly with flame. Now -the glory and the power of the colour in the west, and -now the pallid north, fill the brain to overflowing with -the mingling of distance, of sublime motion, and of hue, -and intoxicate it and give it wings, until at last when the -west is crossed by long sloping strata as of lava long cooled -they seem the bars of a cage impassable. But even they -are at last worn away and the sky is as nothing compared -with earth. For there, as I move, the infinite greys and -yellows of the crops, the grass, the bare earth, the clumps -of firs, the lines of beeches and oaks, play together in the -twilight, and the hills meet and lose their lines and flow -into one another and build up beautiful lines anew, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[229]</a></span> -outward and visible signs of a great thought. Out of the -darkness in which they are submerged starts a crying of -pewits and partridges; and overhead and close together -the wild duck fly west into the cold gilded blue.</p> - -<p>At dawn a shallow crystal river runs over stones and -waves green hair past ancient walls of flint, tall towers -and many windows, with vines about the mullions, past -desolate grass of old elmy meads, high-gated, and -umbrageous roads winding white by carven gateways, -under sycamore and elm and ash and many alders and -haughty avenues of limes, past an old great church, past -a park where elms and oaks and bushy limes hide a ruin -among nettles and almost hide a large stone house from -which peacocks shout, past a white farm, red-tiled, that -stands with a village of its own thatched barns, cart-lodges -and sheds under walnut and elm, enclosed within -a circuit of old brick with a tower that looks along the -waters. It is a place where man has known how to aid -his own stateliness by that of Nature. The trees are -grand and innumerable, but they stand about in aristocratic -ways; the bright young water does not flout the -old walls but takes the shadow of antiquity from them -and lends them dew-dropping verdure in return. The -pebbles under the waves are half of them fallen from -the walls; the curves round which they bend are of -masonry; so that it is unapparent and indifferent whether -the masonry has been made to fit the stream or the stream -persuaded to admit the masonry. As I look, I think of -it as Statius thought of the Surrentine villa when he prayed -that Earth would be kind to it and not throw off that -ennobling yoke. Everywhere the river rushes and shines, -or roars unseen behind trees. The sun is warm and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[230]</a></span> -golden light hangs as if it were fruit among the leaves -over the ripples.</p> - -<p>Above the stream the elms open apart and disclose a -wandering grey land and clumps of beeches, a grey windy -land and a grey windy sky in which the dark clumps are -islanded. Flocks of sheep move to and fro, and with them -the swallows. Two shepherds, their heavy grey overcoats -slung about their shoulders and the sleeves dangling, their -flat rush baskets on their backs, stand twenty yards apart -to talk, leaning on their sticks, while their swallow-haunted -flocks go more slowly and their two dogs converse -and walk round one another.</p> - -<p>The oats have been trampled by rain, and two men are -reaping it by hand. They are not men of the farm, but -rovers who take their chance and have done other things -than reaping in their time. One is a Hampshire man, -but fought with the Wiltshires against “Johnny Boer”—he -liked the Boers ... “they were very much like a lot -of working men.... We never beat ’em.... No, we -never beat ’em.” He is a man of heroic build; tall, lean, -rather deep-chested than broad-shouldered, narrow in the -loins, with goodly calves which his old riding breeches -perfectly display; his head is small, his hair short and crisp -and fair, his cheeks and neck darkly tanned, his eye bright -blue and quick-moving, his features strong and good, except -his mouth, which is over large and loose; very ready to -talk, which he does continually in a great proud male voice, -however hard he is working. A man as lean and hard -and bright as his reaping hook. First he snicks off a -dozen straws and lays them on the ground for a bond, -then he slashes fast along the edge of the corn for two -or three yards, gathers up what is cut into his hook and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[231]</a></span> -lays it across the straws: when a dozen sheaves are prepared -in the same way he binds them with the bonds and -builds them into a stook of two rows leaning together. -It is impossible to work faster and harder than he does -in cutting and binding; only at the end of each dozen -sheaves does he stand at his full height, straight as an ash, -and laugh, and round off what he has been saying even -more vigorously than he began it. Then crouching again -he slays twelve other sheaves. Then he goes over to the -four-and-a-half-gallon cask in the hedge: it is a “fuel” -that he likes, and he pays for it himself. In his walk and -attitude and talk—except in his accent—there is little of -the countryman. He is a citizen of the world, without -wife or home or any tie except to toil—and after that -pleasure—and toil again. A loose bold liver—and lover—there -can be no doubt. The spirit of life is strong in -him, in limbs and chest and eyes and brain, the spirit -which compels one man to paint a picture, one to sacrifice -his life for another, one to endure poverty for an idea, -another to commit a murder. What is there for him—to -be the mark for a bullet, to contract a ravenous disease, -to bend slowly under the increasing pile of years, of work, -of pleasures? He does not care. He is always seeing “a -bit of life” from town to town, from county to county, a -peerless fleshly man casting himself away as carelessly as -Nature cast him forth into the world. His father before -him was the same, ploughboy, circus rider, brickmaker, and -day labourer again on the land, one who always “looked -for a policeman when he had had a quart.” He set out -on his travels again and disappeared. His wife went -another way, and she is still to be met with in the summer -weather, not looking as if she had ever borne such a son<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[232]</a></span> -as this reaper. As she grows older she seems to stretch -out a connecting hand to long-vanished generations, to -the men and women who raised the huge earthen walls -of the camps on these hills. She has a trembling small -face, wrinkled and yellow like old newspaper, above a -windy bunch of rags, chiefly black rags. A Welshwoman -who has been in England fifty years, she remembers or -thinks of chiefly those Welsh years when, as a girl, she -rode a pony into Neath market. She hums a Welsh tune -and still laughs at it because she heard it first in those -days from one then poor and old and abject—she herself -tall and wilful—and the words of it were: “O, my dear -boy, don’t get married.” She would like once again to -lie in her warm bed and hear the steady rain falling in the -black night upon the mountain. She feels the sharp flint -against the sole of her foot and appears not to be annoyed -or indignant or resolved to be rid of the pain, but only -puzzled by the flintiness of God as she travels, in the long -pageant of those who go on living, the lonely downland -road among the gorse and the foxgloves, in the hot but -still misty morning when the grey and the chestnut horses, -patient and huge and shining among the sheaves, wait for -the reaping machine to be uncovered and the day’s work -to begin.</p> - -<p>Through the grey land goes a narrow and flat vale of -grass and of thatched cottages. The river winds among -willows and makes a green world, out of which the -Downs rise suddenly with their wheat. Here stands a -farm with dormers in its high yellow roof and a square of -beeches round about. There a village, even its walls -thatched, flutters white linen and blue smoke against a -huge chalk scoop in the Downs behind. For miles only<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[233]</a></span> -the cherry-coloured clusters of the guelder-rose break -through the rain and the gently changing grey of the -cornland and green of the valley, until several farms of -thatched brick gather together under elms and mellowing -chestnuts and make a crooked hamlet. Or at a bend in -the road a barn like a diminutive down stands among ricks -and under elms; behind is a red farm and church tower -embowered; in front, the threshing machine booms and -smokes and an old drenched woman stands bent aloft -receiving the sheaves in her blue stiff claws. Close by, -a man leads a horse away from a field and its companion -looks over the gate with longing, and turns away and -again returning almost jumps it, but failing through fearfulness -at seeing the other so near the bend in the road, -races down the hedge and back and stands listening to -the other’s whinny, and then scattering the turf dashes -into an orchard beyond and whinnies as he gallops.</p> - -<p>In majesty, rigid and black, the steam ploughs are -working up against the treeless sky; and, just seen in the -rain, the white horse carved upon the hill seems a living -thing, but of mist.</p> - -<p>Now, as if for the sake of the evening bells and the -gleaners, the rain withholds itself, and over the drenching -stubble the women and children, in black and grey and -dirty white, crawl, doubled up, careless of the bells and -of the soft moist gold of the sun that envelops them, as -of the rain and wind that after a little while cover up the -gold upon the field and the green and rose of the sky.</p> - -<p>And so to the inn. Why do not inns have a regular -tariff for the poorish man without a motor-car? Let inn-keepers -bleed the rich, by all means, but why should they -charge me one shilling and ninepence for a cod steak or a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[234]</a></span> -chop or the uneatable cold roast beef of new England, -and then charge the same sum for the best part of a duckling -and cheese and a pint of ale? I once asked the most -enterprising publisher in London whether he would print -a book that should tell the sober truth about some of our -English inns, and he said that he dared not do anything -so horrible. For fear of ruining my publisher I will not -mention names, but simply say that at nine inns out of -ten the charges are incalculable and excessive unless the -traveller makes a point of asking beforehand what they -are going to be, a course that provokes discomfort in his -relation to the host outweighing what is saved. The tea -room, on the other hand, is inexpensive. It lies behind a -shop and there is a slaughter-house adjacent—even now -the butcher can be heard parting the warm hide from the -flesh. Inside, the room is green and the little light and -the rain also come sickly through windows of stained -glass and fall upon a piano, a bicycle, an embroidered -deck chair, vases of dead grass on a marble-topped table, -a screen pasted over with scraps from the newspapers, -and, upon the walls, a calendar from the butcher depicting -a well-dressed love scene, a text or two, pictures of well-dressed -children and their animals, and upon the floor, -oilcloth odorous and wet. Here, as at the inns, the adornments -are dictated by a taste begotten by the union of -peasant taste and town taste, and are entirely pretentious -and unrelated to the needs of the host or of the guests.</p> - - - -<div class="chapter"> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[235]</a></span></p> - - - - - - -<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER XIV<br /> - -<span class="smaller">AN OLD HOUSE AND A BOOK—WILTSHIRE</span></h2> -</div> - - -<p>The country is deserted in the rain, and I have the -world to myself, a world of frenzied rain among the elms -of the lowland, an avenue of elms up to a great house, -hidden sheep tinkling and bleating, shepherds muffled, -huge slopes of grass and pearled clover above a coombe -where a grey heron sails and clanks alone, a farm desolate -among elder and ash at the highest part of the hills, and -then miles of pathless pasture and stubble descending past -an old camp and a tumulus to the submerged vale, where -yellow elms tremble about a church tower, a cluster of -red cottages and bowed yellow dahlias and chrysanthemums, -and a house standing aloof. This house is some -way from the Downs themselves, but just at the foot of a -lesser slope, a fair golden hill—golden with cowslips in -May—that rises on one side with a swift, short ascent -and then shoots forward, as if with the impetus, almost -level until, after crowning itself with beeches, it descends -in a lazy curve to a field, roughened by the foundations -of a vanished house, at one corner of which the chimneys -join with another group of elms in the haze of rain.</p> - -<p>Hanging from the wall in rags, too wet even to flap, -are the remains of an auctioneer’s announcement of a sale -at the house behind. Mahogany—oak chests—certain -ounces of silver—two thousand books—portraits and -landscapes and pictures of horses and game—of all these -and how much else has the red house been disem<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[236]</a></span>bowelled? -It is all shadowy within, behind the windows, -like the eyes of a corpse, and without sound, or form, or -light, and it is for no one that the creeper magnificently -arrays itself in bediamonded crimson and gold that throbs -and wavers in the downpour. The martins are still there, -and their play up and down before the twenty windows -is a senseless thing, like the play of children outside a -chamber of agony or grief. They seem to be machines -going on and on when their master and purpose are dead. -But then, too, there is gradually a consolation, a restfulness, -a deceit, a forgetting, in the continuity of their -movement and their unchanged voices. The two hundred -autumns perpetuated in the tones of the bricks are in vain. -Strangers will come, no doubt—I hope they will not—and -be pleased, actually proud, at this mellowness, which -ought to have died with the last of the family that built -the house.</p> - -<p>The tall horse-chestnuts throw down their fruit out of -the crisp, rusty foliage and it rolls darkly burnished out -of the pods white as mushrooms in the rain, and where it -falls it lies, and no child gathers it, and the harvest -waggons have crushed a thousand under their wheels. -The moss is beginning to encrust the gravel for the soft -feet of the ghosts, of the old men and the mothers and -the maids and the school-boys and tottering babes that -have trodden it once. Now that they are all gone, every -one, they seem always to have been ghosts, with loud, -happy voices and wails of sorrow, with smiles, dark looks, -passionate splendours, bright hair, the bright brown hair -as of red deer in the men, the long, heavy coils of living -odorous gold in the women, but flitting to and fro, footless, -unconfined, like the swallows, returning and wander<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[237]</a></span>ing -up and down, as if they had left something behind in -their home.</p> - -<p>When I first entered the house by an accident in passing -that way, a great-grandfather, a granddaughter and -her son were alone in the house, with two servants. The -mother, early widowed, had come with her child to -minister to the last days of the ancient man. The house -was by then full of the reports of death. In almost every -room there had been a deathbed. For it had always been -full of life; there was never such a house for calling back -its children; the sons of it brought their wives, and the -daughters their husbands, and often an excuse was made -for one pair to stay on indefinitely; and thus it came to -be full also of death. This granddaughter, however, had -stayed, as she wished to believe, against her will, because -the old man was so fond of his great-grandchild. She -was a beautiful, strong woman, with the dark, lustrous -skin, gold hair, perfect clear features, proud step and -prouder voice, of all the family; she had shone before a -thousand eyes; and yet she stayed on and on, obsessed by -the multitudinous memories of the house alone under the -Downs.</p> - -<p>Her grandfather would talk of nothing but his father -and his grandfather, the lawyers, the captains, the scholars, -whose bones were under the churchyard elms, and his -sons and their sons, all of them also now dead. He had -their childish ways by heart, the childish ways of men -who were white-haired at his birth as well as of those -who went golden-haired but yesterday into the grave; -and all their names, their stately, their out-of-the-way -names, and those which recorded the maiden names of -their mothers; their nicknames, too, a whole book of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[238]</a></span> -them; the legends about the most conspicuous, their -memorable speeches and acts, down to the names of their -very dolls, and their legends also, which, of course, -recurred again and again in the family fantasy. Every -tree and field and gate and room was connected with -some one of the dear and beauteous or brave dead, with -their birth, their deeds, their ends.</p> - -<p>The portraits of many of them, at least one to every -generation, hung on the walls, and it was curious to -notice, what never any one of them could see, except the -granddaughter, the progress and the decline from generation -to generation. The earliest of all had sailed and -buccaneered with Henry Morgan, a great lover and destroyer -of life. It was from him that the expression and -air of them all had descended. Love and battle had -carved his face. Out from behind his bold but easy face -peered a prophetic pitifulness, just as behind the loaded -brown clouds of drifting storm peers the innocence of -blue, and upon it white clouds that are thin and waved -like an infant’s hair. Upon this model his descendants’ -faces had been carved, not by love and battle, but by his -might alone. Even the tender women flaunted it. It -nestled, an eagle, among the old man’s snows; it possessed -the little child, and he had nothing but the face -of the buccaneer, like an eaglet in a cage.</p> - -<p>A house is a perdurable garment, giving and taking of -life. If it only fit, straightway it begins to chronicle our -days. It beholds our sorrows and our joys; its untale-bearing -walls know all our thoughts, and if it be such -a house as grows after the builders are gone, our thoughts -presently owe much to it; we have but to glance at a -certain shadow or a curve in the wall-paper pattern to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[239]</a></span> -recall them, softened as by an echo, and that corner or -that gable starts many a fancy that reaches beyond the -stars, many a fancy gay or enriched with regrets. It is -aware of birth, marriage and death; and who dares say that -there is not kneaded into the stones a record more pleasing -than brass? With what meanings the vesperal beam -slips through a staircase window in autumn! The moon -has an expression proper to us alone, nested among our -limes, or heaving an ivory shoulder above the neighbour -roofs. As we enter a room in our house we are conscious -of a fitness in its configuration that defies mathematics. -Rightly used, such a space will inspire a stately ordering -of our lives; it is, in another respect, the amplest canvas -for the art of life. It becomes so much a part of us that -we <span class="lock">exclaim—</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“This beautiful house in sand and stone:</div> - <div class="verse">What will it be in heaven?”</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p>This beautiful house under the Downs was already -more than “sand and stone.” It was a giant, very gentle -but very powerful, and adding to its power the lore of the -family it was irresistible. This young mother had all the -lore by heart and loved it, yet had fought against it. She -had been happy when her child had grown at first unlike -her own family and much like her husband’s; but no! his -hair grew lighter, his nose was as those of her brothers’ -in bud, and now that he was five he was not a child so -much as an incarnation of the family, a sort of graven -image to which the old man bowed down, and with all -the more fervour because of that weakness in the boy -which others thought imbecility. The old man, too, had -been not only a man but a family; now that the child was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[240]</a></span> -there he waited, garrulously contented, for his release -from the post. So contented was he that when the granddaughter -left her child with him, and after delays and -excuses and delays disappeared into the blank, indifferent -abyss of the multitude far away who knew not the house -and the family, he was not only contented but glad at -heart, for it was a rebel that was gone.</p> - -<p>For several years the white beard and the poor child -lived together happily, turning over old memories, old -books, old toys, taking the old walks through the long -garden, past, but not into, the beech wood that a whim of -the old man’s had closed against even himself, against all -save the birds and the squirrels; over the high downs and -back into the deep vale which had produced that delicate -physical beauty and those gracious lusty ways beyond -which it seemed that men and women could hardly go in -earthly life. Very happy were those two, and very -placid; but within a week their tragic peace was perfected. -The boy fell out of one of the apple-trees and -was killed. The old man could not but stumble over -that small grave into his own, and here is the end, the -unnoted, the common end, and the epitaph written by -the auctioneer and the rain.</p> - -<p>Much as I love rain, heavy or light, freakish or continuous, -I am glad to be out of it for a little while and -to open a book of ballads by a solitary fire at “The -White Horse,” and soon to close it after reading again -the <span class="lock">lines—</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“O then bespake her daughter dear,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">She was baith jimp and sma’:</div> - <div class="verse">‘O row me in a pair o’ sheets,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And tow me owre the wa’!’</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[241]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">They row’d her in a pair o’ sheets,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And tow’d her owre the wa’;</div> - <div class="verse">But on the point o’ Gordon’s spear</div> - <div class="verse indent2">She gat a deadly fa’.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">O bonnie, bonnie was her mouth,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And cherry were her cheeks,</div> - <div class="verse">And clear, clear was her yellow hair,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Whereon the red blood dreeps.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Then wi’ his spear he turn’d her owre;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">O gin her face was wan!</div> - <div class="verse">He said, ‘Ye are the first that e’er</div> - <div class="verse indent2">I wish’d alive again.’</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">He cam’ and lookit again at her;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">O gin her skin was white!</div> - <div class="verse">‘I might hae spared that bonnie face</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To hae been some man’s delight.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">‘Busk and boon, my merry men a’,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For ill dooms I do guess;</div> - <div class="verse">I cannot look on that bonnie face</div> - <div class="verse indent2">As it lies on the grass.’</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">‘Wha looks to freits, my master dear,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Its freits will follow them;</div> - <div class="verse">Let it ne’er be said that Edom o’ Gordon</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Was daunted by a dame....’”</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p>I cannot help wondering whether the great work done -in the last century and a half towards the recovery of old -ballads in their integrity will have any effect beyond the -entertainment of a few scientific men and lovers of what -is ancient, now that the first effects upon Wordsworth -and his contemporaries have died away. Can it possibly -give a vigorous impulse to a new school of poetry that -shall treat the life of our time and what in past times has -most meaning for us as freshly as those ballads did the -life of their time? It is possible; and it is surely impossible -that such examples of simple, realistic narrative shall<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[242]</a></span> -be quite in vain. Certainly the more they are read the -more they will be respected, and not only because they -often deal with heroic matters heroically, but because -their style is commonly so beautiful, their pathos so -natural, their observation of life so fresh, so fond of -particular detail—its very lists of names being at times -real poetry.</p> - -<p>Sometimes the style is equal and like to that of the -most accomplished poetry, as in the <span class="lock">stanza—</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“The Ynglyshe men let ther boys (bows) be,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And pulde owt brandes that were brighte;</div> - <div class="verse">It was a hevy syght to se</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Bryght swordes on basnites lyght.”</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p class="noindent">Or <span class="lock">in—</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“God send the land deliverance</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Frae every reaving, riding Scot!</div> - <div class="verse">We’ll sune hae neither cow nor ewe,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We’ll sune hae neither staig nor stot.”</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p>It is equally good in passages where the poet simply -expresses his hearty delight in something which his own -eyes have seen among his neighbours, as <span class="lock">in—</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“He had horse and harness for them all,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Goodly steeds were all milke-white:</div> - <div class="verse">O the golden bands an about their necks,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And their weapons, they were all alike....”</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p>And, by the way, do not touches like these often reveal -the stamp of individuals upon pieces which are loosely -said to have been “composed by the folk”? They quite -do away with the notion that ballads were composed by -a number of people, after the fashion of a story in the -game of “Consequences.” In fact, it is one of the -pleasures of reading ballads to watch for those things<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[243]</a></span> -which show us the heart of one man who stands out by -himself. Such a one was the man who <span class="lock">said—</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“I dreamt I pu’d the heather green</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Wi’ my true love on Yarrow.”</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p>And who was that unhappy one who served a king for -seven years and only once saw the king’s daughter, and -that was through a gimlet-hole? Two were putting on -her gown, two putting on her shoes, five were combing -down her <span class="lock">hair—</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Her neck and breast was like the snow—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Then from the bore I was forced to go.”</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p class="noindent">Was he the man who made it a common thing to speak -in ballads of “combing her yellow hair”?</p> - -<p>What a poet, too, was he who put that touch into -“Bewick and Grahame,” where the father throws down -his glove as a challenge to his son and the son stoops to -pick it up, and <span class="lock">says—</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“O father, put on your glove again,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The wind hath blown it from your hand.”</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p class="noindent">It is one of the most delicate things, and with it the -stanza in the same ballad where the father praises the son -for his victory over a friend, but the son, hating the battle -which would not have been fought if the fathers had not -quarrelled in their wine, <span class="lock">says—</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Father, could ye not drink your wine at home</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And letten me and my brother be?”</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p>And the mind of a poet is to be seen in the whole of -some ballads and in every detail, as for example in the -three perfect <span class="lock">verses—</span></p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[244]</a></span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“O lang, lang may their ladies sit</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Wi’ their fans into their hand,</div> - <div class="verse">Or ere they see Sir Patrick Spens</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Come sailing to the land.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">O lang, lang may the ladies stand,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Wi’ their gold combs in their hair,</div> - <div class="verse">Wailing for their ain dear lords,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For they’ll see them na mair.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Half-owre, half-owre to Aberdour,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">It’s fiftie fadom deep,</div> - <div class="verse">And there lies guid Sir Patrick Spens,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Wi’ the Scots lords at his feet.”</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p>This ballad is one peculiar to our island, and no one -can seriously deny that some one of its authors was one -of the greatest writers of narrative poetry that ever lived.</p> - - - -<div class="chapter"> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[245]</a></span></p> - - - - - - -<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER XV<br /> - -<span class="smaller">AN OUTCAST—WILTSHIRE</span></h2> -</div> - - -<p>Not far from “The White Horse” is a little town -upon a stream that waves myriads of reeds and tall purple -flowers of hemp agrimony. These are the last shops I -am likely to pass in Wiltshire, and it occurs to me that -I should like to taste lardy cakes—which I last bought -in Wroughton fifteen years ago—before I leave the -county. Richard Jefferies’ grandfather was “My Lord -Lardy Cake” in old Swindon sixty years ago, and his -memory is kept alive by those tough, sweet slabs of larded -pastry which, in his generous ovens, gathered all the best -essences of the other cakes, pies, tarts and joints which -were permitted to be baked with them. In “Amaryllis -at the Fair” they are mentioned with some indignity as -a ploughboy’s delicacy. My lips water for them, and -at the first bakery in —— I ask for some. The baker -tells me he has sold the last one. He is a small, white-haired -and white-bearded man with an expression of -unctuous repose, assuredly a pillar of his chapel and possibly -its treasurer, and though he himself will, by his -own telling, have no more lardy cakes until the next -morning, he stiffly tries to persuade me that none of his -fellow-townsmen bakes them. I disbelieve the man of -dough for all his conscious look of sagacity and virtue, and -am rewarded for my disbelief by four lardy cakes for -threepence-halfpenny not many yards from his accursed -threshold. Lardy cakes, I now discover for the first time,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[246]</a></span> -have this merit besides their excellent taste and provision -of much pleasant but not finical labour for the teeth, that -one is enough at a time, and that four will, therefore, -take a man quite a long way upon the roads of England.</p> - -<hr class="tb hidden" /> - -<p>At the next inn three labourers and the landlord are -heated in conversation about some one not present.</p> - -<p>“Quite right,” says one, a sober carter whose whip -leans against the counter, “’tis the third time this week -that a tramp has been to his door, and by the looks of -them they didn’t call for naught.”</p> - -<p>“One of them didn’t, I know,” says the landlord. -“He came in here once and asked for a job and left -without a drink, but after he’d been to Stegbert’s Cottage -he came straight here and ordered a pint of mild. And I -heard as he let a chap and a woman sleep two nights -running in that rough patch behind the house. Don’t you -think the parson ought to hear of that? And what does -he do for a living? He looks poor enough himself.”</p> - -<p>“I don’t know. Mr. Jones is a kind-hearted fellow. -He stopped my youngest in the street the other day and -gave her a penny and measured her hair, and told her -she’d have a yard of it some day. They tell me he hasn’t -a carpet on the floor anywhere, and no parlour, and not -even a chest of drawers; and the postman says he hasn’t -a watch or a clock. What does he do with himself?”</p> - -<p>“I reckon he’s mad,” says the third, chuckling, “and I -don’t mind if he is. My old dog doesn’t need feeding at -home since he’s been here. He doesn’t eat no meat himself -neither. The widow Nash was reckoning it up, and -she says he spends four shillings a week——”</p> - -<p>“And a shilling here regular,” interjects the landlord.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[247]</a></span></p> - -<p>“On groceries, including one-and-six for tobacco. He -has four loaves, and I know ‘Kruger’ must have more -than half of them.”</p> - -<p>“And every other week he buys a postal order for two -shillings and a penny stamp——”</p> - -<p>“Pint of mild, mister,” says a tall blear-eyed man who -comes in, meekly followed by a small woman, dusty and -in rags but neat, to whom he offers the tankard after -nearly draining it himself.</p> - -<p>“Nice weather,” he ventures, smacking his lips.</p> - -<p>“Yes,” says the landlord discouragingly, and the carter -leaves.</p> - -<p>“Everybody seems to be gone to the flower show,” -continues the intruder, “and that’s where I’m going” -(here he looks at his boots), “but the best way for sore -feet is three days in a tap-room in some good sawdust.”</p> - -<p>The wife sighs.</p> - -<p>“The fat woman that weighs twenty-three stone,” says -her husband to the company, “is a cousin of mine twice -removed, and I have done a bit in the show line myself. -It’s a rum business. Better than working in a brewery -stables, though. Me and my mate had to go because we -got up so early that we burnt too many candles.”</p> - -<p>The mention of the fat woman rouses the labourers, -and one <span class="lock">says—</span></p> - -<p>“They say them fat women eats hardly anything -at all.”</p> - -<p>“Very small eater is Daisy. But you see her food -does her good. None of it’s wasted.”</p> - -<p>“That’s it. Her food agrees with her.”</p> - -<p>The wife sighs.</p> - -<p>“Now there’s my missus here,” says the husband.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[248]</a></span> -“She was one of these pretty gallus dancing-girls who -get their fifteen shillings a week. Her food don’t -nourish her. Now my brother used to laugh in publics -for a pint and he would laugh till they gave him a pint -to stop.”</p> - -<p>“Oh, I can laugh <i>after</i> a pint,” says the wife, “but -then I could just as easy cry, I worries so. There’s many -a aching heart goes up and down that Great Western -Railway in the express trains.”</p> - -<p>“I never worries, missus,” says a labourer with pursy -mouth, short pipe, and head straight up behind from his -neck.</p> - -<p>“Quite right,” says the husband. “My old girl here -lives on the fat of the land and is always thin. Her food -don’t nourish her. There’s more harm done in the world -by a discontented gut than anything else. I think of -asking her to try living on her pipe by itself.”</p> - -<p>“Like Mr. Jones over there,” says one of the labourers.</p> - -<p>“Mr. Jones? What, my friend Mr. William Jones?” -asks the tall man.</p> - -<p>“Is he a friend of yours?” asks the landlord, curiosity -overpowering his natural caution with a man who is selling -spectacles at a shilling a pair.</p> - -<p>“He is, and I don’t mind letting any one know it. I’m -very glad to see him settled down. He’s the only one -along the road who hasn’t gone to the flower show -to-day.” Here the tall man calls for another tankard, -which, as he is doing all the talking, he does not pass to -the small neat woman behind him. Pleased to be civilly -used, and warmed by the liquor, he tells the story of his -friend, the little woman helping him out, and landlord -and labourers adding some touches; and Mr. Jones him<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[249]</a></span>self -completed the picture during my few days in the -village.</p> - -<p>The man who fed his neighbour’s dog, and sent the -beggar satisfied away, and made presents to the children, -and lived on six ounces of tobacco a week, is a native of -Zennor in Cornwall. “Wonderful place for pedlars is -Cornwall. The towns are so few and far between that -the people along the road aren’t used to pedlars, and when -you do call you are sure of the best of treatment.” He -was apprenticed to a shoemaker in a town in South -Devon, and for a time practised his trade there as an -assistant. He was very clever at boxing and wrestling, -and a hard fighter, too, though unwilling to make a -quarrel. But he was a queer youth and took violent likes -and dislikes to men, and one day he dropped a boot and -went out into the street and took a young gentleman by -the arm and said to him: “Excuse me, sir, you have -passed this shop for five years nearly every day and I -can’t stand it any longer.” Whereupon he gave that -young gentleman a beating. He was sent to prison; he -lost his employment and went to sea. And at sea or else -in foreign countries he stayed six years. He left the sea -only because he broke an arm which had at length to be -amputated above the elbow. He was a changed man and -many thought then that he was mad. When he left the -hospital it was December and bitter weather: he had only -five shillings and it was notorious how he spent it. -Every day for a week he bought three loaves of bread -and went out and fed the birds with them. When that -week was over he had to go into the workhouse, and -there he stayed until the spring. It was there that he -fell in with the tall man who helped to tell his tale.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[250]</a></span> -They left together and for some time he almost kept -the two by begging, his lack of an arm ensuring his -success. But he was not altogether to his companion’s -taste, nevertheless. He would stop and smoke a pipe and -admire the view when he was miles from anywhere and -their object was to reach a town and find enough money -to pay for lodgings. He would stand by a hedge, content -for an hour to disentangle the bryony strands that were -in danger of straying to the road, and to restore them to -the hazel and thorn where their fellows ramped. He was -willing to be foster-father to half the helpless fledglings -that he found on the roadside. Sleeping one night in a -barn he could not be persuaded to leave until he had -decided whether it was better to kill a spider who had a -great appetite for flies or to leave it to Fate. Several he -rescued from the web and then out of pity for the spider -brought it flies already dead; but finding that these were -not to its taste he left the difficulty unsolved and went -sadly on his way. Almost equal to his pitifulness was his -dislike of work and his moral cowardice. Nothing could -persuade him to do any work, and such a coward was he -that if he failed at the first house where he offered his -laces for sale he would not try again in that village or -town. Yet he did not scruple to steal—even with a hint -of physical violence—if he needed anything which chance -presented to him in another man’s possession: but he stole -only necessaries, having none of the acquisitiveness which -is more common in their victims than in thieves. Few -men use leisure as well as he; perhaps no man was ever -idle with less harm to his fellows. The rich could have -learned many lessons at his feet: they must always be -shooting or driving furiously or meddling with politics<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[251]</a></span> -or stopping footpaths; they cannot be kept out of harm, -however rich. How well this man would have employed -money: he would have given it away!</p> - -<p>By and by his pity for goaded cattle and his frequent -gazings into their brown eyes as they stared at him by a -stile still further reduced his necessities—he would touch -no meat; so that his companion, finding him no longer of -much use in spite of his possession of but one arm, left -him and only crossed his path at increasing intervals of -time. It was now that Jones remembered with horror -a scene which had slumbered in his mind with the fear -which it originally roused in youth. He and other boys -were in the habit of peeping through a hole in the wall -of a slaughter-house and watching the slaughter, the -skinning and the cutting up, until their ears became -familiar with the groans, the screams, the gurglings, the -squelchings in the half-darkness of candle-light, the blood -and white faces and the knife. But one day there was -led into the slaughter-house a white heifer fresh from the -May pasture, clean and bright from her gleaming rosy -hoofs to the tips of the horns that swayed as she walked. -Her breath made, as it were, a sacred space about her as -the light of a human face will do. She stood quiet but -uncertain and musingly in the dark, soaked, half-ruinous -place, into which light only came in bars through a cobwebbed -lattice and fell that day upon her white face, -leaving in darkness the tall butcher and the imbecile -assistant who held the rope by which the animal’s head -was drawn down to the right level for a blow. The men -were in no hurry and as the heifer was not restive they -finished their talk about Home Rule. Then the idiot tried -to put her into the right position, but for a time could<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[252]</a></span> -not get her to see that her head must be drawn tight and -somewhat askew against the oaken pillar. He only succeeded -by patting her flanks and saying gently as if to a -girl: “Come along, Daisy!” She lowed soft and bowed -her head; the blow fell; she rolled to the ground and the -butcher once more let loose the heavy scent of blood. -The wholesome pretty beast, the familiar “Come along, -Daisy!” and the blow and the scent came often into -Jones’ mind. He ate no meat, but made no attempt to -proselytize; he simply retreated deeper and deeper into -his childlike love of Nature. The birds and the flowers -and the creeping and running things he seemed to regard -as little happy, charming, undeveloped human beings, -looking down on them with infinite tenderness and a little -amusement; with them alone was he quite at home. -Nature, as she presented herself to his simple senses, was -but a fragrant, many-coloured, exuberant, chiefly joyous -community, with which most men were not in harmony. -Silent for days and thinking only “green thoughts” under -the branches of the wood, he came to demand, unconsciously, -that there should be such a harmony. But he -loved Nature also because she had no ambiguity, told no -lies, uttered no irony. Sitting among flowers by running -water he wore an expression of blessed satisfaction with -his company which is not often seen at the friendliest -table. He drew no philosophy from Nature, no opinions, -ideas, proposals for reform, but only the wisdom to live, -happily and healthily and simply, himself.</p> - -<p>I dare say modernity was in his blood, but no man -seemed to belong less to our time. Of history and science -he knew nothing, of literature nothing; he had to make -out the earth with his own eyes and heart. He had not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[253]</a></span> -words for it, but he felt that whatever he touched was -God. No myth or religion had any value to him. There -were no symbols for him to use. The deities he surmised -or smelt or tasted in the air or upon the earth had neither -name nor shape. Had he been able to think, he was the -man to put our generation on the way to a new mythology. -For all I know, he had the vision, the power of -the seer, without the power of the prophet. A little more -and perhaps he would have invaded Christendom as St. -Paul invaded Heathendom. Yet I think he was not -wholly the loser by being unable to think. The eye -untroubled by thought sees things like a mirror newly -burnished; at night, for example, the musing man can see -nothing before him but a mist, but if he stops thinking -quickly the roads, the walls, the trees become visible. -So this man saw with a clearness as of Angelico, and in -his memory violets and roses, trees and faces were as clear -as if within his brain were another sun to light them. -He had but to close his eyes to see these things, an -innumerable procession of days and their flowers and their -birds in the sky or on the bough. And this he had at no -cost. He employed only such labour as was needed to -make his bread and occasionally clothes and a pipe. Nor -did he merely ask alms of Nature and Civilization. He -paid back countless charities to flower and bird and child -and poorer men, and there was nothing against him of -pain or sorrow or death inflicted. And as he was without -religion so he was without patriotism. He had no -country, knew nothing of men and events. Asked by -a person who saw him idle and did not observe his defect, -whether he would not like to do something for his country, -he replied: “I have no country like you, sir. I own<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[254]</a></span> -nothing; my people never did, that I know. I admire -those that do, for I have been in many a country when -I was a sailor, but never a one to beat England, let alone -the West Country when it’s haymaking time.”</p> - -<p>He continued to beg with a free conscience, and was -always willing to give away all that he had to one in -more need. And now chance found him out and gave -him ten shillings a week. He rented a cottage in this -village, weeded his flower-borders, but let his vegetable-plots -turn into poppy-beds. Sometimes he wearied of -his monotonous meals; he would then fast for a day or -two, giving his food to the birds and mice, until his hearty -appetite returned....</p> - -<p>He did not stay long in the village. He was shy and -suspicious of men, and except by the younger children he -was not liked. He set out on his travels again, and is still -on the road or—unlike most tramps—on the paths and -green lanes, the simplest, kindest, and perhaps the wisest -of men, indifferent to mobs, to laws, to all of us who -are led aside, scattered and confused by hollow goods, -one whom the last day of his full life will not find in a -whirlpool of affairs, but ready to go—an outcast.</p> - - - -<div class="chapter"> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[255]</a></span></p> - - - - - - -<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER XVI<br /> - -<span class="smaller">THE END OF SUMMER—KENT—BERKSHIRE—HAMPSHIRE—SUSSEX—THE -FAIR</span></h2> -</div> - - -<p>The road mounts the low Downs again. The boundless -stubble is streaked by long bands of purple-brown, -the work of seven ploughs to which the teams and their -carters, riding or walking, are now slowly descending by -different ways over the slopes and jingling in the rain. -Above is a Druid moor bounded by beech-clumps, and -crossed by old sunken ways and broad grassy tracks. It -is a land of moles and sheep. At the end of a shattered -line of firs a shepherd leans, bunched under his cape of -sacking, to watch his black-faced flock dull-tinkling in the -short furze and among the tumuli under the constant -white rain. Those old roads, being over hilly and open -land, are as they were before the making of modern roads, -and little changed from what they were before the -Roman. But it is a pity to see some of the old roads that -have been left to the sole protection of the little gods. -One man is stronger than they, as may be known by -any one who has seen the bones, crockery, tin and paper -thrown by Shere and Cocking into the old roads near by -as into a dust-bin; or seen the gashes in the young trees -planted down Gorst Road, Wandsworth Common; or -the saucy “Private” at the entrance to a lane worn by a -hundred generations through the sand a little north of -Petersfield; or the barbed wire fastened into the living -trees alongside the footpath over a neighbouring hill that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[256]</a></span> -has lately been sold. What is the value of every one’s -right to use a footpath if a single anti-social exclusive -landowning citizen has the right to make it intolerable -except to such as consider it a place only for the soles of -the feet? The builder of a house acquires the right to -admit the sunlight through his window. Cannot the users -of a footpath acquire a right, during the course of half-a-dozen -dynasties or less, to the sight of the trees and the -sky which that footpath gives them in its own separate -way? At least I hope that footpaths will soon cease to -be defined as a line—length without breadth—connecting -one point with another. In days when they are used as -much for the sake of the scenes historic or beautiful -through which they pass as of the villages or houses on -this hand or that, something more than the mere right -to tread upon a certain ribbon of grass or mud will have -to be preserved if the preservation is to be of much use, -and the right of way must become the right of view and -of very ancient lights as well. By enforcing these rights -some of the mountains of the land might even yet be -saved, as Mr. Henry S. Salt wishes to save them.<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> In -the meantime it is to be hoped that his criticisms will not -be ignored by the tourists who leave the Needle Gully -a cascade of luncheon wrappings and the like; for it is -not from a body of men capable of such manners that -a really effective appeal against the sacrifice of “our -mountains” to commercial and other selfishness is like -to spring.</p> - -<p>And those lone wayside greens, no man’s gardens, -measuring a few feet wide but many miles in length—why -should they be used either as receptacles for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[257]</a></span> -dust of motor-cars or as additions to the property of the -landowner who happens to be renewing his fence? They -used to be as beautiful and cool and fresh as rivers, these -green sisters of the white roads—illuminated borders of -many a weary tale. But now, lest there should be no -room for the dust, they are turning away from them the -gypsies who used to camp there for a night. The indolent -District Council that is anxious to get rid of its difficulties—for -the moment—at the expense of a neighbouring -district—it cares not—will send out its policemen to drive -away the weary horses and sleeping children from the -acre of common land which had hitherto been sacred—to -what?—to an altar, a statue, a fountain, a seat?—No! -to a stately notice-board; half-a-century ago the common -of which this is a useless patch passed on easy terms -to the pheasant lords. The gypsies have to go. Give -them a pitch for the night and you are regarded as an -enemy of the community or perhaps even as a Socialist. -The gypsies shall be driven from parish to parish, and -finally settle down as squalid degenerate nomads in a -town where they lose what beauty and courage they had, -in adding to the difficulties of another council. Yet if -they were in a cage or a compound which it cost money -to see, hundreds would pay for a stare at their brown faces -and bright eyes, their hooped tents, their horses, their -carelessness of the crowd, and in a few years an imitation -of these things will be applauded in a “pageant” of the -town which has destroyed the reality.</p> - -<p>The grassy way ends with the moor at a pool beside a -road, on one side of it six thatched cottages fenced by -sycamore and ash and elm, on the other a grey farm and -immense brown barn, within a long wall roofed with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[258]</a></span> -mossy thatch; and the swallows fly low and slowly about -the trees.</p> - -<p>First beeches line the rising and descending road—past -a church whose ivied tombstones commemorate men of -Cornish name—as far as an inn and a sycamore nobly -balanced upon a pedestal of matted roots. Then there -are ash-trees on either side and ricks of straw wetted to -an orange hue, and beyond them the open cornland, and -rising out of it an all-day-long procession in the south, -the great company of the Downs again, some tipped with -wood, some bare; in the north, a broken chain of woods -upon low but undulating land seem the vertebræ of a -forest of old time stretching from east to west like the -Downs. Hither and thither the drunken pewits cry over -the furrows, and thousands of rocks and daws wheel over -the stubble. As the day grows old it grows sweet and -golden and the rain ceases, and the beauty of the Downs -in the humid clearness does not long allow the eyes to -wander away from them. At first, when the sun breaks -through, all silver bright and acclaimed by miles of clouds -in his own livery, the Downs below are violet, and have -no form except where they carve the sky with their long -arches. It is the woods northward that are chiefly glorified -by the light and warmth, and the glades penetrating them -and the shining stubble and the hedges, and the flying -wood-pigeons and the cows of richest brown and milky -white; the road also gleams blue and wet. But as the -sun descends the light falls on the Downs out of a bright -cave in the gloomy forest of sky, and their flanks are olive -and their outlines intensely clear. From one summit to -another runs a string of trees like cavalry connecting one -beech clump with another, so that they seem actually to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[259]</a></span> -be moving and adding themselves to the clumps. Above -all is the abstract beauty of pure line—coupled with the -beauty of the serene and the uninhabited and remote—that -holds the eye until at length the hills are humbled -and dispread as part of the ceremony of sunset in a -tranquil, ensanguined, quietly travelling sky. The blue -swallows go slowly along the silent road beside me, and -the last rays bless a grooved common grazed upon by -cows and surrounded by ranges of low white buildings -and a row of lichened grotesque limes, dark of bole, -golden-leaved, where children are playing and an anvil -rings.</p> - -<p>Frost follows after the blue silence and chill of twilight, -and the dawn is dimmest violet in a haze that -reveals the candied grass, the soaking blue dark elms -painted yellow only in one place, the red roofs, all in a -world of the unborn, and the waters steaming around -invisible crying coots. Gradually round white clouds—so -dim that the sky seems but to dream of round white -clouds—appear imbedded in the haze; the beams grow -hot, and a breeze joins with them in sucking and scattering -all the sweet of the first fallen leaves, the weed fires -and the late honeysuckle.</p> - -<p>Why are there no swifts to race and scream? We -fret over these stages of the descending year; we dream -on such a day as this that there is no need of farther -descent. We would preserve those days of the reaping; -we have lost them; but we recall them now when the -steam-plough has furrowed the sheeny stubble, and long -for the day when the gentle north wind can only just stir -the clusters of aspen-leaves, and the branches are motionless. -The nut bushes hang dreamily, heavily, over the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[260]</a></span> -white cool roads. The wood-pigeon’s is the sole voice in -the oak woods of the low hills, except that once or twice -a swift screams as he pursues that martial flight of his—as -of one who swings a sword as he goes—towards the -beeches and hop gardens of the higher hills in the north; -it is perhaps the last day for more than eight months that -his cry will be heard. A few barley-straws hang from -the hazels; some leaves are yellow. Autumn, in fact, -seems possible to the mind that is not perfectly content -with these calm sweet airs and the sense of the fulness -of things.</p> - -<p>At a crossing a small island is made amidst this and -three other roads, and on the island stands an oast house -with two mellow cones and white leaning cowls; and -beside it a simple tiled cart-lodge, dimly displaying massive -wheels, curving bulwarks of waggons and straight shafts -behind its doorless pillars of rough-hewn wood. Making -one group with these, though separated from them by one -road, is an old red farmhouse, of barely distinguishable -timber and brick, with white-edged dormers and lower -windows and doors, entrenched behind hollyhocks of deepest -red and the burning discs of everlasting sunflowers. -Behind the gates stand four haystacks brightly thatched, -and one that is dark and old and carved into huge stairs.</p> - -<p>Notice the gate into the rickyard. It is of the usual -five oak bars; and across these is a diagonal bar from the -lowest end nearest the hinge to the upper end of the -opposite side, and from top to bottom a perpendicular -cross-bar divides the gate. The top bar marks it as no -common gate made at a factory with a hundred others of -the same kind, though there are scores of them in Kent. -It thickens gradually towards the hinge end of the gate,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[261]</a></span> -and then much more decidedly so that it resembles a gun-barrel -and stock; and just where the stock begins it is -carved with something like a trigger-guard; the whole -being well proportioned, graceful but strong. In all the -best gates of Kent, Sussex and Surrey and the South -Country there is an approach to this form, usually without -the trigger-guard, but sometimes having instead a much -more elaborate variation of it which takes away from the -dignity and simplicity of the gate. At the road’s edge -crooked quince-trees lean over a green pond and green -but nearly yellow straight reeds; and four cart-horses, three -sorrels and a grey, are grouped under one stately walnut.</p> - -<p>These things mingle their power with that of the -silence and the wooded distance under the blue and rosy -west. The slow dying of a train’s roar beats upon the -shores of the silence and the distance, and is swallowed up -in them like foam in sand, and adds one more trophy to -the glory of the twilight.</p> - -<p>Night passes, and the white dawn is poured out over -the dew from the folds in low clouds of infinitely -modulated grey. Autumn is clearly hiding somewhere in -the long warm alleys under the green and gold of the -hops. The very colours of the oast houses seem to wait -for certain harmonies with oaks in the meadows and -beeches in the steep woods. The songs, too, are those -of the drowsy yellow-hammer, of the robin moodily -brooding in orchards yellow spotted and streaked, of the -unseen wandering willow-wren singing sweetly but in a -broken voice of a matter now forgotten, of the melancholy -twit of the single bullfinch as he flies. The sudden lyric -of the wren can stir no corresponding energy in the land -which is bowed, still, comfortable, like a deep-uddered<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[262]</a></span> -cow fastened to the milking-stall and munching grains. -Soon will the milk and honey flow. The reaping-machine -whirrs; the wheelwrights have mended the -waggons’ wheels and patched their sides; they stand -outside their lodges.</p> - -<p>There is a quarter of a sloping wheat-field reaped; the -shocks stand out above the silvery stubble in the evening -like rocks out of a moonlight sea. The unreaped corn is -like a tawny coast; and all is calm, with the quiet of -evening heavens fallen over the earth. This beauty of -the ripe Demeter standing in the August land is incomparable. -It reminds one of the poet who said that he had -seen a maid who looked like a fountain on a green lawn -when the south wind blows in June; and one whose smile -was as memorable as the new moon in the first still mild -evening of the year, when it is seen for a moment only -over the dark hills; and one whose walking was more -kindling to the blood than good ale by a winter fire on an -endless evening among friends; but that now he has met -another, and when he is with her or thinks of her he -becomes as one that is blind and deaf to all other things.</p> - -<p>But a few days and the bryony leaves are palest yellow -in the hedge. Rooks are innumerable about the land, but -their cawing, like all other sounds, like all the early -bronze and rose and gold of the leaves, is muffled by the -mist which endures right through the afternoon; and all -day falls the gentle rain. In the hillside hop garden two -long lines of women and children, red and white and -black, are destroying the golden green of the hops, and -they are like two caterpillars destroying a leaf. Pleasant -it is now to see the white smoke from the oast house -pouring solidly like curving plumes into the still rain, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[263]</a></span> -to smell the smell, bitter and never to be too much sniffed -and enjoyed, that travels wide over the fields. For the -hop drier has lit his two fires of Welsh coal and brimstone -and charcoal under the two cones of the oast house, -and has spread his couch of straw on the floor where he -can sleep his many little sleeps in the busy day and night. -The oast house consists of the pair of cones, white-vaned -and tiled, upon their two circular chambers in which the -fires are lit. Attached to these on one side is a brick -building of two large rooms, one upon the ground, where -the hop drier sleeps and tends his fires, lighted only by -doors at either side and divided by the wooden pillars -which support the floor of the upper room. This, the -oast chamber, reached by a ladder, is a beautiful room, -its oak boards polished by careful use and now stained -faintly by the green-gold of hops, its roof raftered and -high and dim. Light falls upon it on one side from -two low windows, on the opposite side from a door -through which the hops arrive from the garden. The -waggon waits below the door, full of the loose, stained -hop-sacks which the carter and his boy lift up to the -drier. From the floor two short ladders lead to the doors -in the cones where the hops are suspended on canvas -floors above the kilns. The inside of the cone is full of -coiling fumes which have killed the young swallows in -the nests under the cowl—the parents return again and -again, but dare no longer alight on their old perches on -the vanes. When dried the hops are poured out on -the floor of the vast chamber in a lisping scaly pile, and -the drier is continually sweeping back those which are -scattered. Through a hole in the floor he forces them -down into a sack reaching to the floor of the room below.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[264]</a></span> -He is hard at work making these sacks or “pokes,” which, -when full and their necks stitched up, are as hard as wood. -Before the drying is over the full sacks will take up half -the room. The children tired of picking come to admire -and to visit all the corners of the room; of the granary -alongside and its old sheepbells, its traps, a crossbow and -the like; of the farmyard and barns, sacred except at this -time. For a few minutes the sun is visible as a shapeless -crimson thing above the mist and behind the elms. It is -twilight; the wheels and hoofs of the last waggon approach -and arrive and die away. And so day after day -the fires glow with ruby and sapphire and emerald; the -cone wears its plume of smoke; and everything is yellow-green—the -very scent of the drying hops can hardly be -otherwise described, in its mixture of sharpness and mellowness. -Then when the last sack is pressed benches are -placed round the chamber and a table at one end. The -master, who is giving up the farm, leans on the table -and pays each picker and pole-puller and measurer, with -a special word for each and a jest for the women. Ale -and gin and cakes are brought in, and the farmer leaves -the women and one or two older men to eat and drink. -The women in their shabby black skirts and whitish -blouses shuffle through a dance or two, all modern and -some American. One old man tipsily tottering recalls -the olden time with a step-dance down the room; some -laugh at him, others turn up their new roseate noses. -Next year the hops are to be grubbed up; the old man to -be turned out of his cottage—for he has paid no rent -these seven years; but now it is cakes and ale, and the -farmer has hiccupped a lying promise that his successor -will go on growing hops.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[265]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>HAMPSHIRE.</h3> - -<p>To-day is fair day. The scene is a green, slightly -undulating common, grassy and rushy at its lower end -where a large pond wets the margin of the high road, -and at the upper end sprinkled with the dwarf and the -common gorse out of which rise many tumuli, green -or furzy mounds of earth, often surmounted by a few -funereal pines. The common is small; it is bounded -on every side by roads, and on one by a row of new -mean houses; there is a golf-house among the tumuli; in -one place a large square has been ploughed and fenced -by a private owner. But the slope of the sandy soil is -pleasant; in one place it is broken into a low cliff overhanging -the water, and this with the presence of the gorse -give it a touch of the wildness by which it may still -deserve its name of “heath.” Most powerful of all in -their effect upon the place are the tumuli. They are low -and smooth; one or two scarcely heave the turf; some -have been removed; and there is no legend attached to -them. Yet their presence gives an indescribable charm -and state, and melancholy too, and makes these few acres -an expanse unequalled by any other of the same size. -Not too far off to be said to belong to the heath, from -which they are separated by three miles of cultivated land -and a lesser beechen hill, are the Downs; among them one -that bears a thin white road winding up at the edge of -a dark wood. In the moist October air the Downs are -very grave and gentle and near, and are not lost to sight -until far beyond the turreted promontory of Chanctonbury.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[266]</a></span></p> - -<p>Early in the morning the beggars begin to arrive, the -lame and the blind, with or without a musical instrument. -King of them all certainly is he with no legs at all and -seeming not to need them, so active is he on a four-wheeled -plank which suspends him only a foot above the -ground. Many a strong man earns less money. The -children envy him as he moves along, a wheeled animal, -weather-beaten, white-haired, white-bearded, with neat -black hat and white slop, a living toy, but with a deep -voice, a concertina and a tin full of pence and halfpence.</p> - -<p>These unashamed curiosities line the chief approaches, -down which every one is going to the fair except a few -shabby fellows who offer blue sheets full of music-hall -ballads to the multitude and, with a whisper, indecent -songs to the select. Another not less energetic, but stout -and condescending, yellow-bearded, in a high hard felt -hat, gives away tracts. The sound of a hymn from one -organ mingles with the sound of “Put me among the -girls” from another and the rattle of the legless man’s -offertory-tin.</p> - -<p>The main part of the fair consists of a double row, a -grove, of tents and booths, roundabouts, caravans, traps -and tethered ponies. A crowd of dark-clad women goes -up and down between the rows: there is a sound of -machine-made music, of firing at targets, of shouts and -neighs and brays and the hoot of engines. Here at the -entrance to the grove is a group of yellow vans; some -children playing among the shafts and wheels and musing -horses; and a gypsy woman on a stool, her head on one -side, combing her black hair and talking to the children, -while a puppy catches at the end of her tresses when -they come swishing down. Beyond are cocoanut-shies,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[267]</a></span> -short-sighted cyclists performing, Aunt Sallies, rows of -goldfish bowls into which a light ball has to be pitched to -earn a prize, stalls full of toys, cheap jewellery and sweets -like bedded-out plants, and stout women pattering alongside—bold -women, with sleek black or yellow hair and -the bearing and countenance of women who have to -make their way in the world. Behind these, women are -finishing their toilet and their children’s among the vans, -preparing meals over red crackling fires, and the horses -rest their noses on the stalls and watch the crowd; the -long yellow dogs are curled up among the wheels or -nosing in the crowd.</p> - -<p>There are men selling purses containing a sovereign -for sixpence, loud, fat cosmopolitans on a cockney basis -with a ceaseless flow of cajolery intermingled with sly -indecency; the country policeman in the background -puzzling over his duty in the matter, but in the end -paralyzed by the showmen’s gift of words. One man -has before him a counter on which he asks you to cover -a red-painted disc with five smaller discs of zinc, charging -twopence for the attempt and promising a watch to the -great man who succeeds. After a batch of failures he -himself, with good-natured but bored face, shows how -easily it is done, and raising his eyes in despair craves for -more courage from the audience. The crowd looks on, -hesitating, until he singles out the most bashful countryman -at the back of the throng, saying: “I like your face. -You are a good sort. You have a cheerful face; it’s the -rich have the sad faces. So I’ll treat you to a go.” The -hero steps forward and succeeds, but as it was a free trial -he receives no watch; trying again for twopence he fails. -Another tries: “By Jove! that was a near one.” A<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[268]</a></span> -woman tries, and just as she is finishing, “You’re a ’cute -one, missus,” he ejaculates, and she fails. Another tries, -and the showman has a watch ready to hand over, and -only at the last moment says excitedly (restoring the -watch quietly to its place): “I thought you’d got it that -time.... Come along! It’s the best game in the -world.” Once more he repeats the trick himself without -looking, and then exclaims as he sweeps the discs -together: “It’s a silly game, I call it!” He is like the -preachers who show the stupid world how virtue is won: -he has a large audience, a large paunch, and many go -away disappointed. The crowd stares, and has the one -deep satisfaction of believing that the woman who travels -with him is not his wife.</p> - -<p>At the upper end of the grove is the gaudy green and -gold and scarlet-painted and embossed entrance to the -bioscope, raised a few feet above the crowd. On the -platform before the door stand two painted men and a -girl. The girl has a large nose, loose mouth and a ready, -but uneasy, discontented smile as if she knows that her -paint is an imperfect refuge from the gaze of the crowd; -as if she knows that her eyes are badly darkened, and her -white stockings soiled, and her legs too thin under her -short skirt, and her yellow hair too stiff. She lounges -wearily with a glib clown who wears a bristly fringe of -sandy hair round his face, which tickles her and causes -roars of laughter when he aims at a kiss. The other performer -is a contortionist, a small slender man in dirty, ill-fitting -scarlet jacket with many small brass buttons, dirty -brown trousers criss-crossed by yellow stripes; his hands in -his pockets; his snub nose deep pink, and his lean face -made yet leaner and more dismal by a thin streak of red<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[269]</a></span> -paint on either cheek. His melancholy seems natural, yet -adds to his vulgarity because he forsakes it so quickly -when he smirks and turns away if the girl exposes her -legs too much. For she turns a somersault with the clown -at intervals; or doubles herself back to touch the ground -first with her yellow hair and at last with her head; or is -lifted up by the clown and, supported on the palm of one -of his hands, hangs dangling in a limp bow, her face yet -gaunter and sadder upside down with senseless eyes and -helpless legs. The crowd watch—looking sideways at -one another to get their cue—some with unconscious -smiles entranced, but most of them grimly controlling the -emotions roused by the girl or the contortionist or the -clown and the thought of their unstable life. A few -squirt water languidly or toss confetti. Others look from -time to time to see whether any one in the county dare -in broad daylight enter the booth for “gentlemen only,” -at the door of which stands a shabby gaudy woman of -forty-five grinning contemptuously.</p> - -<p>Up and down moves the crowd—stiffly dressed children -carrying gay toys or bowls of goldfish or cocoanuts—gypsy -children with scarves, blue or green or red—lean, -tanned, rough-necked labourers caged in their best clothes, -except one, a labourer of well past middle age, a tall -straight man with a proud grizzled head, good black hat -of soft felt low in the crown, white scarf, white jacket, -dark-brown corduroys above gleaming black boots.</p> - -<p>On the open heath behind the stalls they are selling -horses by auction. Enormous cart-horses plunge out of the -groups of men and animals and carry a little man suspended -from their necks; stout men in grey gaiters and -black hats bobble after. Or more decorously the animals<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[270]</a></span> -are trotted up and down between rows of men away from -the auctioneer and back again, their price in guineas -mingling with the statement that they are real workers, -while a small boy hustles them with whip and shout from -behind, and a big stiff man leads them and, to turn them -at the end of the run, shoves his broad back into their -withers. The Irish dealers traffic apart and try to sell -without auction. Their horses and ponies, braided with -primrose and scarlet, stand in a quiet row. Suddenly a -boy leads out one on a halter, a hard, plump, small-headed -beast bucking madly, and makes it circle rapidly about -him, stopping it abruptly and starting it again, with a stiff -pink flag which he flaps in its face or pokes into its ribs; -if the beast refuses he raises a high loud “whoo-hoop” -and curses or growls like an animal. For perhaps five -minutes this goes on, the boy never abating his oaths and -growls and whoops and flirtings of the pink flag. The -horse is led back; a muttering calm follows; another horse -is led out. Here and there are groups of cart-mares with -huge pedestalled feet and their colts, or of men bending -forward over long ash-sticks and talking in low tones. -Horses race or walk or are backed into the crowd. Droves -of bullocks are driven through the furze. Rows of bulls, -sweating but silent and quiet, bow their heads and wait -as on a frieze. Again the pink flags are flourished, and -the dealer catches a horsy stranger by the arm and -whispers and shows him the mare’s teeth. This dealer -is a big Irishman with flattened face and snaky nose, his -voice deep and laughing. He smiles continually, but -when he sees a possible buyer he puts on an artful expression -so transparent that his merry face shines clearly -underneath and remains the same in triumph or rebuke—is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[271]</a></span> -the same at the end of the day when he leads off his -horses and stopping at a wayside inn drinks on the kerb, -but first gives the one nearest him a gulp from the -tankard.</p> - -<hr class="tb hidden" /> - -<p>All night—for a week—it rains, and at last there is a -still morning of mist. A fire of weeds and hedge-clippings -in a little flat field is smouldering. The ashes are crimson, -and the bluish-white smoke flows in a divine cloudy -garment round the boy who rakes over the ashes. The -heat is great, and the boy, straight and well made, wearing -close gaiters of leather that reach above the knees, is -languid at his task, and often leans upon his rake to watch -the smoke coiling away from him like a monster reluctantly -fettered and sometimes bursting into an anger of -sprinkled sparks. He adds some wet hay, and the smoke -pours out of it like milky fleeces when the shearer reveals -the inmost wool with his shears. Above and beyond him -the pale blue sky is dimly white-clouded over beech woods, -whose many greens and yellows and yellow-greens are -softly touched by the early light which cannot penetrate -to the blue caverns of shade underneath. Athwart the -woods rises a fount of cottage-smoke from among mellow -and dim roofs. Under the smoke and partly scarfed at -times by a drift from it is the yellow of sunflower and -dahlia, the white of anemone, the tenderest green and -palest purple of a thick cluster of autumn crocuses that -have broken out of the dark earth and stand surprised, -amidst their own weak light as of the underworld from -which they have come. Robins sing among the fallen -apples, and the cooing of wood-pigeons is attuned to the -soft light and the colours of the bowers. The yellow<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[272]</a></span> -apples gleam. It is the gleam of melting frost. Under all -the dulcet warmth of the face of things lurks the bitter -spirit of the cold. Stand still for more than a few -moments and the cold creeps with a warning and then a -menace into the breast. That is the bitterness that makes -this morning of all others in the year so mournful in its -beauty. The colour and the grace invite to still contemplation -and long draughts of dream; the frost compels -to motion. The scent is that of wood-smoke, of fruit and -of some fallen leaves. This is the beginning of the -pageant of autumn, of that gradual pompous dying which -has no parallel in human life yet draws us to it, with sure -bonds. It is a dying of the flesh, and we see it pass -through a kind of beauty which we can only call spiritual, -of so high and inaccessible a strangeness is it. The sight -of such perfection as is many times achieved before the -end awakens the never more than lightly sleeping human -desire of permanence. Now, now is the hour; let things -be thus; thus for ever; there is nothing further to be -thought of; let these remain. And yet we have a premonition -that remain they must not for more than a little -while. The motion of the autumn is a fall, a surrender, -requiring no effort, and therefore the mind cannot long be -blind to the cycle of things as in the spring it can when -the effort and delight of ascension veils the goal and the -decline beyond. A few frosts now, a storm of wind and -rain, a few brooding mists, and the woods that lately -hung dark and massive and strong upon the steep hills are -transfigured and have become cloudily light and full of -change and ghostly fair; the crowing of a cock in the still -misty morning echoes up in the many-coloured trees like -a challenge to the spirits of them to come out and be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[273]</a></span> -seen, but in vain. For months the woods have been -homely and kind, companions and backgrounds to our -actions and thoughts, the wide walls of a mansion utterly -our own. We could have gone on living with them for -ever. We had given up the ardours, the extreme ecstasy -of our first bridal affection, but we had not forgotten -them. We could not become indifferent to the Spanish -chestnut-trees that grow at the top of the steep rocky -banks on either side of the road and mingle their foliage -overhead. Of all trees well-grown chestnuts are among -the most pleasant to look up at. For the foliage is not -dense and it is for the most part close to the large boughs, -so that the light comes easily down through all the horizontal -leaves, and the shape of each separate one is not -lost in the multitude, while at the same time the bold -twists of the branches are undraped or easily seen through -such translucent green. The trunks are crooked, and the -handsome deep furrowing of the bark is often spirally cut. -The limbs are few and wide apart so as to frame huge -delicately lighted and shadowed chambers of silence or of -birds’ song. The leaves turn all together to a leathern -hue, and when they fall stiffen and display their shape -on the ground and long refuse to be merged in the dismal -trodden hosts. But when the first one floats past the eye -and is blown like a canoe over the pond we recover once -more our knowledge and fear of Time. All those ladders -of goose-grass that scaled the hedges of spring are dead -grey; they are still in their places, but they clamber no -longer. The chief flower is the yellow bloom set in the -dark ivy round the trunks of the ash-trees; and where it -climbs over the holly and makes a solid sunny wall, and -in the hedges, a whole people of wasps and wasp-like flies<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[274]</a></span> -are always at the bloom with crystal wings, except when -a passing shadow disperses them for a moment with one -buzz. But these cannot long detain the eye from the -crumbling woods in the haze or under the large white -clouds—from the amber and orange bracken about our -knees and the blue recesses among the distant golden -beeches when the sky is blue but beginning to be laden -with loose rain-clouds, from the line of leaf-tipped poplars -that bend against the twilight sky; and there is no scent -of flowers to hide that of dead leaves and rotting fruit. -We must watch it until the end, and gain slowly the -philosophy or the memory or the forgetfulness that fits -us for accepting winter’s boon. Pauses there are, of -course, or what seem pauses in the declining of this -pomp; afternoons when the rooks waver and caw over -their beechen town and the pigeons coo content; dawns -when the white mist is packed like snow over the vale -and the high woods take the level beams and a hundred -globes of dew glitter on every thread of the spiders’ -hammocks or loose perpendicular nets among the thorns, -and through the mist rings the anvil a mile away with a -music as merry as that of the daws that soar and dive -between the beeches and the spun white cloud; mornings -full of the sweetness of mushrooms and blackberries from -the short turf among the blue scabious bloom and the -gorgeous brier; empurpled evenings before frost when -the robin sings passionate and shrill and from the garden -earth float the smells of a hundred roots with messages of -the dark world; and hours full of the thrush’s soft -November music. The end should come in heavy and -lasting rain. At all times I love rain, the early momentous -thunderdrops, the perpendicular cataract shining, or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[275]</a></span> -at night the little showers, the spongy mists, the tempestuous -mountain rain. I like to see it possessing the whole -earth at evening, smothering civilization, taking away -from me myself everything except the power to walk -under the dark trees and to enjoy as humbly as the hissing -grass, while some twinkling house-light or song sung by -a lonely man gives a foil to the immense dark force. I -like to see the rain making the streets, the railway station, -a pure desert, whether bright with lamps or not. It foams -all the roofs and trees and bubbles into the water-butts. -It gives the grey rivers a demonic majesty. It scours the -roads, sets the flints moving, and exposes the glossy chalk -in the tracks through the woods. It does work that will -last as long as the earth. It is about eternal business. In -its noise and myriad aspect I feel the mortal beauty of -immortal things. And then after many days the rain -ceases at midnight with the wind, and in the silence of -dawn and frost the last rose of the world is dropping her -petals down to the glistering whiteness, and there they -rest blood-red on the winter’s desolate coast.</p> - -<div class="footnotes"> - -<p><span class="pagenum"> -<a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[277]</a></span></p> - - - - -<h2 class="nobreak">INDEX</h2> - - - -<ul class="index"><li class="ifrst">Angelico, Fra, <a href="#Page_253">253</a></li> - -<li class="indx">April, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><i>Arabian Nights</i>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Ashdown, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a></li> - -<li class="indx">August, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_262">262</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Bain, F. W., <a href="#Page_222">222</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Ballads, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>, <a href="#Page_240">240</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Belloc, Hilaire, <a href="#Page_1">1</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Beowulf, <a href="#Page_158">158</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Berkshire, <a href="#Page_255">255</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Blake, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Books, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Borrow, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Bradley, A. G., <a href="#Page_11">11</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><i>Brocken, Henry</i>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Browne, Thomas, <a href="#Page_86">86</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Byron, <a href="#Page_111">111</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Canal, Wilts. and Berks., <a href="#Page_3">3</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Cathedrals, <a href="#Page_4">4</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Catullus, <a href="#Page_109">109</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><i>Centuries of Meditation</i>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Chaucer, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Colman’s Hatch, <a href="#Page_60">60</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Conrad, Joseph, <a href="#Page_130">130</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Cornwall, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Cows, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Crouch’s Croft, <a href="#Page_47">47</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Crowborough, <a href="#Page_47">47</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Cuckoo, <a href="#Page_41">41</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Doughty, Charles M., <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Downs, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Drayton, Michael, <a href="#Page_109">109</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Fair, A South Country, <a href="#Page_266">266</a></li> - -<li class="indx">February, <a href="#Page_17">17</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Game, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Genée, Mademoiselle, <a href="#Page_179">179</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Gerald of Wales, <a href="#Page_150">150</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Golden Age, <a href="#Page_125">125</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Gypsies, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Hampshire, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a></li> - -<li class="indx">History, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[278]</a></span>Hops, <a href="#Page_262">262</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Houses, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>, <a href="#Page_235">235</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Hudson, W. H., <a href="#Page_130">130</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Inns, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>, <a href="#Page_240">240</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Jefferies, Richard, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Jonson, Ben, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Journalist, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a></li> - -<li class="indx">June, <a href="#Page_121">121</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Kent, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Lamb, Charles, <a href="#Page_138">138</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Land’s End, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a></li> - -<li class="indx">London, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Lucas, E. V., <a href="#Page_11">11</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">M, <a href="#Page_115">115</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Maeterlinck, <a href="#Page_36">36</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Malory, <a href="#Page_130">130</a></li> - -<li class="indx">March, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a></li> - -<li class="indx">May, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Milton, John, <a href="#Page_109">109</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Morris, William, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Names of places, <a href="#Page_148">148</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Nature-teaching, <a href="#Page_141">141</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Nightingale, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a></li> - -<li class="indx">November, <a href="#Page_99">99</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Oasts, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a></li> - -<li class="indx">October, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst"><i>Pantagruel</i>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Pattison, Mark, <a href="#Page_145">145</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Penshurst, <a href="#Page_202">202</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Piet Down, <a href="#Page_47">47</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Pilgrim’s Way, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Railway, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Rivers of the South Country, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Roads, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Salt, Henry S., <a href="#Page_256">256</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Sandsbury Lane, <a href="#Page_60">60</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Scott, <a href="#Page_63">63</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Sea, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Shelley, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Sidney, Sir Philip, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Signboards, <a href="#Page_4">4</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Socialism, <a href="#Page_94">94</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Socialist, <a href="#Page_257">257</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Spring, <a href="#Page_22">22</a> <i>et passim</i></li> - -<li class="indx">Statius, <a href="#Page_229">229</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Suburbs, <a href="#Page_61">61</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Suffolk, <a href="#Page_15">15</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Sunday, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Surrey, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Sussex, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Swinburne, A. C., <a href="#Page_111">111</a></li> - -<li class="indx">“Swineherds County,” <a href="#Page_211">211</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Thoreau, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[279]</a></span>Tolstoy, <a href="#Page_143">143</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Traherne, Thomas, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Trespassers, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Vagrants, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Vaughan, Thomas, <a href="#Page_137">137</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Villon, <a href="#Page_109">109</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Wales, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Walton, Izaak, <a href="#Page_125">125</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Wandsworth, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Weald, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a></li> - -<li class="indx">West, the, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_254">254</a></li> - -<li class="indx">White, Gilbert, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Whitman, Walt, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Wiltshire, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Winchester, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Woolmer, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Wordsworth, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_241">241</a></li></ul> - -</div> - - -<p class="center noindent p4 nobreak">THE END</p> - -<div class="break"> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[280]</a></span></p> - - - - -<p class="p4 center noindent"> -<span class="smcap">Richard Clay & Sons, Limited</span>,<br /> -BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND<br /> -BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.<br /> -</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -</div> - -<div class="footnotes"> - -<h2 class="nobreak">FOOTNOTES</h2> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> <i>A Book of Saints and Wonders</i>, by Lady Gregory.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> From <i>Poems and Interludes</i>, by Lascelles Abercrombie.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> <i>Centuries of Meditation</i>, by Thomas Traherne (Dobell).</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> <i>The Dawn in Britain</i>, by Charles M. Doughty.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> <i>The Heifer of the Dawn</i>, by F. W. Bain.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> See his valuable <i>On Cambrian and Cumbrian Hills</i> (Fifield).</p></div> - -</div> - - - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 559px;"> -<a href="images/innercover_rh.jpg"> -<img src="images/innercover_r.jpg" width="559" height="800" alt="man leading horses" /> -</a> -</div> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 546px;"> -<a href="images/innercover_lh.jpg"> -<img src="images/innercover_l.jpg" width="546" height="800" alt="ploughman" /> -</a></div> - - -<hr class="full" /> - - -<div class="transnote"> - -<h2 class="nobreak">Transcriber's Note</h2> - - -<p>The following apparent errors have been corrected:</p> - -<ul> - -<li>p. 19 "HAMPSHIRE" changed to "HAMPSHIRE."</li> - -<li>p. 34 "gnomes of undergound" changed to "gnomes of underground"</li> - -<li>p. 62 "hoisery" changed to "hosiery"</li> - -<li>p. 154 "CORNWALL" changed to "CORNWALL."</li> - -<li>p. 222 (note) "F W. Bain" changed to "F. W. Bain"</li> - -<li>p. 256 (note) "(Fifield)" changed to "(Fifield)."</li> - -<li>p. 277 "210 262" changed to "210, 262"</li> - -<li>p. 277 "Wilts. and Berks" changed to "Wilts. and Berks."</li></ul> - - -<p>Inconsistent or archaic spelling and punctuation have otherwise been left as printed.</p> -</div> - - - - - - - - -<pre> - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The South Country, by Edward Thomas - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SOUTH COUNTRY *** - -***** This file should be named 60760-h.htm or 60760-h.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/6/0/7/6/60760/ - -Produced by Henry Flower and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was -produced from images generously made available by The -Internet Archive/American Libraries.) - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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