A GOLDEN AGE
Almost at the end of a long walk, and as a small silver sun was leaving
a pale and frosty sky, we began to ascend a broad, heaving meadow which
was bordered on our right, on its eastern side, by a long, narrow
copse of ash trees. At the top of the meadow, hardly a quarter of a
mile away, was a little red farmhouse--yet not so little but that it
rose with a maternal dignity among and above the sheds and stables,
its children, and, like it, of antique red. The home and dependencies
gave out a sense of solidity, independence and seclusion. Our hearts
acknowledged at once that it was desirable, saluted it, and were calmly
glad at the sight.
At that moment the tumult of a windy day was entirely gone. The north
wind now lay dead upon the long white clouds in the east. The smoke
from the farmhouse chimneys flowed southward along the top of the ash
trees in a narrow, motionless rivulet in the calm air. Far off the
hoofs of the returning hunt clattered decently, and combined with the
dim memory of the wind in trees and sedge to give to the great meadow
an emphasised tranquillity like that which fills an invalid’s room when
others are just audibly busy about and below. We walked more and more
slowly up the meadow. The red house was clear and hard in the grey
air, yet with a richness and implicated shadow as of things submerged.
Something which it gave out abundantly filled our minds that had for
hours played with casual and untraceable thoughts and images--descended
like an enthusiasm among criticisms. In a minute the house was
beautiful; it seemed to flower with the happiness of men and women and
little children living melodiously; there, we thought, must be minds
and bodies which, without carelessness and without stupidity, found in
life what some expect from the future and some feign to remember in the
past; there was character and beauty and strength, which time flowed
over in vain. Hither, it seemed, had drifted upon Lethe’s stream all
the hopes and wishes and recollections and unaccomplished dreams of
unhappy men, and had formed at last a blossoming island in the waste.
And some were enjoying that island now. The very smoke from the
chimneys had goodness in it. Even as we walked we turned the moment
past into a Golden Age, except that, whenever we looked up towards the
house, we knew that all was not yet lost, and that a golden age might
still succeed the last. Overhead sailed some little rosy clouds that
were part of the blossom of that house.
Then suddenly a fearless child ran into the garden and blew a horn and
disappeared. Then we knew that the past moments had been as when, in
the old tale, men saw an anchor let down out of the clouds and rooted
in the ground, and, looking up saw a rope shaken as if to dislodge the
anchor, and heard the voices of sailors aloft in the sky, and then saw
a man clambering down the rope and dying at last, as if he had been
drowned in the air which they breathed easily, and the voices aloft
were heard no more.