THE PRIDE OF THE MORNING
The sun has been up for an hour without impediment, but the meadows
are rough silver under a mist after last night’s frost. The greens in
cottage gardens are of a bright, cold hue between blue and grey, which
is fitter for the armour of heaven, or the landscape of some strong
mystic, than for one who loathes to leave his bed. The blackbirds are
scattering the frost, and they live in glittering little hazes while
they flutter in the grass.
But the sky is of an eager, luminous pale blue that speaks of health
and impetuousness and success. Across it, low down, lie pure white
clouds, preserving, though motionless, many torn and tumultuous forms;
they have sharp edges against the blue and invade it with daggers of
the same white; they are as vivid in their place in that eager sky as
yews on a pale, bright lawn, or as lightning in blue night. If pure
and hale intelligence could be visibly expressed, it would be like
that. The eyes of the wayfarer at once either dilate in an effort
for a moment at least to be equal in beauty with the white and blue,
clear sky, or they grow dim with dejection at the impossibility. The
brain also dilates and takes deep breaths of life, and casts out stale
thought and coddled emotion. It scorns afterthought as the winds are
flouting the penitent half moon.
A squadron of wild fowl races through the crystal air; the mind expands
with their speed, and tries to share it, and believes that it succeeds.
A heron goes over solemnly, high up, and as if upon some starry
business in that profound, bright air; the mind at once attunes itself
to that majesty and directness and simplicity--
“And each imagined pinnacle and steep
of godlike hardship.”
A starling sits on the weathercock with ruffled feathers watching
the sky with one eye and then with the other, and his form and voice
are sharp and pure as they joyfully pierce the air. The weathercock
itself shines like Mars. Together, they speak of the cold and vigour
and health and beauty which abide somewhere in the sky to-day and not
inaccessibly.
High above me, here and there upon the road, stand oast-houses, with
their conical roofs ruddy against the sky, and over them the newly
painted white cowls point eastward, and in their whiteness seem to have
been set as a signal to say that it is the west wind after frost that
has made the world what it is; they point out a road which, if I could
follow it, would lead to the very court of mind and beauty, yonder,
afar off, where the wind and the heron and the wild ducks are going.
There I might learn to realise the long, joyous curves in which thought
and action and life itself sweep onward to their triumphs....
But I know well that long hopes and wide, vaulting thoughts are not
usually nourished by lane and footpath and highway, on and on; and
probably I shall stop at “The Black Horse” over the next hill, where a
man may always lighten his burden on a Tuesday by hearing the price of
beasts.