NOVEMBER RAIN
Close, perpendicular, quiet rain came upon me when I was ten miles
from last night’s shelter and ten miles from my end. Shelter was not
near, nor indeed to be thought of in an untrodden lane which had been,
for some time, and seemed to go on for ever, winding through the
delicious, vacant country of a late autumn Sunday, while it was yet
early in the day and yet not so early but that the milking was over,
and the milk carts gone, and the cattle satisfied and slow after their
first questing in the fields. The rain was so dense, and the light so
restrained, and the drops hung so about my eyes, and the sound and the
sweetness of it made my brain so well contented with all that umber
country asleep, that what I saw was little compared with what reached
me by touch and by darker channels still. I rarely see much in the
country--a few herbs underfoot, the next field, the horizon woods,
some brief light that shows only its departing hem; for, like others,
I always carry out into the fields a vast baggage of prejudices from
books and strong characters whom I have met. My going forth, although
simple enough to the eye, is truly as pompous as that of a rajah who
goes through the jungle on a tall and richly encrusted elephant, with
a great retinue, and much ceremony and noise. As he frightens bird
and beast, and tramples on herb and grass, so I scatter from my path
many things which are lying in wait for a discoverer. There is no
elephant more heavy-footed and no rifle more shattering than the egoism
of an imitative brain. And thus the little thing I saw was an unusual
discovery.
It was a triangular, six-acre wood below me, across a bare and soaking
ploughland. The wood was mainly of ash and the myriad stems were a grey
mist, only denser and a little clearer than the rain itself. Out of
them rose half a hundred oaks which were exuberant in foliage of hues
so vigorous and splendid in their purple that it was impossible to
think of it as on the edge of death, but easy to think of it as in a
deathless prime. One thrush sang heartily somewhere deep among the ash
trees, and that was the only sound, for the sound of the rain was but
a carpet on which that song walked forth, delicate footed, haughty and
beautiful....
When I had walked another mile, the wood was out of sight, the thrush
unheard. The wood is now purple immortally, for ever that song emerges
from its heart, as free from change as one whom we remember vividly
in the tip-toe of his exulting youth, and dying then has escaped
huskiness, and a stoop, and foul breath, and a steady view of life.