A WINTER MORNING
Night was soon to pass into a winter day as I looked out of the window
to see what kind of a world it was that had been, since I began to
read, shutting me off effectually from everything but my book.
“And but the flitter-winged verse must tell,
For truth’s sake, what woe afterwards befell,
’Twould humour many a heart to leave them thus,
Shut from the busy world of more incredulous.”
The words were still fresh in my brain.
But, outside, the trees and barns and shed were quiet and dim, and as
much submerged and hidden from the air in which I had been living as
the green streets of motionless lily and weed at the bottom of some
lonely pool where carp and tench go slowly. The road went straight away
from the window to the invisible beyond; hard and dry, it was trying
to shine, as if it recalled the sunlight. Half way along, at one side,
under a broad oak, there was a formless but pregnant shadow. The farm
buildings that lay about the road were huddled, dark, colourless and
indistinguishable because of their shadows; they might have been heaped
up by a great plough, of which the road was the shining furrow; they
were not so much the vague wreckage of what I had known yesterday, as
a chaos out of which perhaps something was to be born. Yet the outside
world was vaster than it had seemed when I could see three ranges of
hills and guess at the sea beyond; and strange it was when the words--
“She saw the young Corinthian Lycius
Charioting foremost in the envious race
Like a young love, with calm, uneager face,
And fell into a swooning love of him”--
came back to me. How frail and perilous and small was the poet’s
shielded world! The outside world threatened it as the smooth
escarpment of tall, toppling water threatens the little piping
sea-bird. And yet this poet’s world was for the time being my life.
Beyond his words there were, perhaps, the gay, the dear, the beautiful
persons whom I knew; Nobby, the tinker, and many more; but probably
they slept; they were vain if they were not fictitious; if they could
be supposed to live, my only proof of it was that somehow they were
connected with a very distant light that refused to go out among the
westward copses. They were hardly more credible than the words of a
stale preacher talking of charity, or an artful poet writing of love.
So I clung to Keats, the reality, until the road grew almost white,
and under that broad oak some rational, nay, beautiful outlines begin
to appear, which the shadow enveloped like a cocoon. The outlines were
hardly built until they were seen to be a waggon, and its birth out of
the shadow was a mighty thing that shared the idiom of stately trees
and the motions of great waters and of cliffs that look on sunset and
a noble sea. Dimly, uncertainly, powerfully, never quite expressing
itself in any known language--as was natural in what seemed to belong
to an early brood of the giant earth--the waggon emerged, with
ponderous wheels and slender, curving timbers and trailing shafts. The
chariot of Dis coming up to Persephone looked thus majestic. Yet the
waggon suggested nothing definite, at least no history. It had no such
articulate power. But antiquity played about it as, an hour before, it
had played about my shelves and books. It was simply the richer for
its long life, like a violin or a wise man; and, like them, it neither
carried its legend on its exterior nor encouraged anything more than
joyful surmise.
It was the one clearly visible piece of man’s work among all those
potent shadows and uncertain forms of roof and wall; it was crowned by
the last stars. Becoming clearer as morning came, it was an important
part of the recreation of the world, and involved in it, just as a
brazen image may seem to be part of the good fortune or calamity
which follows prayer to it. It filled the white road with emotion.
It was more intelligible than some men are when they say “I worship”
or “I love.” Keats left my mind. From my memory, I added melodies of
voice and harp and reed, and noise of seas and winds in forests and
houses by night, and organ music, with its many demons blithe and
terrible, exploring the skiey roof of some cathedral and knocking at
the clerestory to get out, floating, sad or happy, about the aisles,
and settling at last to make the old purples and greens and blues in
the glass more solemn than before; and yet I could not reproduce the
melody or anything like it, with which the old waggon pervaded the
farmyard. Slowly the light came, and the world was filled with it
as imperceptibly as the brain with a great thought. It fell upon the
spokes of the waggon wheel, and they seemed to move. Then all was over.
The clear face of things which it is so hard to enjoy was back again.
The determined starlings flew swift and straight overhead. The clouds
about the risen sun went stately upon their errands through the sky.
PART III
THE UPLAND
CHAPTER XXX
CHERRY BLOSSOM
In front, a tall beechen hill closes up the gulf that runs out of the
valley into the heart of the chalk down. The hill fills nearly half
the sky, and just above it stands the white full moon, as one who
looks over his lands. It warms the low, pale, curdled sky, but does
not disturb the darkness of the beeches. All its light seems to fall
and settle, as if it would dwell there for ever in the cherry trees on
either hand. All are blossoming, and in their branches the nightingales
sing out of the blossom, dispersing what ruins remain of the world of
yesterday, and building rapidly those tall watch towers that last until
dawn, which men may climb and from their summits see what may make them
out of love with the earth.
The past day is long past, the day of fighting, digging, buying,
selling, writing; and if there are still men on the earth they are all
equal in the trances of passion or sleep; the day to come is not to be
thought of. The moon reigns; you rule. The centuries are gathered up
in your hand. You and the moonlight and the nightingale and the cherry
blossom have your own way with them all night long. It is true then
that Virgil, Catullus, Crashaw, Burton, Shelley ... live still, and
Horace, Racine, Bishop Beveridge ... never lived. You exult because
you are alive and your spirit possesses this broad, domed earth. Poor
thing as you are, you have somehow gained a power of expression like
the nightingale’s, a pure translucency like the petals of the flowers;
and as never before to man or woman you open your eyes widely and
frankly, even the limbs move with the carelessness of the animals, the
features lose the rigidity that comes of compromise and suppression.
Walking slowly thus, with a bowed head, you find an image of yourself
and the universe in a shallow pool among the trees. The pool is your
own mind. The flowers at its edge--hyacinth, primrose, marsh-marigold,
and all the trees and their foliage--are the intimate and permanent
companions of your life, and they are clearly mirrored in the water.
An oak draws a long, snaky shadow from side to side, with the head
and neck of a sitting dove among the leaves. And there, too, are the
stars and the moon, brought down into that homely company of trees and
flowers by the shining water, and preserved there in strangely woven
patterns; just as in your mind you mingle visions of the world, the
past, the imaginary, with your own domestic surroundings and acts, and
a changing mood, like a puff of wind across the pool, erases them. How
sovereign and proud your own form plunged among these mirrored stars
and leaves! On such a night an uncourageous lover, who sat at the edge
with his mistress, was lured to a strange boldness by long gazing at
the two blissful figures down there among the clouds. “See how fair
they are,” he said, “and how happy and close. Let us make them kiss.”
And the shadows kissed in the bosom of the pool.
CHAPTER XXXI
THE FOX HUNT
We had driven ten miles through a country that rose and fell with
large, stormy lines of hillock and hill. A March sun was bright, but
a sharpness lingered in the air from last night’s frost, like a cold
spring in a warm lake. Over the hazy, genial oak woods on the hills
sailed slow white gulls all crying, “wheel whill” with a shrillness
that suited the high blue sky. Sowers went across the long red fields,
casting dark seeds that flew in curved clouds before them at each
second step and vanished in the wind. On the steep roads the dust
whirled in curves as of perfect dancers, which the kestrel repeated on
a grand scale high overhead. Thrushes sang at ash tops and in hedges.
And we four talked, making such harmonious music to a fine day as men
may, with jest and recollection and anticipation of the meet of the fox
hounds to which we were going, two to ride and two to follow afoot.
Within a mile of the meet we got down at a farmhouse, where the horses
were awaiting their owners and the yeoman was to join us.
The farm-buildings made almost a complete quadrangle with the side of
the house--stables, cow stalls, a granary of ancient stone, a barn
with a low-arched Tudor doorway like a broad back ready to receive a
weight, and ladders and lengths of oak leaning against the walls. There
stood the horses, nodding by their grooms, with restless fetlocks; a
red calf flung up its heels amongst the flying, yellow straw; the fowls
were stately and fluttered by turns. The house was all white, except
for the roof of stone “slats” and the large dark windows. Close to
it, away from the farm buildings, lay the crooked orchard. We passed
through the shrubbery, without offending its warbling blackbirds, and
across a lawn to the door.
The yeoman was of a noble, antique type; of medium height; straight,
but mobile, and stooping gently as he listened, with moderate, neat,
large-featured head; reticent, slow but beautiful of speech, ready with
laughter. He made me think of the last Roman who spoke the speech of
Virgil and Cæsar quite pure. He was in his prime, past thirty, the last
of his family, and still holding their few hundred acres, a bachelor
who had not long since won his captivity from the pale, fair-haired
beauty at his side, to judge by her commanding smiles from time to time.
They were sure of a fox, he said; not so sure to kill, because the
ground was dry again in spite of last night’s frost, and scent bad.
As we stood round the room eating sandwiches--there was yet half an
hour before the meet--one asked him if he knew anything of an old house
in a valley some miles away. All the doors and walls were panelled with
mirrors amidst their bright oak, and as you sat there you saw your
party repeated as if through the walls in the neighbouring rooms. He
had not time to answer when an old bent and pallid man, his uncle,
who had sat unobserved, began to speak in a feeble, singing voice,
strangely laughing at times.
“I know the house with the mirrors. The Merediths lived there for three
hundred years, and I knew the last of them well. She was Arabella. She
had no brothers, and there is no child. I was a young man then, and
though you may not easily believe it, when you see this arm, I was a
fine, strong man. Ha! ha! ha!”
He stopped to chuckle abstractedly, with ambiguous irony at the
contrast between his early lustihood and the decrepitude which had
coffined it. Perhaps his nephew winced at the garrulity and such irony
as the thick laughter disclosed to him, but he did nothing to divert
the talk, nor did Enid, his betrothed, when she filled a glass with
whisky and water for the old man, who did but admire it with a sudden
satisfaction, and then continued:--
“Well, I was about the age of my nephew yonder, and I had never known
what pain or misery was, except when I was nearly beaten by a gipsy in
running down Mowland Hill. I farmed and I hunted, and it was understood
that I was to marry an amiable and pretty young woman whom my father
admired so much that he was willing that nobody should be my wife if
not she. But I was in no haste, and indeed I was not fond of women.
Others I knew seemed stupid or frivolous. This one was chiefly busy
with the church and the poor. I respected her, and I believe now that
she would have looked after me well in my old age. She understood me;
we had known one another since we were children, and I used to delight
to stop my horse to speak to her on a fine day when I was feeling fresh
and gay. At last it was agreed that we were soon to be married, and I
did not know why to draw back.”
Enid glanced quickly at my host, all the command having left her meek
smile, and as quickly dropped her eyes. It seemed to me that the glance
betrayed a slender fear or anticipation which she was ashamed of
immediately. By his over-rigid tranquillity it may be that her lover
gave a similar sign, the only one, and lost on her.
“No,”--the old man paused, as though he would still have liked to
unearth some excuse which he might, fifty years back, have made for
breaking his troth. “No,” he said, questioningly, “I did not know why
to draw back. But one day a woman I had sometimes heard of--she had
been away at school and with friends almost continually--came and
joined our hunt for the first time--Arabella Meredith. She was over one
bank before me, and I thought that Edith would never have done that. We
had a good day and a long one. As I was riding back I was pretty well
satisfied when with great clatter Miss Meredith rode up to me. She had
had a long day and she was hot with her gallop, and yet as she came
alongside, I turning my horse so that both curvetted together in the
narrow road, she was as fresh as if it had been raining and she just
out to take the air, as fresh as a young lime leaf and as clean and,
if you understand me, as inhuman in a way, at least I thought so that
evening when I was alone. When I saw her eyes, as I soon did, they
seemed to belong to somebody else hiding there, and not the woman I had
seen jumping.
“‘Mr. Arnold,’ she said, ‘I hear you are to be married....’
“‘Yes,’ I said.
“‘Then you will marry me,’ she said.
“In a mazy way I said that I would think about it, and she replied
instantly,--
“‘Please ride as far as our house with me--not but that I can look
after myself, though it is fifteen miles away, and the roads bad and
dark--and you will have plenty of time to think about it.’
“I rode home with her, and I did not think at all, and I did not speak;
nor did she, except to the horse; and at the end I said that I would
marry her if she were willing.
“‘I will think about it,’ she said, ‘good-night,’ and I turned my horse
to do the ten miles that divided the house with the mirrors from this.
It was an extraordinary thing to do, I think. The next day I told Edith
that I could not marry her because I wanted to marry Miss Meredith.
There was trouble, but it is a long time ago. Edith never married,
but continued to help the church and the poor in another part of the
country. She was a good woman.”
Enid had flushed--was it angrily?--at the first mention of Arabella.
She was become serious and very still, and looked no more at her
neighbour who was apparently studying some drawings of spaniels. Seeing
the gentle girl’s pain I was sorry that I had not helped her in the
attempt to check the old man. But that was impossible now.
“Arabella was wonderful,” he exclaimed, his old voice slowing to a
stronger tone and a new solemnity. “Arabella was wonderful. I believed
then that for a man to live as I had lived for so long, and then to see
her all suddenly, was the best thing in the world. I used to look at
her, and even when I did not see her face, but only her neck and hair
and dress and feet, it was just like--like it used to be looking up on
a day like this at the blossoming tops of tall elms right in the sky,
and hearing the cuckoo’s mate up there.
“Twice a week I used to walk over to her house or to some place near
by to see her. I don’t know which was best--the fine weather or the
wet--when I went, for in the rain I used to shut out the noise of the
rain with my singing all kinds of songs, and sometimes I used to run
and whoop as if the hounds had just killed a fox. It was a long way to
walk, and sometimes, especially at night, I used to go almost mad with
thinking of all the dense space and time and other people, intervening
between her and me. Yet I always refused to ride if a farmer stopped
his cart, and took footpaths to avoid them. The train to London which
I saw all bright on winter evenings used to give me an odd joy and
envy--thinking of all those unknown people as if they were hurrying
faster than I to see their sweethearts. I did think her beautiful. When
I saw Edith in those days, it was somehow painful, like seeing a lamb
lying aside dead in a ditch.”
Enid had turned her face away to the window and the lawn. Just so
pitiful might she seem were she passed over by her lover.
“I am not going to tell you,” the old lover went on, looking at nothing
visible, “what we did when we met. I think sometimes now that we were
not wise. But we used to walk and walk, and she would tell me about
girls and the ways of girls, and her childhood, so that I wished I had
been a boy with her. She would praise me and say that if ever anything
happened to me so that I was hurt and maimed, or if I should die, she
would not go on living. The thought of such a thing made her angry and
she would stop, and, without looking at me and seeming to forget me,
would lift her arms and say confused things that sounded fierce which I
could not hear, and then suddenly turn to me quite happy again.
“It was the finest day in my life, when, one May day we fished
together, and cooked some fresh caught trout by the riverside over a
fire of oak branches, and ate them together in the morning, just as the
sun grew hot.
“Every day I wished to marry her, especially when she spoke suddenly
after being silent, or when I could only smell her lovely breath and
see the pale skin under her little ear in the dark.
“She did extraordinary things and she made me do extraordinary things.
“One day as we were walking we heard the sound of the Fair, and
Arabella said that we must go. As quick as thought she knocked some
walnuts off a tree and we stained our faces with the juice of the
rind, and at a friendly cottage borrowed a rude disguise, for we went
as gipsies. Arabella told fortunes, first, and I had to tell some
too. Then she wanted me to play on a flute while she danced; but
instead I kept somewhere near while she danced, to see that all was
as it should be; and as it was, I nearly had to knock down a little
Welshman whose harp she began dancing to; for while he played and she
danced I hardly knew what was happening; it was as if I had gone into
a church with rich windows out of a dark night. She danced all the way
home, sometimes with her right hand just touching my right shoulder
and looking up at me--Ah! Perhaps she thought I was a little careless
at seeing her as much in love with me as I with her, and suddenly
taking her hand off my shoulder she said quite fiercely that I must do
something to show that I would do anything for her.”
Here the old man stopped and laughed and drank his whisky and seemed
disinclined to go on. The yeoman rose hastily and we had to follow at
once, all but Enid, the old man and the boldest and worst horseman who
was taking some more “jumping powder” with an air; and then, when all
had mounted in the farmyard, I found courage to equal my curiosity and
asked the yeoman for the end of the story. He stopped his impatient
horse and said,--
“One night in November, when the river was in flood, my uncle
remembered what Miss Meredith had said, and in his clothes he swam over
instead of going round by the bridge. It was a long and difficult swim
and he got bruised on the rocks; but he got through and then went to
meet Miss Meredith. I do not know what happened that evening, but the
next day his life was in danger from fever, and for many days he was
ill. As soon as she heard, Miss Meredith came over and saw him when
he was at his worst; I think someone told her that he would recover,
being so vigorous a man. Some days later they picked her out of the
river, and they say she had drowned herself. My uncle says that as he
lay ill he was proud, and did not even ask for Miss Meredith lest she
should see him as he was. But when he got downstairs and felt well and
was growing stronger, they told him that she was buried in Mowland
churchyard. Then he laughed terribly with long laughs, so that they
say my grandmother heard him in London, and went on laughing at the
magnificent jest of that beautiful woman being underground.
“She was small, with fair skin and brown hair that was pure gold where
it was rolled up behind her ear, and she had a deep clear voice. Her
skill in dancing was great, and as a rider only my uncle excelled her.
She was generous and tender, but courageous and unforgiving, never
losing either friend or enemy.
“He has quite recovered now. It is wonderful what things a man will
recover from. He does not mind telling the story; I think he is even a
little ashamed of his infatuation. All the women who were born in that
house, at least all the Merediths, are said to have been odd, and they
were all beautiful.”
“It is well for all of us,” said one, “that there are not many
Arabellas in the world.”
“There are not many,” said the yeoman; and he was about to follow
the rest when I saw Enid, a little anxious and it may have been
apologetic, at the door. “Good-bye, Arabella,” he called, with quiet
raillery.
“No!” she stamped her foot impatiently, but gently even so. He kissed
her hand and looked at her; and as he rode away, I saw that she was at
peace again. He shouted that they would see us by the gorse.
And so those three rode away and we walked to the meet. All the
labourers on the farm where the hounds met had a holiday, and all the
children too, enough of them to drown the music of the hounds. There
were about twenty men and women riding, three in pink, two or three
rich men and as many rich women, a lawyer, a doctor and many farmers
and their boys; and everyone talked with everyone. They found a fox
in the long, tumbling hill of gorse that ran almost to the river’s
edge; but the scent was bad, and after running backwards and forwards
for some time, they drew several little covers and there were some
rapid bursts with merry music, and flying of dust on the ploughland
and halloos here and there, and laughter and chatter of boys, and slow
comment from the labourers. But soon all was quiet except that a child
was telling a blind farmer where the hounds were and which way they
were going.
The river ran at our feet in one large curve, and among banks not so
steep but that it shone continually. Just below us the lover must have
swum, landing in the tall oaks that came to the edge. On the farther
side a road went up from the low bridge and over the hill and then,
but out of sight, down to the house with the mirrors. Ten miles away,
above the river, with its church tower against the sky in a manner
that commanded everyone who could walk, was the little town where they
still hold a Michaelmas Fair. Beyond that, faint and delicate, small
and beautiful as the lines in an oyster shell, were great hills all but
invisible in haze.
CHAPTER XXXII
APPLE BLOSSOM
The stream going helpless and fast between high banks is gloomy until
it is turned to bright, airy foam and hanging crystal by the mill; over
the restless pool below hangs a hawthorn all white and fragrant and
murmurous with bloom.
Above the mill, to the north, the land rises in long, lustrous,
melodiously swelling lawns of perfect green to the dark borders of a
beech wood, where the sweet, thick air fills the hollows among the
virginal foliage with blue. In one place the beeches have parted and
made a broad avenue for the eye to travel towards a noble stone house,
many-angled, many-windowed, grey, discreet, holding, or on such a day
seeming to hold, human life worthy to walk upon the long lawns to the
mill, where now nothing moves except the divine sunlight and, in the
hollows, its little cloudy elves.
Below the mill, to the south, is a land of tall trees standing in
conclaves of woods, in whispering groups, or solitary, each in
its sovereignty of shade and shining grass; of apple orchards and
farmhouses that lie, amidst their haystacks and ricks of straw, in
gulfs among the trees; and here and there the yellow skeleton of an
oak, encircled by its bark and twigs in piles, thrusts its sharp
appealing lines through the neighbouring green.
There is the tall, stony beech, its bole as fair as human shoulders and
flanks, lighted and shadowed changefully, its topmost branches curving
over as if with the weight of birds alighting, and doves and wood-wrens
among the leaves; the twisted birch’s misty, moving foliage as of a
pensive fountain; the oak, whose dark branches only yesterday were
interwoven like the flight of many bats at twilight, now an enchanted
hill of glowing bronze; the straight, lean, athletic ash, like a young
prince in short hunting tunic; the calm, feminine sycamore whose fresh
foliage hangs in folds as of smoke; the pollard willow, along the
stream, an ancient, neglected, grotesque deity, reluctantly assuming
its green garlands for yet another spring.
These things and many more the eye sees delightedly, and having ranged,
finds its chief joy in some narrow tract of the large land, like the
first field below the mill.
It is but an acre or two of sweet, undulating pasture, bounded on two
sides by tall hawthorn hedges, on the third by an ash copse, on the
other by an orchard of apple trees. The grass is pure green, revealing
here and there a purple orchis or dog violet or blue self-heal, except
where the crystal brook rushes through it and gathers white and gold
about its banks. Here no shadow falls, or if it does the dew and
blossoms break it up. The leaning and interwoven apple trees make a
white and wine-filled sky by their dense clots of bloom. The swallows
embroider the air with their songs and their blue flight. A farmhouse
walls are dusky red between the trunks. Overhead, the dim blue sky
lets a white cloud roll out at intervals like lilies from a pool. And
the blackbird perfects his song indolently; the thrush thinks clearly,
sharply aloud, with nothing long drawn out; and the willow wren happily
complains for ever--a voice that has wings and must revolve continually
through the land to express for one or another the vague pains or
pleasures of spring day.
The hedges and the orchard and the copse shut out everything except
that, through the ash stems, there is the dim, white sea far off,
gentle, like a fantastic tale of men and women that never were, in
countries where no discoverer’s keel has ever shrieked upon the beach,
to which the eye wanders now and then, returning again to the apple
blossom and the grass with an added security.
Over the green grass walks the farmer’s daughter in a white dress, on
her head a mushroom-shaped straw hat that reveals black hair curving
like the wings of a dove over the half moon of her brow, and like smoke
above her golden nape. She stands still like a straight birch in heavy
snow--her form and her dress one and yet separate, and definitely
female in rise and fall. She walks like a summer cloud, except that
her feet, clad in shining black, take firm hold upon the grass and
spurn it strongly, yet with the light short steps of a proud bird. Her
left hand carries purple orchis and white stitchwort, and carefully,
but fantastically and unnecessarily, raises the hem of her skirt to
the height of the tallest dandelions. Her right hand is free to gather
flowers, to feel the growth of the young greenfinches in the nest, to
arrange and disarrange her hair. Her small round head is lifted up,
her eyes fully round, her lips too much curved to meet very often yet,
her nose clear and straight, and the fair, wing-like curve of bone
from ear to chin seeming to be born of the shadow which it creates
upon her neck. Her childhood has passed, her maturity has not come.
She is a Lady May, careless, proud, at ease. On her lips, indeed, is a
childish song; but she has become more strange and distant to children
than older women are, for the moment--perhaps for to-day only, since
to-morrow she may meet a man and stay late in the lanes. She is as
strange as the silver water that gushes among green grass and marigold
in the copse, or as the blue swallow slanting down the sunny red
wall. To look at her is to take deep breaths as at the savour of warm
bread, of honeysuckle, of cows when they come from the meadows into
a dusty road. A speech that should be all sapphires and pearls would
not be worthy of her--to-day. She is at the altar of Aphrodite “full
of pity”--to-day. She has been carried far in the goddess’s dove-drawn
chariot over mountains and seas, and has bathed in the same fountain as
Aphrodite, nor yet been seen of men--to-day. Delay, sun, above the sea;
wait, moon, below the hills; sing, birds; rustle, new-leaved beeches;
for to-morrow and the day after and for ever until the end this will be
but a memory and may be all she has. She walks hardly faster than the
shadows over the fair grass: and you, Time, O Woodman! set not your axe
at the foot of this tree, lean not upon it with your strong hands. See!
the crest nods and the air trembles; let it not fall to-day.
CHAPTER XXXIII
A LITTLE BEFORE HARVEST
Summer is perfect now.
The wheat says so, when in the dawn it drips with half-an-hour’s rain
and gleams like copper under the fresh, dim sky; it cries aloud the
same when it crackles in the midday sun, and the golden sea of it
washes murmurously to the feet of the hills.
In the hedges and fields the agrimony wands and mullein staves, the
climbing vetch, the cushioned bird’s-foot lotus, the myriads of ragwort
and sow thistle, are golden too.
The meadowsweet and honeysuckle flowers and the wild carrot seeds give
out sweet scents, but not so strong as not to be drowned, when the wind
blows, by a thousand lesser scents from field and wood and farmyard.
Wood pigeons coo in the high-shaded storeys of the beeches and in the
wet willow copses where bushes and herbage have grown so dense that
hardly a bird’s-nester or a lover would care to penetrate them. In the
dark wood alleys, all day long, hang insects whose wings seem to be
still in their swiftness, like golden lamps.
The gardens have amber lilies, fuchsia trees, phloxes, poppies,
hollyhocks, carnations, snap-dragons, rockets and red flax rising above
rose of Sharon and lemon-scented balm and yellow stone-crop, where the
tortoise-shell butterflies worship with opening wings.
And on the garden walls the purple plums ooze and heave in the sun with
yellow wasps that give a touch of horror to the excellent and abounding
life of perfect summer.
These things and many more the eye notes carelessly. We are so rich
that we do not count our treasure. We record them as contented
worshippers their beads. They are but as dust above the corn when the
thresher twists his oaken flail. The mother or master of them all seems
to be the line of the chalk hills.
The corn sweeps to these hills, and on the strand which divides
them is a hamlet of six thatched cottages and a farmhouse, and new
haystacks round these, fine and sharp-angled, and old ones carved in
steps and supported by props of ash. The cream pans and the churns
glitter outside the house. A girl kneels at the brook that flows past
and dips a jug among the cresses, trying to catch a trout at the same
time. The eye dwells on these for a little while, saying that it could
be content there never to wander again, and then rises to the downs,
and away it goes, soaring as at the sound of organ or harp. For how
proud-thoughted are these long, curving downs, whether they make a
highway at noon for round white clouds or at night for the large moon.
They uplift and allure and lead far away the eye. The mind follows the
eye as the streaming wake follows the ship and is naught without it.
Those curves suggest to the mind, confused and languid after long
summer days in the lowland, that it also might follow such curves that
lead on--surely--to noble thoughts and high discoveries, though without
them it will be happy merely in following with joyous undulations to
the windy beeches on the furthest height. To see them close by with our
last glance before entering an inn is good, or, far off, on a midsummer
night when we are to watch the sun rise from the encampment which makes
one of them, or to fancy them by the winter fire; but to see them thus,
in full summer, when day is separate from day only by brief, perfumed
nights of stars, stimulates like a page of saga or history or a perfect
rhyme, setting the heart free. “Let us be brave,” says a shepherd of
these hills.
“In lofty numbers let us rave ...
I’ll borrow Phœbus’ fiery jades,
With which about the world he trades
And put them in my plough.
I’ll to great Jove, hap good, hap ill,
Though he with thunder threat to kill,
And beg of him a boon.
To swerve up one of Cynthia’s beams,
And there to bathe thee in the streams
Discover’d in the moon....
And to those indraughts I’ll thee bring,
That wondrous and eternal Spring,
Whence the ocean hath its flowing.
We’ll down to the dark House of Sleep,
Where snoring Morpheus doth keep,
And wake the drowsy groom.”
And at evening, when the rooks go over, quietly expounding space in
the rosy sky, they do not, as in other countries they do, torment the
mind; for the ridge of the downs travels the same way and is at the
same moment here, just above us, and yonder in the bosom of the sunset,
and it gives rest and satisfaction as, but a few hours ago, it gave
infinite adventure and happiness therewith.
CHAPTER XXXIV
AUTUMN BELLS
From this beechen hill I can see into and across a long pastoral
valley at my feet; its gentle sides running east and west are clothed
in wood, and at the western end, where the valley leads straight out
into the western sky, a stone city lies. Beyond this valley to the
south are the misty, wooded ridges that hint at other valleys. The
sunset light has made the landscape immense, but with the help of
autumn it has made it simple too; and the sound of bells in the city
seems to have created it, rounded and mellow in outline and hue. The
little rounds of hedge-tops and knolls in the meadows and gorse in the
higher slopes harmonise and run into the larger rounds of the single
oaks in the middle distance, and the still larger rounds of the hills
and their cloudy woods, and the clouds above them. A hawk in the air
might seem to be carving the outlines of some perfect palm tree as he
flies. The white steam also of a slow train far away bubbles up in the
moist and gentle air and hangs there long in delicately changing and
merging mounds that mock the clouds and woods. The amber wheat stacks
are of the same family of form, lying in a half circle at one side of
a hunched farmhouse that lifts up a dome of mossy thatch,--near it a
garden of shadowed wallflower, snapdragon, roses, in clouds beyond
clouds, with a burning edge of hollyhock, sunflower, red-hot poker and
chrysanthemum.
The sound of the city bells continues to overflow in bubbles from the
valley, up and up, to the round, golden clouds. As if filled with the
sound, the city smoke ascends and takes on the colours of the sunset.
The sun is now low between the final walls of hill, where the valley
ends, and it seems to belong to the city below, as if it were the
city’s god descending there for once in answer to some especially
rich altar or noble deed. The towers and their bells are as maidens
pensively embroidering, and now and then dropping their embroidery to
sing a melody of something far away; and long after the sun has gone
and the city has disappeared their song is repeated in the fragrant and
noiseless abysses of the far-stretched night.
CHAPTER XXXV
SUNDAY
The morning air of autumn smelt like the musky, wild white rose. The
south wind had carried hither all the golden and brown savours from
Devon and Wiltshire and Surrey; and the strong sweetness made the
walker snuff deeply at it, with uplifted upper lip. Church bells two
miles away, deep among the woods that lay around narrow gulfs of meadow
on every side, called and called, as if they had wedded this perfume
and all the gold and brown of the wide land. Not the last willow wren
in the oak, nor the cooing dove, spoke more melodiously of autumn and
repose than the bells. So when I came to the church, under a cavernous
beech wood, I paused beneath the low tower and sate in the cool nave.
Parts of the windows were still rich with old colour, the rest might
seem to have flown into the woods as the sounds from the genial bells
were still flying thither and through the autumn land. The church was
the lovely home of the dead of several fair families still living
near. A helmet with motionless crest jutted over the nave. Several
bright, crude effigies flaunted their crimson and blue in one aisle.
The walls were still half covered by paintings of varying clearness.
Here and there a sword stood out quite clear, or the head of a woman or
a youth, a coat of armour, an aureole that some head had lost, a curve
of vesture, or a mere whisper of colour, red like old blood, or a few
words, such as “olim magnificus pulcherrimus”--“periit”--“resurget”;
things that survived there much as events in human memories, and as
incidents and expressions may actually survive our death, and painfully
strive for integration in a dim world of fragments that shall be
strangely arrayed again.
The clerk stood looking out of a little open window that revealed a
piece of green meadow and yellow maple that might have belonged to the
ancient glass.
One by one the men came in, two old labourers past work, a neighbouring
farmer, his cowman and carter, a gamekeeper, and the women and children
in twos and threes, and lastly the squire--perhaps twenty-five
altogether. In hymn and psalm and prayer all voices save those of the
rector and one sweet-voiced child were so faint that the church was
undisturbed. The old men were still, the young restless, the women and
children interested in one another; but they were fainter than the
figures on the wall, being so like thousands of others, all but a red
and fair-haired man of fifty who might have been a Bacchus hastily
metamorphosed for some jolly purpose.
With the sermon the silence became immense, as if it must flower
suddenly or crumble away in a roar. The preacher spoke slowly as one
who scorned time, and in the intervals could be heard the masticating
of horses in the meadow outside. He spoke of the necessity of “drawing
near to God”--by a life of piety, by private prayer, by communion, by
worshipping in this house. His rich, gentle voice saying murmurous
things fell upon me as one of sleep’s forerunners, and I had just heard
him asking the squire and the Bacchus and the rest whether they had
not, at the Communion, had visions of “those tabernacles above,” when I
began to dream a dream which the parson could not have inspired without
the help of some very different elf who now lay under the pavement of
the nave, or was painted on the wall, or had sat among the rushes when
the church was beautiful and young as a country bride. For it seemed
that I saw these men and women in a kind of heaven where all day long
for ever they did those things which had pleased or most taken hold of
them in life. I saw them like the figures painted on the wall, some
bright and clear, some dim or broken, some known by hardly more than a
defacement of the large light that dwelt there.
There the grave and cheerful carter went home at evening, looking
ahead steadily, without sorrow, or alarm, or lassitude, and sometimes
turning to his undulating team, noting their still bright harness and
speaking to them by name: “Ho! Violet”--“Smiler”--“Darling”--“Swallow.”
He was even now hungry, a little tired, thinking of his inn at
nightfall. Heaven had caught him and made of him a picture of strength,
contentment and evening which, in that luminous land, was pleasing yet
to mortal men.
There the cowman was leading out the bull, and making the ring jar in
its nostrils. Still his back and knees were bent as he cursed out
“Jimmy,” his face still moulded and unmoulded by faint-hearted lust,
vexation, fear, perplexed by the home where his eleven children were,
with his pigs and his fledgling magpies.
His wife was near, but almost invisible, and as it were a wraith of
pitiful maternity, neither bitter nor glad, but bearing her burdens,
one still beneath her girdle, one in her arms, and others demanding her
anxiety, winning her tenderness, on this side and on that.
The gamekeeper stood, with smoking gun barrels, and a cloud of jay’s
feathers still in the air and among the May foliage about him. Pride,
stupidity, servility clouded his face as in his days of nature, and
above him in the oaks innumerable jays laughed because beauty, like
folly, was immortal there.
The squire, more faint, and whether to his joy or not I could not
discern, was standing under a bough on which hung white owls, wood
owls, falcons, crows, magpies, cats, hedgehogs, stoats, weasels, some
bloody, some with gaping stomachs, some dismembered or crushed, some
fleshless, some heaving like boiling fat, and on them and him the sun
shone hot.
The red-faced man sat drinking ale, and with him it seemed always
evening, and his stomach fathomless.
Five boys--four of them with blackened faces and sticks or swords,
and one of them dressed as a woman and carrying a bag--played the
Pace-Egging Play in blue Easter weather in a daffodil lane before a
ripe grey farmhouse.
A little girl nursed something musingly, whether a mole or a cluster of
rags I could not tell.
The farmer sat on his cream pony, brow-beating a birdnesting boy by a
gate.
A young woman waited by a stile and did up her hair.
And still the parson threw back his head and closed his eyes, and
with an action as of washing his hands, talked melodiously and with
satisfaction, saying, at last, “It is well for us to draw near unto the
Lord.”
PART IV
THE MOUNTAINS
CHAPTER XXXVI
THE FIRST DAFFODILS
It was one of those early March days in a mountainous country when
a warmly clothed man, in good health and walking rapidly, can just
foretaste the spring. The icy dark water in stony brooklets shone
golden whenever it could find the sun. This gold seemed a brand upon
the winter that marked it for death. There was gold also on the
turf between the walls and the roadways, for there were hundreds of
celandine flowers: it was to be found also in the miniature forests of
the moss that made detached and placid worlds upon every stone of the
walls; in the little hollow woods, or steep and craggy orchard plots,
where the first daffodils were unveiled; in the rickyards where fowls
scattered the gleaming straw; in the fur of the squirrel that moved as
if the swirling wind dissolved and shaped it again continually; in the
warm ale at “The White Hart.”
But when the eye grew proud and the wind rose and every half hour the
horizontal snow put out everything of the world except its noises--the
cry of the curlew, the buzz of pewits’ wings, the song of the missel
thrush that came through the storm like a mere ode to liberty in the
midst of revolution--then it was winter still, and the rustling oak
leaves talked of December. And when the snowfall ceased with a rush
as if upon the wings of a peregrine, those small signs of spring were
no more than a child’s sand castles on a vast sea shore, and not so
noticeable as the thick suds and flakes of snow hanging from the hedges
on the walls and turned to mists by the restless robins.
On one side, for some miles, ran a large fell that was a home and
playground of winds, steep and long to be crossed, and all white and
grim, shutting out home and the pleasures that are found among men. On
the other side, steep also and widely shaped with small, precipitous
crags and angry surf of heather and here and there haggish thorns, lay
a moor. Between these two the road rose and fell over lesser but steep
hills, and from one hilltop I could see the sea beyond the moor. It was
grey, without light, with long quivering lines that never ended, but
insubstantial; it seemed rather the grisly offspring of a mind made
pregnant by the wintry melancholy. The mountains came down to the edge
of it, like lions to drink, ten miles away. Not a house was visible,
and on the sea the few ships were like the water itself, inventions of
my own, as it were, which I had launched upon that infinite desolation
for sport.
All day, ahead and always at the same distance, rose high mountains,
with crude outlines as of heavy and frosty land fresh turned by the
plough; the long ravines of snow upon their sides made their peaks more
sharp and their heights more sudden. They haunted the day.
Now and then the snow fell, and in the weak sunshine that followed, the
light struck up from the snow and made the white breasts of the gulls
seem opal lanterns full of flame, and the hazel thickets were nets of
silver and crystal branches, invisible in their own splendour.
I descended to a small deep river that ran, with noble curves of power,
solemn and full of some inhuman simple purpose. For a moment the
sunlight fell on one curve of it and the windy waves were now a stately
glittering cavalcade, and now a dance of fairies into which some
ass-headed Bottom suddenly intruded with a gust from a cloud, making
them whirl faster and then disappear. But the river was careless of the
light; it went on as before, unchanged even when for another moment all
that grim, serious water was changed into white spray and light by a
fall.
And there still were the mountains ahead. Their painful distances of
long, white, houseless steeps made the mind suffer the body’s agony of
toiling there, of being lost there in storm, of being there on a still,
dark night. They bred--by means of natural, human sympathy with the
difficulty of life among such heights, by the horror of the distance,
the coldness, the whiteness--a languor out of which emerged infinite
admiration and awe, a sense of beauty even, and unquestionably a kind
of pride in the powers of the human spirit that can dwell upon the
earth and be the equal of these things, sharing with them the sunlight
and the darkness, enduring like them vicissitudes, decay, violent
disaster, and like them disbelieving in the future and in death, except
for others. So when at nightfall the snowy hills made a semicircle
round the head of an enormous grey estuary, and couched there ten
and fifteen and twenty miles away as if the sweep of a puissant arm
had made them in clearing a space for the water, they were purely
beautiful, while over them a large, simple sunset threw a golden bridge
between towering, white, still clouds.
Then, at length, a hamlet on a hill; first, a farmyard on one side
of the road and a farmhouse on the other; then four or five stone
cottages; lastly an inn where I thought to sleep. Hardly had I sat
down than a pedlar came in and sat beside me. He was a tall, grave man
of a gritty, brown complexion and big, straight features; from his
simple, heroic face, that seemed an animated piece of crag from his
native hills, his blue eyes looked at me with that glance, fearless of
any return, which the ordinary man gives to a dog or a labourer, but
presently became more modest as I looked up and down the blue gaberdine
which he wore down to his knees.
The gaberdine was of the stoutest linen, heavy and warm. It opened
for about six inches down from the neck, back and front, and was
fastened with small bone buttons. On each side of these openings it was
smocked in an elaborate pattern nine inches deep; the wide, turn-down
collar almost covered the embroidered shoulder straps and was itself
adorned with seven rows of feather stitching. The sleeves were smocked
both at the shoulders and the wrists, and were finished with broad,
feather-stitched cuffs. He wore it because it was decent, and he would
always wear one so long as the woman lived who could make it.
I asked him about his trade, and he said that he pursued it among these
hills and valleys all the winter, setting it aside for work in the
fields during the summer months. He was born in one of the cottages
close by; so was his father before him and so were his children after
him. They were happy there. Death alone disturbed them now and then;
and death, he said, was incurable and to be expected. In the spring he
spent less on candles and his orchard bloomed, and there was a marriage
or two in the church and the ewes dropped their lambs. In the summer it
was warm without fires, and they needed no candles, and he had what he
desired--what that was he did not say. In the autumn he remembered that
things were coming round again, winter soon and then spring again. In
the winter his cottage walls were thick, and if the days were short he
had always had a fire and some food, and had never yet refused a beggar
something; there were songs also: and as to his trade, of course he
liked it, and he did not think people could do without him.
“And now, young man,” he said, “who are you, what have you seen, and
what is your country?”
He looked at me with something like the benignity of a child accepting
a spoonful of honey; but for that joy and expectancy I might have
spoken easily. I hesitated between the truth, which was difficult and
perhaps to him unintelligible, my own view of the truth, which would
be so confused by reservations and after-thoughts that it could not
please, and the picturesque. So I said:--
“I am a poor, modern man”--which was true--“I have seen nothing”--which
was my view of the truth--and finally, “the great city of London is my
country”--which was picturesque.
“What?” said he, not angrily, not pityingly, but inquiringly, “what
do you mean by a ‘poor, modern man,’ and how is it that you have seen
nothing?”
A thousand things crowded to my brain and contended on my lips. This
was an opportunity, but too great a one, too sudden. I stifled my
designs and decided to say nothing. He was kind; he nodded gracefully
and continued,--
“Tell me about London.”
He did not say, “Do me an essay of fifteen hundred words by next week.”
That might have been easy; writing--possibly even good writing--is
comparatively easy; because the writer is alone while he writes and is
not present while his work is read, and he can therefore withhold what
seems difficult to express and he deceives without appearing deceitful;
moreover, he writes at his ease, or should do, what is probably read in
haste. But in conversation with an aged blue-eyed man, in a majestic
blue gaberdine, who has an evening’s leisure and desires the truth,
asking simply: “Tell me about London,” the difficulties in the way of a
simple man are enormous. I said something about a book called _The Soul
of London_; but he could not read. He wished again to be informed what
the soul of a city was. Again I failed him.
“But you have actually lived in London,” he repeated, encouraging me.
“Yes.” He seemed to be proud, as who should say, “I sit with one who
has lived in the most famous city in the world.”
I remembered that there are said to be five millions of human beings in
London, and that its streets on end would reach to the moon.
Also I thought of the old song and the verse:--
“There be kings and queens in London town
A-sitting all of a row.”
In despair I actually ventured to tell him that there were five million
people there. But he seemed to be poor at arithmetic and he was frank.
“I beg you,” he said, “to speak simply and not all at once to a poor,
remote old man. The evening is young yet,” he continued without heat
and as if he were making all clear.
“There is a king there, is there not?” he said.
“There is.”
“And a queen?”
“Yes.”
“And a palace?”
“There are several palaces.”
“Then tell me about the king,” he said.
I have never seen the king, and I longed for the power of the Tempter
to tell the old man of--
“Prætors, proconsuls to their provinces
Hasting, or on return, in robes of state;
Lictors and rods, the ensigns of their power;
Legions and cohorts, turms of horse and wings;
Or embassies from regions far remote,
In various habits, on the Appian road,
Or on the Æmilian”--
But still his questions came. How did the ships come up and unlade
again? What were the army and the navy like? Had I seen the famous
men? Were the people noble as became a metropolitan race? Achilles
questioning Ulysses in Hades could not have spoken more magnificently
than this old man questioning me, though I seemed the ghost and he
the visitor to the underworld. Yet in some sort his great questions,
elevating his soul, seemed to supply him, if not with an answer, at
least with some satisfaction. I would have spoken, if I could. But
how short the evening! myself how unprepared and inadequate! I would
have told him of Pimlico and Battersea which were not entirely unknown
to me. I would have said that there were sorrowful and happy men
there--thousands of both, unknown to me and unknown to one another;
thousands of houses, beautiful, stately, pompous, indifferent, ugly,
sublimely squalid; that upon them as upon him and his neighbours fell
rain and sun and snow and the wind beat and death came suddenly,
desired or undesired; that the city was as vast as Time, which had made
it, and that to know it a man must live and die the lives and deaths of
all that had ever lived and died there. But he ceased to regard me. He
entered into talk with others that came in. One sang this ballad and
he, like the rest, joined the chorus:--
“My clothing was once of the linsey woolsey fine,
My tail it grew at length, my coat likewise did shine;
But now I’m growing old, my beauty does decay,
My master frowns upon me; one day I heard him say--
Poor old horse, poor old horse.
Once I was kept in the stable snug and warm,
To keep my tender limbs from any cold or harm;
But now, in open fields, I am forcèd for to go,
In all sorts of weather, let it be hail, rain, freeze or snow,
Poor old horse, poor old horse.
Once I was fed on the very best corn and hay
That ever grew in yon fields, or in yon meadows gay;
But now there’s no such doing can I find at all;
I’m glad to pick the green sprouts that grow behind yon wall.
Poor old horse, poor old horse.
You are old, you are cold, you are deaf, dull, dumb and slow,
You are not fit for anything or in my team to draw;
You have eaten all my hay, you have spoilèd all my straw;
So hang him, whip him, stick him, to the huntsman let him go.
Poor old horse, poor old horse.
My hide unto the tanners, then I would freely give
My body to the hound dogs, I would rather die than live;
Likewise my poor old bones that have carried you many a mile
Over hedges, ditches, gates and bridges, likewise gates and stiles.
Poor old horse, poor old horse.”
Terrible, noble old man! No doubt he expected me to speak as simply
as that, so I slipped away from him and went to the next inn. A high,
cloudy night hung over me, like a great yew tree in March, with stars
instead of flowers. With those reticent, dark silences and spaces I
tried to console myself.
CHAPTER XXXVII
THE MIRROR
There are a hundred little landscapes on the walls by the roadside--of
grey or silver or golden stone, embossed and fretted and chequered by
green and gold-pointed mosses, frosty lichens, pale round penny-wort
leaves and the orange foliage of cranesbill. At their feet are the
young leaves of the larger celandine and the lustrous blossoms of
the lesser, still swaddled in dead leaves where mice and squirrels
are questing. On top, thorns and ash trees trail horizontally in
many dragon shapes, and purple brambles overhang. Or there are low
thorns which make way at intervals for straight hollies, spared by the
billhook, or even carved by it into pagoda-like shapes. Sometimes even
a thorn has been thus spared and honoured, but here they are not each
knotted into impenetrable globes of twigs or interlaced in pairs as
elsewhere. What fantasy persuades men to make those little wayside and
even railwayside suggestions of a mild tree worship surviving yet? In
places the walls are interrupted and replaced by a smooth, blue sheet
of natural rock based in grass and making a home for vertebrate ferns,
and stamped by white and yellow and green algæ which look as if they
were the stains of a sunshine too strong to be wiped out. Some of the
ash tree boles are heavily draped in a fur woven inextricably of dark
green and fine-leaved ivy, pale green moss over which hover pendulous
drops of gold, silver lichen, and ferns green and amber. Out of rock or
wall gushes bright, crystal water, losing itself in moss and herbage
below, or received into small stone tanks, and turned into a darkly
gleaming, golden creature that throbs under the rain.
Between such walls the road winds into many valleys and over many fells
towards the mountains. On either hand rise and fall many hollowed
tawny meadows, with boulders embedded in heather and flowering gorse,
and over them the pewits plunge and soar and modulate their crying by
their speed. Here and there a family of oak or beech stands up in the
midst of the fields. Between the meadows there are copses of hazel and
oak, and snowdrops underneath, or a crisp, untrodden carpet of old
leaves of many dying golds and browns and reds; or an arable field
intervenes. The plough climbs the hill, turning the dry, grey soil to
purple and brown that is dappled by rooks and gulls. Some of the gulls
slide overhead against the wind, inclining their wings this way and
that, rising and descending slightly, as if they could by tacking and
delaying avoid the streamy wind.
The steeper hills are the home of oak and ash and birch and larch. The
grey larch woods waver in colour like a dying trout, as the wind and
the sunshine pass over them. In a five-minute shower the rainbow sets
her foot among the trees before she leaps across the sky, and while yet
her colours are uncertain among the luminous branches makes a small,
fairy, remote world that speaks to the eye like the young moon on a
fair evening or Cassiopeia when it crowns a sapphire night.
In ten miles there is an inn. “Pretty Polly” and “Sceptre” are on the
walls, with notices of sales and advertisements of spirits. The hostess
sings the cosmic melody of “Blue Bell” as she goes about her work--that
marvellous melody over which farmboys become romantic and even cheerful
at four o’clock on wild and sleety mornings in January as they go about
their work. But the host has good ale, and he can sing the Holm-bank
Hunting Song:--
“One morning last winter to Holm-bank there came
A noble, brave sportsman, Squire Sandys was his name,
Came a-hunting the fox, bold Reynard must die,
And he flung out his train and began for to cry
Tally-ho, tally-ho! Hark forward, away, tally-ho!
The season being frosty, and the morning being clear,
A great many gentlemen appoint to meet there;
To meet with Squire Sands with honour and fame
And his dogs in their glory to honour his name.
There Gaby the huntsman with his horn in his hand,
It sounded so clear and the dogs at command,
Tantive! Tantive! the horn it did sound,
Which alarmed the country for above a mile round.
It’s hark dogs together, while Jona comes in,
There’s Joyful and Frolic, likewise little Trim,
It’s hark unto Dinah, the bitch that runs fleet,
There’s neat little Justice, she’ll set ’em to reet.
There’s Driver and Gamester, two excellent hounds,
They’ll find out Bold Reynard if he lies above ground;
Draw down to yon cover that lies to the south,
Bold Reynard lies there, Trowler doubles his mouth.
Three times round low Furness they chased him full hard,
At last he sneaked off and through Urswick churchyard,
He listened to the singers as I’ve heard them say,
But the rest of the service he could not well stay.
The dogs coming up made Reynard look sly,
Then he marked out his tricks for to give ’em the by;
They being bred to their business they managed their cause
And they made him submit to their attention close.
Through Kirkby and Woodland they nimbly passed,
Broughton and Dunnerdale they came to at last,
Then down across Duddon to Cumberland side,
And at Grass-gards in Ulpha, bold Reynard he died.
Since Reynard is dead he’ll do no more ill,
He hadn’t much time for to make a long will,
He has left all his states to his survivor and heir,
He has a right to a widow for she’ll claim her share.
Of such a fox chase as never was known,
The horsemen and footmen were instantly thrown,
To keep within sound didn’t lie in their power,
For the dogs chased the fox eighty miles in five hours.
You gentlemen and sportsmen wherever you be,
All you that love hunting draw near unto me,
Since Reynard is dead, we have heard of his downfall,
Here’s a health to Squire Sands of High Graythwaite Hall.
Tally-ho, tally-ho! Hark forward, away, tally-ho!”
The road has turned away into a valley. The mountains are close ahead,
and the billowy moorland prepares me for them, with hawks in all its
hollows, and small ponds, the silent sport of winds that roar in crags
and hiss in grasses, and then at length a long, blue pool, edged by
yellow reeds and receiving the shadow of a steep oak wood. There the
wind is lured into many metamorphoses among the ripples--at one moment
a writhing, hundred-headed snake, at another the wraith perhaps of a
swift skater who was once drowned in the water, and again a swarm of
dark bees. At first sight this blue expanse, with narrow ends running
into the moorland, and its edge of shivering reed, lays hold upon the
mind. All day, unseen of any but the shepherd, the water reflects
the birds and the clouds, and all night the stars, until it might be
supposed to have acquired a symbolic sadness and tranquillity by thus
keeping watch on all the nights and days since it began. There, in its
depths, hang the mountain clouds and the immense spaces of sky, with
something added by the reflecting water, as if it were some gloomy
opiate personality that turned all things to its own tune. Even the
joyous, golden fleece of the perfect summer morning are rendered by
the pool with touches of wizardry and night, and when a little breeze
erases them for a moment it is like a breath of delight sweeping over
an immortal pain. The nearest mountain, too, is there. The highest
summit, engraved with snow, shows in the depths like a bleached skull
emerging from ridgy tracts of dark sand. There, also, are the long,
tawny and olive flanks of the ascent, inlaid with purple and blue by
precipices and cloud-shadows, with grey and ruddy woods below, and the
silver wounds of birches. Now and then my own shadow flits among them,
as if a magician had compelled me to wander in that giddy profound of
water and sky. As I look down I seem to see what men have made of the
universe in the past, with the help of poet and priest, by plunging it
in the sorrows and uncertainties of their own heart and brain. There is
superstition, there religion and poetry, confining the great heavens
and the hills with sun and moon and stars, within these few acres of
desolate mountain water. There are the stories of the gods and of a
heaven that overhung mortals with hideous aspect. There, also, the
eager courage of man’s soul when first he tried to burst “the strong
bars of Nature’s gateways”--while the sun and wind contend upon the
water--and set out upon the adventure which has made us “equal with
heaven.” Looking up, away from the pool, there still are the mountains
and the sky, just as they were, still inscrutably holding out in one
hand laughter and in one hand tears for us to choose from. I look down
and the singing lark, against a white cloud, is singing high and wise
things in some contemplative poet’s verse. I look up and, behold! the
new joy of the spring, unintelligible, and for the moment not asking
to be understood, but to be shared; and as we climb happily the pool
no longer imposes its version of life, for yonder is the True upon the
hills, and the eyes dilate and the nostrils and the lungs accept the
air and the “darling of men and gods ... mistress of the nature of
things” takes her place with us.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
UNDER THE MOOR
It was June, but it had been like March for many miles upon the rough
moor until, with the dawn, I came to a lowland where there were mossy
fields with clear rain pools among the flowering gorse; and meadows cut
into two planes by small, perpendicular cliffs of stone, so that on one
the cattle were already feeding in the early light and on the other
still lying down; and wheat fields that had islands of stone in their
midst; and then at last an immense meadow sloping down towards fresh
oak woods and the sea, and rising out of it rounded beechen knolls
which, Druid-like, preserved the night under their domes of foliage,
though all the grass was flooded by the slow tides of dawn. The white
cow-parsley flowers hovered around me on invisible stems and gave out
the thick summer flavours of nettles and myriad grasses. And lying down
and sleeping in the sun until morning was hot, I awoke and seemed to
hear a tale of the south as the air grew mazy with the scent of elder
and thyme and the colour of bird’s-foot lotus and all the grass, and
the sky leaned down upon the earth in milky purples. It was just such
a change from the poor land to the rich as is expressed in the ancient
tale of Cherry of Zennor told by Hunt in his _Popular Romances of the
West of England_.
The girl, Cherry of Zennor, could not contentedly put up with her life
at home, because her parents were poor, living on potatoes and fish,
and she, though she was pretty and could run like a hare, had never a
ribbon for her curls nor a new frock to go to church or to fair in. So
she set out to get a servant’s place somewhere in the “low countries.”
The road was long and she was homesick by the time she had reached a
four-went way. There she sat down and cried, but had scarcely recovered
when she saw a gentleman coming up to her. He bade her “good-morning”
and asked her whither she went; and when she said that she was off to
look for a servant’s place, he told her that he was in search of just
such a clean and handsome girl for his own house. So Cherry went off
with him, to milk his cow and look after his child; and she was to have
good clothes when she got there.
They went down and down for a long way; the road was clouded over by
trees and was growing darker and darker, when suddenly the man opened
a gate in a wall and told her that there it was that he lived. She had
never seen a garden so rich in fruit and flowers and singing birds. Was
it enchanted? But no, the man was no fairy; he was too big. Presently
his child appeared, a boy with piercing and crafty eyes, and an old
hag, called “Aunt Prudence,” who prepared a choice supper for the girl;
and she ate of it heartily. Cherry slept with the child at the top of
the house and was told that, even if she could not sleep, she was to
keep her eyes shut up there and not to speak to the boy; at dawn she
was to wash him at a spring in the garden and rub his eyes--never her
own--with an ointment; then she was to milk the cow and give the boy a
bowl of the last milk; she was at all times to avoid curiosity.
All this she did until it came to milking the cow. But Cherry saw no
cow and was calling “Pruit! Pruit! Pruit!” when out she came from
among the trees as if from nowhere. All day, but it was easy work, she
scalded milk, made butter, cleaned platters and bowls with water and
sand, picked the fruit, weeded the garden. Sometimes the man kissed her
for her pains.
A year passed. Aunt Prudence was sent away because she took Cherry into
one of the forbidden rooms, where the floor was like glass and it was
full of people turned to stone. Sometimes the master went away and left
Cherry alone with the child.
The ointment was still a puzzle--but surely it made the child’s eyes
see many things! So one day she anointed her own eyes with it. It
burned her painfully, and running to the spring to wash it away she
learned its power. For there, at the bottom of the water, was a world
of little people at play and among them her master; and looking up she
saw that the branches of the trees and the flowers and the grass were
crowded with the same joyous people. Another day she looked through the
keyhole of one of the forbidden rooms and saw her master there, and
many ladies too, all singing, and one of these who looked like a queen
he kissed. So when, as they were fruit gathering some time afterwards,
the master leaned forward to kiss her, she struck him on the face,
saying, that he might kiss the small people under the water. Next
morning very early he called her from her bed, led her by the light of
a lantern up the dark lane for a long way, and then disappeared, after
telling her that at times she would still be able to see him on the
hills; and when she had recovered from her sorrow she went home.
CHAPTER XXXIX
A HARVEST MOON
The first steep cornfield under the edge of the red moor lay all rough
and warm with stubble in the evening light. The corn sheaves themselves
were of a shining gold and leaned together in shocks that made long,
low tents and invited the wayfarer to shelter and sleep. We had come
over the moor for hours and this field was the beginning of a deep
valley that stretched to the sea. Yonder was the sea, ten miles away,
with a row of lights running out upon a nose of land far into it. The
valley held one village half way towards the sea and several white
farmhouses which sent the smoke of supper to explore the neighbouring
ash trees.
A stream running straight from the moor gave us water and we ate our
supper leaning against a corn shock. Our pipes soon went out, what with
fatigue and indulgence in the warmth and the pleasant valley, brimming
with summer haze and golden still.
We had been alone when, just as the light was going, two farm boys
and a girl came into the field without noticing us. The girl sat at
the top of the field and the boys took off their coats and laid them
beside her. She arranged their folds and then sat straight up to watch.
For down the field ran the boys, striding heavily side by side, each
leaping the same shock until they had reached the bottom wall almost at
the same time, where they argued and made claims to victory in broken
voices. They walked quickly up again to the girl and threw themselves
down panting, close to her, arguing together as much as they could
without breath.
The girl laughed and said something; then they rose up and raced again,
the heavier one this time encouraging himself with groans at each leap
over the sheaves, flinging himself over with so much ferocity that he
tumbled at the end well in front.
“You can jump, no mistake,” said the girl to the winner. “But what’s
the matter with you?” she asked the other, putting a foxglove between
her lips. Both were too much out of breath to speak, but in a few
minutes started again. They ran faster than ever; they leapt well over
the tops of the shocks, so high as to stumble at each descent. The
winner of the last race could only just keep level with the other,
and seemed about to collapse at each thundering jump, when his rival,
beginning a great leap too early, fell in the middle of the shock and
lost the race. They returned, the winner first, and lay sprawling,
panting full in the girl’s face.
“Well, Luke, you have won, and there’s your kiss,” she said to the
heavier lad.
“And, John, you have been beaten; we did not say what the loser should
have, so here’s two for you,” she went on, this time taking the flower
out of her mouth. “And now, lads, race again!”
This time the race was never in doubt. John took each leap as if he
aimed at the harvest moon that rose before him. Luke tripped at
several sheaves, and, at the bottom, climbed over the stone wall and
disappeared. As to John, he came back and began racing and leaping
alone, until the girl, feeling cold or in need of some company, went
off and left the proud fellow to the moon and the line of shocks.
CHAPTER XL
THE INN
The night was dark and solid rain tumultuously invested the inn. As
I stood in a dim passage I could see through the bar into the cloudy
parlour, square and white, surrounded by settles, each curving about
a round table made of one piece of elm on three legs. A reproduction
of “Rent Day” and a coloured picture of a bold Spanish beauty hung on
the wall, which, for the rest, was sufficiently adorned by the sharp
shadows of men’s figures and furniture that mingled grotesquely. All
the men but one leaned back upon the settles or forward upon the
tables, their hands on their tankards, watching the one who sang a
ballad--a ballad known to them so well that they seemed not to listen,
but simply to let the melody surge about them and provoke what thoughts
it would.
At some time, perhaps many times in his life, every man is likely
to meet with a thing in art or nature or human life or books which
astonishes and gives him a profound satisfaction, not so much because
it is rich or beautiful or strange, as because it is a symbol of a
thing which, without the symbol, he could never grasp and enjoy. The
German archers making a target of Leonardo’s sculptured horse and
horsemen at Milan; the glory of purple that has flown from a painted
church window and settled upon a peasant’s shoulders for an hour;
the eloquence, as of an epigram rich in anger and woe, of one bare
branch that juts out from a proud green wood into the little midnight
stars and makes them smaller with its splendid pang; a woodman felling
one by one the black and golden oak trees in the spring and slaying
their ancient shadows; or, in a discreet and massive crowd, one jet
of laughter, so full of joy or defiance or carelessness that it seems
to cut through the heavy air like the whistle of a bullet--the world
is one flame of these blossoms, could we but see. Music has many of
them in her gift. Music, the rebel, the martyr, the victor--music, the
romantic cry of matter striving to become spirit--is itself such a
symbol, and there is no melody so poor that it will not at some time
or another, to our watchful or receptive minds, have its festal hour
in which it is crowned or at least crucified, for our solemn delight.
“Dolly Gray” I have heard sung all day by poor sluttish women as they
gathered peas in the broad, burning fields of July, until it seemed
that its terrible, acquiescent melancholy must have found a way to the
stars and troubled them.
And of all music, the old ballads and folk songs and their airs are
richest in the plain, immortal symbols. The best of them seem to be
written in a language that should be universal, if only simplicity were
truly simple to mankind. Their alphabet is small; their combinations
are as the sunlight or the storm, and their words also are symbols.
Seldom have they any direct relation to life as the realist believes it
to be. They are poor in such detail as reveals a past age or a country
not our own. They are in themselves epitomes of whole generations,
of a whole countryside. They are the quintessence of many lives and
passions made into a sweet cup for posterity. A myriad hearts and
voices have in age after age poured themselves into the few notes and
words. Doubtless, the old singers were not content, but we, who know
them not, can well see in their old songs a kind of immortality for
them in wanderings on the viewless air. The men and women--who hundreds
of years ago were eating and drinking and setting their hearts on
things--still retain a thin hold on life through the joy of us who
hear and sing their songs, or tread their curving footpaths, or note
their chisel marks on cathedral stones, or rest upon the undulating
churchyard grass. The words, in league with a fair melody, lend
themselves to infinite interpretations, according to the listener’s
heart. What great literature by known authors enables us to interpret
thus by virtue of its subtlety, ballads and their music force us to
do by their simplicity. The melody and the story or the song move us
suddenly and launch us into an unknown. They are not art, they come to
us imploring a new lease of life on the sweet earth, and so we come
to give them something which the dull eye sees not in the words and
notes themselves, out of our own hearts, as we do when we find a black
hearthstone among the nettles, or hear the clangour of the joyous wild
swan, invisible overhead, in the winter dawn.
In the parlour of the inn the singer stood up and sang of how a
girl was walking alone in the meadows of spring when she saw a ship
going out to sea and heard her true love crying on board; and he
sailed to the wars and much he saw in strange countries, but never
came back; and still she walks in the meadows and looks out to sea,
though she is old, in the spring. He sang without stirring, without
expression, except in so far as light and darkness from his own life
emerged enmeshed among the deep notes. He might have been delivering
an oracle of solemn but ambiguous things. And so in fact he was. By
its simplicity and remoteness from life the song set going the potent
logic of fancy which would lead many men to diverse conclusions. It
excluded nothing of humanity except what baseness its melody might make
impossible. The strangeness and looseness of its framework allowed each
man to see himself therein, or some incident or dream in his life, or
something possible to a self which he desired to be or imagined himself
to be, or perhaps believed himself once to have been. There were no
bounds of time or place. It included the love of Ruy Blas, of Marlowe,
of Dante, of Catullus, of Kilhwch, of Swift, of Palomides, of Hazlitt,
of Villon.... And that little inn, in the midst of mountains and
immense night, seemed a temple of all souls, where a few faithful ones
still burnt candles and remembered the dead.
PART V
THE SEA
CHAPTER XLI
A MARCH HAUL
The white houses on the hill are whiter than ever before in the early
light and the south wind from over the sea. The soft, wheat-coloured
sand is inscribed far from the water by the black scrawl of the
overpast storm. But now the sea is broken by sliding ripples so small
that they seem only the last, discontented efforts of the wind to
make the surface one perfect floor of glass. The curving, foamy lines
waver and swirl and are about to disappear and leave the desired level
when others are born unnoticeably. The black hulls of the leaning
ships gleam and darken the water, and by their reflections give
it an immeasurable depth which contrasts strangely with its lucid
tranquillity and the drowned roses of the departing dawn, for in the
high blue sky some of the sunrise clouds have lost their way and hang,
still rosy, near the zenith, round the transparent moon. The mist over
the sea at the horizon is golden.
Sea and shore are at rest, all but one group of men who are welcoming
a little ship that comes in upon the tide, fragrant and stately and a
little weary, as with folded arms, solemn also as if she were invading,
or perhaps bringing mysterious gifts for the ancient, wintry land.
And now they are hauling in the deeply-laden boat that seems on this
fair morning to have brought the spring out of the sea; and that is why
they strain grimly to have her safe on the storm-strewn shore. She is
laden with flowers, with anemones and primroses for the woods, violets
for the banks, marigolds for the brooks and the ungrazed, rushy corners
of long fields, daffodils for the stone walls and the short turf at the
edges of copses, stitchwort for the hedgerows, bittersweet may for the
hawthorns, gold for the willows, white and rosy blossom for the old
orchards among the hills, mezereon, jonquils, rockets, plume poppies
and snapdragons and roses for the gardens; and the men heave and groan
as if they feared lest the sea should still rob them of some.
All the leaves are there--the sweet hawthorn green which the children
chew, the dewy, pensile leaves of hazel and beech and lime, the palmy
ash leaves still misty with purple flower, the oak leaves bronzed or
gilded among their rosy galls, and the streamers of the willow, and
all the grasses and reeds, and the tall young adder-headed bracken for
the moor, and ferns for the dripping ledges of the waterfall; and the
men heave without resting, lest any should escape and so cheat them of
shaded ways for rest and sport and love.
There also are the birds--the gentle martins, swallows that will seem
the perfect flower of the home sweetness in stern cottages on the
heights and warm farmhouses in the valleys, the chiffchaffs that shall
sing in the ash and the larch, the delicate wrens of the woodland
crests and the tempestuous nightingales of the thick-budded copses,
silent fly-catchers for the plum trees on southern walls, cuckoos to
shout over the dim water-meadows and in the pearly lichened oak woods,
ousels to flash on the moors, skiey swifts, doves to fill the green
caverns of the beeches, and all the chatterers that hide in blackthorn
and cornel thickets when it is best to walk among them; and the men
heave, for they are coming to the land even now.
Very near now are the lizards of the drowsy nettle-beds, snakes to curl
and uncurl upon the sunlit moss, and blue sylphs for the rivulets. All
are coming in from this placid sea; and so the men heave, and the white
houses begin to glitter, and the golden mist over the sea promises that
days shall again be long, and men shall sit carelessly on gates and
sleep under the hedge at noon and adventure and make plans in the pure
mornings that are at hand.
CHAPTER XLII
FISHING BOATS
The tide moves the river northward, towards me, under the bridge on
which I stand. On both sides it is lined for a little way by houses:
on the east in a flat, straight front, on the west in irregular rocky
masses. Those on the east are coldly stained with light from the
western sky; those opposite are vaguely shadowed and have an airiness
and gloom--not a light yet appearing--as of the other side of Lethe.
The river is of noble breadth.
Against the eastern houses rise up the masses of seven fishing boats in
a row, with only such movement as makes the shadow run into the brown
and gold, or the gold and brown into the shadow of the sails slowly,
like the unfolding of poppies: and under their sides the shadows are
profound as if they trailed black velvet mantles that hid the water.
For, away from the boats, the unrippled surface of the motionlessly
gliding river is of that lugubrious silver that seems to be, not water,
but some trick of light upon mere air, such as is seen above summer
meadows in the heat.
And over all is bent a pale, soft, empurpled sky, and in it a crescent
moon.
Up the river came two fishing boats, sleeping, their motion the only
proof of the tide--no man visible on board--no voices--and their sails
of a colour as if they had been steeped in the early hues of the now
vanished sunset, and yet in their folds so dark that they seem to be
bringing with them the night as a cargo from those cloudy black woods
in the south. Beyond the large curve of those woods the shining horn of
the river reaches the unseen sea. The spirit of the sea comes up on the
broad silent water.
The two small, solemn boats still glide in sleep; the others dream at
the quay.
Southward, the dark wood sends out the narcotic night as a gift over
the land, sowing the seeds of it from the wings of the slow sea birds,
from the two incoming boats, silently; and now they have fallen upon
good soil in the seven boats on the quay, in the masses of houses, in
the arches of the bridge and in the hearts of men, and all things drink
oblivion. As I turn away there is a sound of shrill, passionless voices
that may be the souls of the oblivious travelling to content somewhere
in the rich purple night.
CHAPTER XLIII
CLOUDS OVER THE SEA
The high, partridge-coloured heathland rolls southward, with small
ridges as of a sea broken by cross winds, or as if the heather and
the hard gorse cushions had grown over ruins which time had not yet
smoothed into the right curves of perfect death. A gentle wind changes
the grass from silver to green, from green to silver, by depressing or
lifting up the blades. In the dry heather and pallid herbage the wind
sounds all the stops of despair. The note that each produces is faint,
and the combination hardly louder than the sound that fancy makes among
the tombs. Nevertheless, the enchantment of that little noise pours
into the air and heart a sympathy with the thousand microscopic sorrows
and uncertainties of the inanimate world--a feeling that is part of the
melancholy importunately intruding on a day of early spring. The larks
rise, linking earth and sky with their songs, and the stonechats are
restless.
There are no trees. The only house is a little, white, thatched cottage
among some shining dark boats, on the distant rosy shore.
The sea makes no sound. It changes with the sky so often and so subtly
that its variations are to be described, if at all, in terms not of
colour but of thought. All such moods as pass through the mind of
a lonely man, during long hours in a place where the outside world
does not disturb him and he lives on memory and pure reflection, are
symbolised by those changes on the surface of the sea. Now it is one
thing and now another; the growth is imperceptible and those moods
that have passed are as hard to reconstruct as the links of a long,
fluctuating reverie. For the most part it is grey, a grey full of
meditation and discontent.
The heathland changes with the sea. Both take their thoughts and
fancies from the sky. For this is a world of clouds; earth and sea are
made by them what they are. They make the sea, and they make the little
pools, blue, silver or grey, among the gorse. The clouds are always
there; inhabiting a dome that is about fifty miles from the horizon up
and down to the opposite horizon; and yet they are never the same.
Where do the clouds go?
The large white clouds, mountainous and of alabaster and with looks of
everlastingness. I see them in the north at midday, making the hills
seem level with the plain. I turn away my eyes and when next I look
they are gone. They vanish like childish things. One day I made an
appointment with another child to play marbles on the next morning; I
never went; I forgot; I never saw the boy again, and I remember it now,
for I never played marbles after that.
The high white halcyons of summer skies.
The distant, icy ranges of rounded pearl down which, in terrace after
terrace, the sun walks like a king to the sea in May. As I watch
they grow big like roses in the sun, and they change and vanish and
reappear beneath the restless sculptor’s hand. If a man loves what is
passing away, he loves then.
Those little dove-like clouds that for a moment stain the dusky clouds
after an April storm--are they a metamorphosis of the Pleiades? They
are gone like music; for sometimes the memory of them equals the
reality and sometimes they are not to be recalled.
Those Elysian, white sierras in the east, which, at the end of a day
of frowns and humours, stretch far away in still and lucid air, their
bases lost in blue, making the world immense, as if it were to be thus
for ever and the gods to walk again.
The cliffs that hold the moon imprisoned in their clefts and lure the
mind to desire useless things.
The flocks that go down into the sea or behind the mountains, and
thrill the heart with adventurousness and yet never move it to an
adventure, but rather persuade us to care greatly for nothing except to
muse and mesmerise ourselves with that old song--
“I did but see her passing by
And yet I love her till I die.”
The parcels of aerial gold which at sunset make one canopy as of a
golden-foliaged tree planted over the world. The night does not believe
that they were ever there.
Those caravans that go down the blue precipices of night intently;
those dragons, lean and black, that prepare the dawn and ruin the
morning star.
They change, they tarry, they travel far, they pass away, they
dissolve, they cannot die. Up there, do they think, or do they watch,
or do they simply act? and is it pleasant simply to act? Have all the
sunsets and dawns and thunderstorms done nothing for them? I suppose
that up there also nothing matters but eternity; that up there also
they know nothing of eternity.
CHAPTER XLIV
THE MARSH
The sun has gone down. Except on one hand, the immense empty marshland
expands to the sea, and where it mingles with the grey water would be
uncertain, but for the clamour of the wading birds and the gleam, now
and then, of a white wing. The low bent thorns, inland, now take on a
strange humanity, as of men who have ventured out into the solitude and
pitched their tents there and none has followed them; they are bent in
alarmed and hurrying attitudes away from the sea, but cannot leave it.
The sea rises steeply up like a vast ploughed field to an uncertain sky
of the same hue. All that greyness takes hold upon the mind like autumn
rain and lures it to we know not what desperate carelessness; and the
siren, that sweet evil of the sea, chants such dissolving melodies as
this:--
“The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy;
Yet still she turns her restless head;
But O, sick children of the world,
Of all the many changing things
In dreary dancing past us whirled,
To the cracked tune that Chronos sings,
Words alone are certain good.
Where are now the warring kings,
Word be-mockers?--By the Rood
Where are now the warring kings?
An idle word is now their glory,
By the stammering schoolboy said,
Reading some entangled story:
The kings of the old time are fled.
The wandering earth herself may be
Only a sudden, flaming word,
In clanging space a moment heard,
Troubling the endless reverie ...”
But at one hand lies the first house in the world, a little ark of
grey stone, pierced by windows behind which a velvet darkness weaves
a spell and by a gloomy doorway; knock there and at once you will be
barricaded again against the annihilating sea and night. All about it
a trim garden of white and gold and dying red sends up a thin tower of
scent that stands bravely in the salt wind. A tower!--at such an hour,
when the easements of all the senses are opened wide upon eternity,
this perfume not only satisfies the desiring and aspiring sense, but,
with all its unsearched, undiscovered powers, builds for us here upon
the shore a specular tower and, more, a palace lovely and shadowy,
where the mind roves slowly and at ease, saluting vaguely apprehended
shapes, finding now long lost memories of men and things which time
has locked against a thousand keys, and now bold hopes and unexpected
consolations. Content herself lurks here and many a pleasant ghost that
seems immortal because it has died many times, and they may be enjoyed,
until suddenly the night wind, without mercy, overturns the tower and
desolates the palace and leaves us forsaken. Yonder the lighthouse
flashes. The ships go out with wings as of a moth that cannot leave
its chrysalis behind. The church bells moan; the sea birds whimper and
shriek, and the road that goes on so long as we can walk lengthens out
along the marsh and up the hill.
CHAPTER XLV
ONE SAIL AT SEA
This is a simple world. On either hand the shore sweeps out in a long
curve and ends in a perpendicular, ash-coloured cliff, carving the
misty air as with a hatchet-stroke. The shore is of tawny, terraced
sand, like hammered metal from the prints of the retreating waves;
and here and there a group of wildly carved and tragic stones--_unde
homines nati, durum genus_--such as must have been those stones from
which Deucalion made the stony race of men to arise. Up over the
sand, and among these stones the water slides in tracery like May
blossom or silver mail. A little way out, the long wave lifts itself
up laboriously into a shadowy cliff, nods proudly and crumbles, vain
and swift, into a thousand sparks of foam. Far out the desolate,
ridgy leagues vibrate and murmur with an unintelligible voice, not
less intelligible than when one man says, “I believe,” or another
man, “I love,” or another, “I am your friend.” Almost at the horizon
a sharp white sail sways, invisibly controlled. In a minute it does
not move; in half-an-hour it has moved. It fascinates and becomes the
image of the watcher’s hopes, as when in some tranquil grief we wait,
with faint curiosity and sad foretelling, to see how our plans will
travel, smiling a little even when they stray or stop, because we
have foretold it. Will the sail sink? Will it take wing into the sky?
Will it go straight and far, and overcome and celebrate its success?
But it only fades away, and presently another is there unasked, yet
not surprising, and it also fades away, and the night has come, and
still the sea speaks with tongues. In the moonlight one strange flower
glistens, white as a campanula, like a sweet-pea in shape--the bleached
thigh-bone of a rat--and we forget the rest.
CHAPTER XLVI
THE CASTLE OF CARBONEK
The castle stands high among vast, sharp-edged waves of sand at the
edge of a cliff, and looks at the sea and a long, empty shore. At its
feet a little river can be seen running in a narrow valley. A few miles
off it rises in the red moorland, then it falls with many a cascade
down ladders of crag, broadens among willows where long leaves are
all horizontal in the wind, and here by the castle it has reached an
elvish, merry old age already, as it moves clear over the brown stones
and out among the rocks to the sea. Opposite the castle, across the
river, the other side of the valley is clothed in dense and luminous
oak wood. Where the river joins the sea both the castle hill and the
wooded hill break away into a broken multitude of bristling rocks, and
among their alleys and hidden corridors and halls the waves leap with
the motion of a herd of ridgy cattle galloping through narrow gateways.
Beyond, and away for ten miles, the high dark coast sweeps in a curve
which the sea whitens by showing its teeth; and round the headland
at the end the ships come and go at starry intervals. Landward, the
country rises in long, steep, furzy curves, interrupted by sudden
rocks, to the red moor and the autumn evening sky of towering,
tumultuous and yet steady grey cloud.
The castle stands among pale sand and long plumy grasses. The sand
is deep within the hollow and roofless circuit of the broken walls,
through which, here and there, come glimpses of sea or sky disconnected
from any fragment of the land, so that I seem to stand between the sea
and sky. In the summer ivy-leaved toad-flax buds and harebells, most
delicate flowers, whisper from the crevices. But nothing lives here
now. The trunk of an old tree that once grew through the walls is now
so much worn that what it was when it lived is not to be known. Not
only is all human life gone from here, but even the signs of its decay
are invisible. The noble masonry can suffer no more except at the
hands of men; it is too low and too strong. It is a rude crag. Neither
history nor legend speaks intelligently of it. It is but known that
it was raised by hands, and each man that comes to it has to build it
again out of his own life and blood, or it remains not far removed
from nothing. The wayfarer starts at the sight of it, tries in vain,
shuddering at the cliff and the desolate sea, to conceive a life lived
by beings like himself in such a place. To have lived there men must
have had fairy aids or the blood of witches or of gods in their veins.
Here might easily have been builded in a night that phantom palace
and its illusive pomps, where the Corinthian Lycius dwelt with the
phantasmal Lamia until a philosopher’s eye unbuilt it again.
Or on these sands might have stood Myratana and blind Tiriel before the
beautiful palace, and cursed their sons.
Or up in the vanished high bowman’s window the king’s daughter sat and
harped and sang:--
“There sits a bird i’ my father’s garden,
An’ O! but she sings sweet!
I hope to live an’ see the day
When wi’ my love I’ll meet.”
When the sun has set, and land and sea are dissolved in cold mist, all
but a circle of pale sand and the castle fragment, it seems true that
here, to the foot of the tower that is gone, came the king’s daughter
and wept and sighed and made a great moan: “Ah! he mourns not who
does not mourn for love.” And the good king came and asked her if she
desired to wed, and she answered, “Alas, sir, yes. Ah! he mourns not
who does not mourn for love.”
“Las! il n’a nul mal qui n’a le mal d’amour:
Las! il n’a nul mal qui n’a le mal d’amour.
La fille du roi est au pied de la tour,
Qui pleura et soupire et mène grand dolour.
Las! il n’a nul mal qui n’a le mal d’amour:
Las! il n’a nul mal qui n’a le mal d’amour.
Le bon roi lui dit: Ma fille, qu’avez vous?
Voulez-vous un mari? Hélas! oui, mon seignoux.
Las! il n’a nul mal qui n’a le mal d’amour:
Las! il n’a nul mal qui n’a le mal d’amour.”
Here, away from earth and sea and sky, apart from men and time and any
care, the melody and the picture are truer than before, suiting that
melancholy wood, in which the heart, seeming to go back easily through
unguessed deeps of time, makes all sorrows its own, airily, not without
delight.
And there are others who abode here or abide here, as for example
those timeless knights of no age or clime--Pelleas, Launcelot,
Pellinore, Palomides, Galahad, whose armour no man pretends to show us,
whom old men’s tongues and poets’ pens have lured into immortality--to
whom this castle gives a home.
When Launcelot had come to the water of Morteise, says Malory, he
slept, and there in a vision he was bidden to rise and put on his
armour and enter the first ship that he found. And he did so, and the
ship moved without sail or oar, and in the ship was great sweetness so
that “he was fulfilled with all things that he thought on or desired.”
There he slept, and when he awoke there was none on board except the
dead sister of Sir Percivale; and the ship went on for more than a
month and Sir Launcelot fed on manna, until at last he touched land
and there met Sir Galahad, his son. For half a year the two sailed
together, and “often they arrived in isles far from folk, where there
repaired none but wild beasts.” But one day at the edge of a forest a
white knight warned Sir Galahad that he should stay with his father
no more. “And therewith Galahad entered into the forest. And the wind
arose, and drove Launcelot more than a month throughout the sea, where
he slept but little, but prayed to God that he might see some tidings
of the Sangreal. So it befell on a night, at midnight, he arrived afore
a castle, on the back side, which was rich and fair, and there was a
postern opened towards the sea, and was open without any keeping, save
two lions kept the entry; and the moon shone clear. Anon Sir Launcelot
heard a voice that said: Launcelot, go out of this ship and enter into
the castle, where thou shalt see a great part of thy desire. Then he
ran to his arms, and so armed him, and so went to the gate and saw the
lions. Then set he hand to his sword and drew it. Then there came a
dwarf suddenly, and smote him on the arm so sore that the sword fell
out of his hand. Then heard he a voice say: O man of evil faith and
poor belief, wherefore trowest thou more on thy harness than in thy
Maker, for He might more avail thee than thine armour, in whose service
thou art set. Then said Launcelot: Fair Father Jesu Christ, I thank
Thee of Thy great mercy that Thou reprovest me of my misdeed; now see I
well that ye hold me for your servant. Then took he again his sword and
put it up in his sheath, and made a cross in his forehead, and came to
the lions, and they made semblaunt to do him harm. Notwithstanding he
passed by them without hurt, and entered into the castle to the chief
fortress, and there were they all at rest. Then Launcelot entered in
so armed, for he found no gate nor door but it was open. And at the
last he found a chamber whereof the door was shut, and he set his hand
thereto to have opened it, but he might not.
“Then he enforced him mickle to undo the door. Then he listened and
heard a voice which sung so sweetly that it seemed none earthly thing;
and him thought the voice said: Joy and honour be to the Father of
Heaven. Then Launcelot kneeled down before the chamber, for well wist
he that there was the Sangreal within that chamber. Then said he: Fair
sweet Father, Jesu Christ, if ever I did thing that pleased Thee, Lord,
for Thy pity ne have me not in despite for my foul sins done aforetime,
and that Thou show me something of that I seek. And with that he saw
the chamber door open, and there came out a great clearness, that the
house was as bright as all the torches of the world had been there. So
came he to the chamber door and would have entered. And anon a voice
said to him: Flee, Launcelot, and enter not, for thou oughtest not to
do it; and if thou enter thou shalt forthink it. Then he withdrew him
aback right heavy. Then looked he up in the middle of the chamber, and
saw a table of silver, and the Holy Vessel, covered with red samite
and many angels about it, whereof one held a candle of wax burning,
and the other held a cross and the ornaments of an altar. And before
the Holy Vessel he saw a good man clothed as a priest. And it seemed
that he was at the sacring of the mass. And it seemed to Launcelot
that above the priest’s hands were three men, whereof the two put the
youngest by likeness between the priest’s hands; and so he lift it up
right high, and it seemed to show so to the people. And then Launcelot
marvelled not a little, for him thought the priest was so greatly
charged of the figure that him seemed that he should fall to the earth.
And when he saw none about him that would help him, then came he to
the door a great pace, and said: Fair Father Jesu Christ, ne take it
for no sin though I help the good man which hath great need of help.
Right so entered he into the chamber, and came toward the table of
silver; and when he came nigh he felt a breath, that him thought it was
intermeddled with fire, which smote him so sore in the visage that him
thought it brent his visage; and therewith he fell to the earth and
had no power to arise; so he was so araged, that had lost the power of
his body, and his hearing, and his seeing. Then felt he many hands
about him, which took him up and bare him out of the chamber door,
without any amending of his swoon, and left him there, seeming dead to
all people. So upon the morrow when it was fair day they within were
arisen, and found Launcelot lying afore the chamber door. All they
marvelled how that he came in, and so they looked upon him, and felt
his pulse to wit whether there were any life in him; and so they found
life in him, but he might not stand nor stir no member that he had.
And so they took him by every part of the body, and bare him into a
chamber, and laid him in a rich bed, far from all folk; and so he lay
four days. Then the one said he was alive, and the other said, nay.
In the name of God, said an old man, for I do you verily to wit he is
not dead, but he is so full of life as the mightiest of you all; and
therefore I counsel you that he be well kept till God send him life
again.
“In such manner they kept Launcelot four-and-twenty days and all
so many nights, that ever he lay still as a dead man; and at the
twenty-fifth day befell him after midday that he opened his eyes, and
when he saw folk he made great sorrow, and said: Why have ye awaked
me, for I was more at ease than I am now. O Jesu Christ, who might
be so blessed that might see openly thy great marvels of secretness
there where no sinner may be! What have ye seen? said they about him.
I have seen, said he, so great marvels that no tongue may tell, and
more than any heart can think, and had not my son been here afore
me I had seen much more. Then they told him how he had lain there
four-and-twenty days and nights. Then him thought it was punishment
for the four-and-twenty years that he had been a sinner, wherefore our
Lord put him in penance four-and-twenty days and nights. Then looked
Sir Launcelot afore him, and saw the hair which he had borne nigh a
year, for that he forthought him right much that he had broken his
promise unto the hermit, which he had avowed to do. Then they asked how
it stood with him. Forsooth, said he, I am whole of body, thanked be
our Lord; therefore, sirs, for God’s love tell me where I am. Then said
they all that he was in the Castle of Carbonek.”
And when the moon is clear, and the tingling sea is vast and alone,
this castle on the sand above the grim coast is Carbonek, meet for all
adventures and all dreams.
SONGS
MOWING SONG
With one man, with two men, we mow the hay to-gether; ...
With three men, with four men, we mow the hay togeth-er....
My four, my three, my two, my one, no more....
We mow the hay and rake the hay and car-ry it a-way to-geth-er.
THE HOLM BANK HUNTING SONG
One morning last winter to Holm bank there came
A brave, no-ble sportsman, Squire Sands was his name,
Came a hunt-ing the fox, bold Reynard must die,
And he flung out his train and be-gan for to cry,
Tally ho! ... tally ho! ...
Hark, for-ward a-way, tal-ly ho....
POOR OLD HORSE
My cloth-ing was once of the lin-sey wool-sey fine, ...
My tail it grew at length ... my coat did likewise shine.
But now I’m growing old my beauty does de-cay.
My master frowns up-on me; one day I heard him say,
Poor old horse, poor old horse.
MARY, COME INTO THE FIELD
Mary, come into the field ...
To work a-long of I....
Digging up man-gel wor-zels,
For they be a-growing high....
Dig ’em up by the roots, dig ’em up by the roots,
Put in your spade, don’t be a-fraid,
Dig ’em up by the roots....
LA FILLE DU ROI
Las! Il n’a nul mal qui n’a le mal d’a-mour!
Las! Il n’a nu! mal qui n’a le mal d’a-mour!
La fill-e du roi est au pied de la tour,
qui pleure et sou-pir-e et mène grand dou-lour.
Las! Il n’a nul mal qui n’a le mal d’a-mour.
Las! Il n’a nul mal qui n’a le mal d’a-mour.
Le bon roi lui dit: Ma fille, qu’avez-vous?
Voulez-vous un mari? Hé-las oui, mon sei-gnoux!
Las! Il n’a nul mal qui n’a le mal d’a-mour.
Las! Il n’a nul mal qui n’a le mal d’a-mour.
INDEX
Achilles, modern, questioning Ulysses, 189
After-harvest, stillness of, 99
Aphrodite, 169
Apollo and Pan, 27
Apple blossom, 166-169
Ash-tree, solitary, dying, endiademed with woe, 53, 54;
how its leaves are shed, 124
August, 73-76;
Nature’s perfect poise, 73;
cool places in, 73;
the woods in, 75
Autumn, 176
Autumn bells, 174, 175
Autumn garden, an, 93-96, 174, 175;
farmhouse the royal flower of, 93;
a farmer’s love of his, 95
Ballad, a pathetic, described, 207, 208;
on the horse, 190, 237
Ballads and folk-songs, 206-208;
their words and melodies richest in immortal symbols, 206, 207
Barge, a black, 143-145;
its strange cargo, 145
Beech wood, a, 166
Birdnesting, 60
“Blue Bell,” the cosmic melody, 194
Bodleian Library, August in, 73
Books, a night with, 118
Boy, long thoughts of, 3
Brook, the, 88-92;
its insect, mineral, and plant life, 88-91;
its meandering course, 91, 92
Burns, Robert, prejudice against his poetry for epitaphs, 114
Calm, effect of, 2
Carbonek, castle of, 225-232;
now only a ruined crag, 226;
dreary outlook from, 226;
and Sir Launcelot’s vision, 229-232
Cassiopeia, the constellation, 194
Catullus, love of, song suggestive of, 208
Centaur, farmer on horse compared to, 66
Chalk hills, the, 171
Cherry blossom, 153, 154
Cherry of Zennor, Hunt’s story of, 198-201;
her dissatisfaction with home, 199;
her strange adventure, 199;
her curiosity and its consequences, 200, 201
Church bells, 176
Church, decorated, description of, 41-48;
service in, 41-43;
hymn-singing, 42;
modern worshippers and mythical gods, 43;
caged bells, 43
Church, village, description of, 176-178;
dull worshippers, 177;
a spiritless sermon, 178;
dream of an earthly heaven, 178-180
Clock, a silent, 118, 119
Clouds on the sea, 216-219;
their changeableness, 217, 218
Coach, London, 78
Company, good, walking in, 28-30
Country churchyard, a, 111-115;
village life in, 111;
life and death in, 111, 112;
epitaphs, 112-115;
eighteenth and nineteenth century epitaphs compared, 112
Country lover, the, 91
Crashaw’s poem, 62
Daffodils, the first, 183-191
Dante, love of, song suggestive of, 208
Dawn, beauties of nature at, 15, 16;
a July, 119
Deucalion stones, 223
Dis, chariot of, coming to Persephone, 148
“Dolly Gray,” sung in July fields, 206
Downs, the, 171-3
Dream, a strange, 39, 40
Earth Children, 126-137
Elves, lingering superstitions regarding, 66
Epitaph on infant’s tomb, 24
Epitaphs, 112-115;
history and progress seen in, 112;
sources of, 113, 114
“Fantastic summer’s heat,” 73
Farm, an old, 64-68;
relics of its long-dead generations, 67;
a deserted, 69, 70
Farmer, his life and habits, 66-68;
his house, 67;
his library, 67, 68;
relics of ancestors and thoughts of posterity, 68
Farmer’s daughter, the, 168, 169
Farmhouse, the royal flower of autumn, 93;
youth and antiquity mingled in the aspect of, 93, 94;
wayfarer’s first view of, 96;
a little red, 100;
life in, 101
Farmyard, in a, 52-55
Faunus, 21-25
Fell and moor, 184
Field, a green, 84-87;
antiquity of, 86;
November the notable month of, 87
Fields, antiquity of, 86
Fishing-boats in a tidal river, 214, 215
Footpaths, ancient, 115
“Four Elms, The,” typical village inn, 106, 110;
its old-time furniture, 107;
tramps and labourers in tap-room, 107-110
Fox-hunt, 141, 155-165
Gaberdine, a pedlar’s description of, 186
Galahad and Launcelot, 228
Gardens, summer flowers in, 170, 171;
autumn flowers, 174, 175
Garland day, 44-48;
song of, 48
Gods, ancient, and modern worshippers, 42, 43;
and heroes, 54
Golden Age, the, 13, 15, 16, 100-102;
and modern literature, 14
Goldfinches happy among thistles, 87
Good Friday and marbles, 60
Happiness, pursuit of, futile, 83
Happy Fields, 73
Harvest, a little before, 170-173
Harvest field, a moonlight love-race in, 201-204
Harvest moon, under a, 202-204
Haul of spring flowers, a March, 211-213
Hazlitt, love of, song suggestive of, 208
Heathland in the wind, 216, 217
Hedges, unruliness of, 84
Heroes and gods, 54
Hill, a tall beechen, 153
Holm-bank Hunting Song the, 194
“Hop-idgit,” the, or “shim,” 126
Horse, ballad on the, 190
House, white stone, 74
Hunt’s story of Cherry of Zennor, 198
Inn, the village, 205-208;
metamorphosed into a temple of all souls, 208
Inns, 63, 104, 106, 123, 183, 194;
a medley, 5;
roadside, 5, 61
January sunshine, 140-142
July night, and dawn, a, reminiscences of a, 118, 119
Junonian woman, 73, 76;
best representative of August, 73
Keats, 147, 148
Kilhwch, love of, song suggestive of, 208
King, Farmer, anecdote of his hay, 129
Labourer, aged, reminiscences of, 77-82;
a memory with a voice, 79;
feats of strength and endurance, 80, 81;
his coaching days, 81;
disciple of Culpeper, 82
Lamia and Lycius, 226
Landscapes on the walls by the roadside, 192
Lane, an ideal country, 56, 57
Launcelot, Sir, at the water of Morteise, 228;
his vision of the Sangreal, 228;
his adventures, 228-232;
at the castle of Carbonek, 229-232
Lethe, 214
Lethe’s stream, the flotsam on, 101
Literature, modern, 14
London, 7, 188;
midnight walk in, 7;
pedestrians encountered, 7, 8;
river, seen from bridge, 8;
names of streets an epitome of the world and time, 9;
can it be told? 188, 189;
_The Soul of London_, 188
Love-race in a moonlit harvest-field, 201-204
Lover’s game, children playing at, 59
Lycius, Corinthian, and Lamia, 226
Malory’s story of Sir Launcelot and the Sangreal, 228
Marbles and Good Friday, 60
March doubts, 37-40
March haul, a, 211, 213
Marlowe, love of, song suggestive of, 208
Marsh, the, 220-222
“Mary, come into the Field,” a peasant song, 34, 35, 237, 238
Maypole, the village, 70
Meadowland, 56-63;
pastoral inhabitants of, 58
Meadow-sweet, the, 75
Men prisons to themselves, 7
Meredith, Arabella, old man’s love-story concerning, 157-163;
her prowess in the hunting-field, 158;
her proposal of marriage, 159;
at the Fair, 161;
her lover’s daring swim, 162, 163;
her death, 163
Merediths, the, 157
Metamorphosis of the trees, 124
Mind, pool an image of the, 154
Moon, reign of, 153, 154
Moor and fell, 184
Moor, under the, 198-201
Moorhen, the home of the, 85
Morning, pride of the, 121-123
Morteise, water of, Sir Launcelot at the, 228
Mountainous country, scene in, 183
Mountains haunting the day, 184
Mowing, extraordinary day’s work at, 80, 81;
song, 11, 235
Music, the romantic cry of matter striving to become spirit, 206
Myratana and blind Tiriel, 226
Names, of streets, an epitome, 9;
of inns, rich in suggestion, 9
Nature, sorrowing, 5;
a philosopher of, 12;
beauties of, at dawn, 15, 16, 119
No man’s garden, 31-36
November, the notable month of the field, 87;
rain, 138, 139
Orchard, an, 167
Pace-egging Play, 179
Paganism, eternal, the multitude’s, 130, 131
Page, Margaret Helen, earth child, 127;
her better days, 127;
her Franciscan fondness for bird and beast, 127;
her Christian-pagan prayer and aspirations, 128-130
Page, Robert, earth child, 126;
his home, 127;
his varied avocations, 131, 132;
his belief of all things in print, 133;
his strange dream of the judgment day, 133, 134;
Bacchus his only god, 134;
his likeness to a lesser god in mythology, 135, 136
Palomides, love of, song suggestive of, 208
Pan and Apollo, 27
Pastoral inhabitants of meadowland, 58;
song, 58;
valley, 174
Pedlar, a, 186;
his picturesque dress, 186;
his birthplace, 186;
his simple life described, 187;
his questionings, 187-190
Pelleas, 228
Pellinore, 228
Persephone and the chariot of Dis, 148
Pleiades, the, and clouds, 218
Ploughman, the, 22-25;
his daily task, 23;
his recreation, 23, 24
Poetry, pastoral, 14
Poison, slow, dream-search for, 39, 40
Pond, a primeval, 52, 53;
the field, 85;
its aspect at dawn, 86
Pond-mirror, the, 192-197;
reflections on and in, 196, 197
Pool, beauties of, 73-76;
an image of the mind, reflections in, 154
“Poor Mary,” children’s lovers’ game, 59, 60
Poppies, 71
_Popular Romances of the West of England_, Hunt’s, 198
Pork, roast, procuring a dinner of, 79, 80
Princess, an impossible, 72
Rain, night walk in, 5, 6
River, a tidal, fishing-heats in, 214
Robin’s eggs, superstition regarding, 60
Ruy Blas, love of, song suggestive of, 208
Sail, one, at sea, 223, 224;
image of watcher’s hopes, 223
St. Martin’s Summer, 118-120
Sangreal, Sir Launcelot and the, 228, 229
Sea, clouds on the, 216, 219;
one sail at, 223, 224
Seifelmolouk, modern, and his memlooks, 43
“Shim,” or “hop-idgit” of six tynes, the Sussex, 126
Sign-post, duty of, 10
Siren, melody of, 220
Song, a country marching, 11, 235
Songs, old, fragments of, 29, 30, 34
Songs with music: Mowing song, 235;
Holm-bank Hunting Song, 236;
Poor old Horse, song of the, 237;
Mary, come into the Field 237, 238;
La Fille du Roi, 238
Soul of London, the, 188
Sovereign things, three: ship, chariot, plough, 21
Spring, birds and flowers, 37-40
Squire of olden days, a, 79
Streets, as seen from railway carriage, 3, 4;
a problem, 4;
at night, 8;
city, 9;
names of, an epitome, 9
Suburban street, a, 1
Summer garden, 170, 171
Summer-time, 170
Sunday, autumn, in country, 176-180
Sunshine, January, 140-142
Superstitions: robin’s eggs, 60;
elves, 66;
tadpoles, 82
Swift, love of, song suggestive of, 208
Symbols that surge and satisfy, 205
Tadpoles, rustic remedy for “decline,” 82
Tartarus, 131
Ten miles drive, 155
Tennyson’s poetry as source of epitaphs, 114
Times, old-fashioned, 77-82;
advantages and disadvantages, 78;
were they “good”? 78
Tiriel, blind, and Myratana, 226
Tombs, only records of early races, 111, 112;
life and death of, 112;
various objects in, 111;
bodies found in sitting posture, 112
Tower, a spectacular, 221
Town-leaving, 1-17
Tramp, a, conversations with, 31-35;
his wife, 32;
a murder, 32, 33;
on Bank-holiday, 35, 36;
at work, 36
Tramps of various nationalities, 107;
strange sleeping-place of, 115
Tree-worship, mild, suggestion of, 192
Trees, 6, 16;
ancient, 42;
metamorphosis of, 124
Valley, a quiet, 140
Village, the, 103-117;
its ancient cottages, 105;
its church and churchyard, 104, 111;
its inns and their frequenters, 104, 106-110;
flower-gardens, 105;
its eighteenth-century vicarage, 106;
longevity of inhabitants, 113;
its roads and footpaths, 115, 116;
its archæological and historic remains, 116
Villon, love of, song suggestive of, 208
Walnut-tree, the, 97-99
Watercress-man, 2;
conversation with, 11-15;
as philosopher and flower-seller, 12;
as landscape-painter, 12-13
Water-mill, deserted, 97
Wayfarer, the, 121
Winter morning, a, 146
Wood at sunrise, 44;
antiquity of, 46;
youth of, 47;
an old, beauties of, 49-51;
memories evoked by, 51;
a triangular, 139
Woodland walk, 26, 27, 44-51
World, still primitive, the, 143
Worshipper, modern and ancient gods, 42, 43
Yeoman of long ancestry, 156;
and Enid, his betrothed, 157, 160, 164
Youth, wood of, 47
_Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, London and Bungay._
Transcriber's Note
Duplicate headings have been removed.
The following apparent errors have been corrected:
p. 35 "Dig ’em up by the roots, etc." changed to "‘Dig ’em up by the
roots,’ etc."
p. 42 "Through all the changing scenes of life”" changed to "“Through
all the changing scenes of life”"
p. 58 "Aud all" changed to "And all"
p. 65 "Si g, birds,in" changed to "Sing, birds, in"
p. 96 "declares it" changed to "declares its"
p. 243 "his home, 127:" changed to "his home, 127;"
Archaic or inconsistent language has otherwise been kept as printed.