All through the morning, the air was held in an ominous stillness.
Sitting over my books, I seemed to feel the silence; when I turned my
look to the window, I saw nothing but the broad, grey sky, a featureless
expanse, cold, melancholy. Later, just as I was bestirring myself to go
out for an afternoon walk, something white fell softly across my vision.
A few minutes more, and all was hidden with a descending veil of silent
snow.
It is a disappointment. Yesterday I half believed that the winter drew
to its end; the breath of the hills was soft; spaces of limpid azure
shone amid slow-drifting clouds, and seemed the promise of spring. Idle
by the fireside, in the gathering dusk, I began to long for the days of
light and warmth. My fancy wandered, leading me far and wide in a dream
of summer England. . . .
This is the valley of the Blythe. The stream ripples and glances over
its brown bed warmed with sunbeams; by its bank the green flags wave and
rustle, and, all about, the meadows shine in pure gold of buttercups. The
hawthorn hedges are a mass of gleaming blossom, which scents the breeze.
There above rises the heath, yellow-mantled with gorse, and beyond, if I
walk for an hour or two, I shall come out upon the sandy cliffs of
Suffolk, and look over the northern sea. . . .
I am in Wensleydale, climbing from the rocky river that leaps amid broad
pastures up to the rolling moor. Up and up, till my feet brush through
heather, and the grouse whirrs away before me. Under a glowing sky of
summer, this air of the uplands has still a life which spurs to movement,
which makes the heart bound. The dale is hidden; I see only the brown
and purple wilderness, cutting against the blue with great round
shoulders, and, far away to the west, an horizon of sombre heights. . . .
I ramble through a village in Gloucestershire, a village which seems
forsaken in this drowsy warmth of the afternoon. The houses of grey
stone are old and beautiful, telling of a time when Englishmen knew how
to build whether for rich or poor; the gardens glow with flowers, and the
air is delicately sweet. At the village end, I come into a lane, which
winds upwards between grassy slopes, to turf and bracken and woods of
noble beech. Here I am upon a spur of the Cotswolds, and before me
spreads the wide vale of Evesham, with its ripening crops, its fruiting
orchards, watered by sacred Avon. Beyond, softly blue, the hills of
Malvern. On the branch hard by warbles a little bird, glad in his leafy
solitude. A rabbit jumps through the fern. There sounds the laugh of a
woodpecker from the copse in yonder hollow. . . .
In the falling of a summer night, I walk by Ullswater. The sky is still
warm with the afterglow of sunset, a dusky crimson smouldering above the
dark mountain line. Below me spreads a long reach of the lake, steel-
grey between its dim colourless shores. In the profound stillness, the
trotting of a horse beyond the water sounds strangely near; it serves
only to make more sensible the repose of Nature in this her sanctuary. I
feel a solitude unutterable, yet nothing akin to desolation; the heart of
the land I love seems to beat in the silent night gathering around me;
amid things eternal, I touch the familiar and the kindly earth. Moving,
I step softly, as though my footfall were an irreverence. A turn in the
road, and there is wafted to me a faint perfume, that of meadow-sweet.
Then I see a light glimmering in the farmhouse window--a little ray
against the blackness of the great hillside, below which the water
sleeps. . . .
A pathway leads me by the winding of the river Ouse. Far on every side
stretches a homely landscape, tilth and pasture, hedgerow and clustered
trees, to where the sky rests upon the gentle hills. Slow, silent, the
river lapses between its daisied banks, its grey-green osier beds. Yonder
is the little town of St. Neots. In all England no simpler bit of rural
scenery; in all the world nothing of its kind more beautiful. Cattle are
lowing amid the rich meadows. Here one may loiter and dream in utter
restfulness, whilst the great white clouds mirror themselves in the water
as they pass above. . . .
I am walking upon the South Downs. In the valleys, the sun lies hot, but
here sings a breeze which freshens the forehead and fills the heart with
gladness. My foot upon the short, soft turf has an unwearied lightness;
I feel capable of walking on and on, even to that farthest horizon where
the white cloud casts its floating shadow. Below me, but far off, is the
summer sea, still, silent, its ever-changing blue and green dimmed at the
long limit with luminous noontide mist. Inland spreads the undulant
vastness of the sheep-spotted downs, beyond them the tillage and the
woods of Sussex weald, coloured like to the pure sky above them, but in
deeper tint. Near by, all but hidden among trees in yon lovely hollow,
lies an old, old hamlet, its brown roofs decked with golden lichen; I see
the low church-tower, and the little graveyard about it. Meanwhile, high
in the heaven, a lark is singing. It descends; it drops to its nest, and
I could dream that half the happiness of its exultant song was love of
England. . . .
It is all but dark. For a quarter of an hour I must have been writing by
a glow of firelight reflected on to my desk; it seemed to me the sun of
summer. Snow is still falling. I see its ghostly glimmer against the
vanishing sky. To-morrow it will be thick upon my garden, and perchance
for several days. But when it melts, when it melts, it will leave the
snowdrop. The crocus, too, is waiting, down there under the white mantle
which warms the earth.