THE END OF WINTER--SUFFOLK--HAMPSHIRE
SUFFOLK.
There are three sounds in the wood this morning--the sound of the waves
that has not died away since the sea carried off church and cottage and
cliff and the other half of what was once an inland wood; the sound
of trees, a multitudinous frenzied sound, of rustling dead oak-leaves
still on the bough, of others tripping along the path like mice, or
winding up in sudden spirals and falling again, of dead boughs grating
and grinding, of pliant young branches lashing, of finest twigs and
fir needles sighing, of leaf and branch and trunk booming like one;
and through these sounds, the song of a thrush. Rain falls and, for
a moment only, the dyked marshland below and beyond the wood is pale
and luminous with its flooded pools, the sails of windmills climb
and plunge, the pale sea is barred with swathes of foam, and on the
whistling sands the tall white waves vaunt, lean forward, topple and
lie quivering. But the rain increases: the sound and the mist of it
make a wall about the world, except the world in the brain and except
the thrush’s song which, so bright and clear, has a kind of humanity in
it by contrast with the huge bulk of the noises of sea and wood.
Rain and wind cease together, and here on the short grass at the
cliff’s edge is a strange birth--a gently convex fungus about two
inches broad, the central boss of it faintly indented, the surface
not perfectly regular but dimpled so as to break the light, and the
edge wavering away from the pure circular form; in hue a pale chestnut
paling to a transparent edge of honey colour; and the whole surface so
smooth and polished by rain as to seem coated in ice. What a thought
for the great earth on such a day! Out of the wood on to this grass the
thrushes steal, running with heads down and stopping with heads prouder
than stags’; out also into the short corn; and so glad are they that
they quarrel and sing on the ground without troubling to find a perch.
It is perfectly still; the sun splutters out of the thick grey and
white sky, the white sails shine on a sea of steel, and it is warm.
And now in the luxury of the first humid warmth and quiet of the year
the blackbird sings. The rain sets in at nightfall, but the wind does
not blow, and still the blackbird sings and the thrushes will hardly
leave the corn. That one song alone sweetens the wide vague country of
evening, the cloudy oak woods, the brown mixen under the elms and the
little white farm behind the unpruned limes, with its oblong windows
irregularly placed and of unequal size, its white door almost at a
corner, and the lawn coming right to the walls.
Day breaks and sun and wind dance together in the clouds and trees,
but without rain. Larks sing over the dark heavy cornland in which the
watery furrows shine. The dead drab grasses wave at the feet of the
hedgerows. Little pools at meadow corners bring down the sky to the
dark earth. Horses nod before the plough. A slight haze exhales from
the innumerable rich spongy clods, between the hedges of oak and ash.
Now and then shapeless rags of white or snow-grey clouds wander up from
the west and for a little while obscure the white mountains of cloud,
the blue sky, the silver sun; or the sweet smoke from the fires of
hedgers and ditchers rises up against the edge of a copse. The white
linen flaps and glows in cottage gardens; the dung cars go by crunching
the flints into the mud; and the boots and bells of pony traps make
a music forgotten since last February. It is only the twenty-second
day of February, yet these delights of the soul through the eyes and
ears are of spring. The children have begun to look for violets, and
the youngest, being the nearest to them in stature and in nature, has
found one. There she stands, four years old, with straight brown legs,
her face clear and soft but brown as a new hazel nut, her hair almost
of the same colour and paler where the sun has bleached it round her
temples and falling over her cheeks and neck; and through it shine
eyes of a deeper brown, the hue of the most exquisite flints. The eyes
shine, the teeth shine through the ever parted long red lips, the chin
shines, the brow shines most of all with a lustre that seems to come
from the joyous brain behind.
She is beautiful and straight as the July corn, as the ash tree
standing alone by the stream. She is fearless as fire, bold and
restless as wind, clear-hearted, simple, bright and gay as a mountain
water, in all her actions a daughter of the sun, the wind and the
earth. She has loving looks for all. From her fair broad naked foot to
her gleaming hair she is, to many, the dearest thing that lives.
Beside her plays a dog, with lifted ears, head on one side, rosy
tongue bright against his yellow fur, waiting upon her fancies. His
rest and his motion, like hers, are careless and beautiful, gifts of
the sun, the wind and the earth. As I look at them I think of such a
child and such a playmate that lived two thousand years ago in the sun,
and once as they played each set a foot upon the soft clay of a tile
that the tile maker had not yet burned hard and red. The tile fell in
the ruin of a Roman city in Britain, was buried hundreds of years in
ashes and flowering mould, and yesterday I saw the footprints in the
dark red tile, two thousand years old.
A day follows of rain and wind, and it is the robin that is most heard
among the dripping thorns, the robin and his autumnal voice. But the
sky clears for sunset and the blackbird’s hour, and, as twilight ends,
only the rear of the disappearing procession of day cloud is visible on
the western horizon, while the procession of night has but sent up two
or three dark forerunners. The sky is of palest blue, and Jupiter and
Sirius are bright over the sea, Venus over the land and Mercury just
over the far oaks. The sea is very dark except at the horizon which is
pale with the dissolving remnant of sunset gold in it; but two ranks of
breakers throw up a waving vapour of fairy foam against the dark waves
behind.
Again there are roaring wet mornings and sunlit mornings, but in them
all the pewits wheel over the marsh and their wild cries mingle with
the sweet whimper of dunlins, the songs of larks, the glitter of the
dykes, the wall of rain. All day the sky over heathery moorland is
like a reduplication of the moorland, except that at the horizon the
sky clears at intervals and fleets of pure white cloud sail over the
dark ploughland and green pines; and the gentle sea is white only where
the waves break on the sand like a line of children in white frocks
advancing with wavers in the game of “Here we come gathering nuts and
may.” Or the west is angry, thick and grey, the snow is horizontal
and fierce, and yet the south has a bay of blue sky and in it a vast
sunlit precipice of white cloud, and the missel thrushes roll out their
songs again and again at the edges of many woods. Or a sun appears
that brings out the songs of thrush and chaffinch and lark, and leaves
a chequer of snow on pine and ploughland and on the mole hills of the
meadows. Again the sun disappears and the swift heavy hail rebounds
on the grass with a dancing as of sand-hoppers, and there is no other
sound except a sudden hedgesparrow’s song to break in upon the beating
of the pellets on hard ivy and holly and tender grass. In the frosty
evening the first moth comes to the lamp.
Now the rain falls rejoicing in its power, and then the sky is sunny
and the white clouds are bubble-shaped in the blue, the wet roads are
azure with reflected sky, the trees are all of crystal, and the songs
of thrushes can be heard even through the snorting and rumbling of a
train.
HAMPSHIRE.
The beeches on the beech-covered hills roar and strain as if they
would fly off with the hill, and anon they are as meek as a great
horse leaning his head over a gate. If there is a misty day there is
one willow in a coombe lifting up a thousand silver catkins like a
thousand lamps, when there is no light elsewhere. Another day, a wide
and windy day, is the jackdaw’s, and he goes straight and swift and
high like a joyous rider crying aloud on an endless savannah, and,
underneath, the rippled pond is as bright as a peacock, and millions
of beech leaves drive across the open glades of the woods, rushing to
their Acheron. The bush harrow stripes the moist and shining grass;
the plough changes the pale stubble into a ridgy chocolate; they are
peeling the young ash sticks for hop poles and dipping them in tar. At
the dying of that windy day the wind is still; there is a bright pale
half-moon tangled in the pink whirl of after-sunset cloud, a sound of
blackbirds from pollard oaks against the silver sky, a sound of bells
from hamlets hidden among beeches.
Towards the end of March there are six nights of frost giving birth to
still mornings of weak sunlight, of an opaque yet not definitely misty
air. The sky is of a milky, uncertain pale blue without one cloud.
Eastward the hooded sun is warming the slope fields and melting the
sparkling frost. In many trees the woodpeckers laugh so often that
their cry is a song. A grassy ancient orchard has taken possession of
the visible sunbeams, and the green and gold of the mistletoe glows
on the silvered and mossy branches of apple trees. The pale stubble
is yellow and tenderly lit, and gives the low hills a hollow light
appearance as if they might presently dissolve. In a hundred tiers on
the steep hill, the uncounted perpendicular straight stems of beech,
and yet not all quite perpendicular or quite straight, are silver-grey
in the midst of a haze, here brown, there rosy, of branches and
swelling buds. Though but a quarter of a mile away in this faintly
clouded air they are very small, aërial in substance, infinitely remote
from the road on which I stand, and more like reflections in calm water
than real things.
At the lower margin of the wood the overhanging branches form blue
caves, and out of these emerge the songs of many hidden birds. I know
that there are bland melodious blackbirds of easy musing voices, robins
whose earnest song, though full of passion, is but a fragment that
has burst through a more passionate silence, hedgesparrows of liquid
confiding monotone, brisk acid wrens, chaffinches and yellowhammers
saying always the same thing (a dear but courtly praise of the coming
season), larks building spires above spires into the sky, thrushes
of infinite variety that talk and talk of a thousand things, never
thinking, always talking of the moment, exclaiming, scolding, cheering,
flattering, coaxing, challenging, with merry-hearted, bold voices that
must have been the same in the morning of the world when the forest
trees lay, or leaned, or hung, where they fell. Yet I can distinguish
neither blackbird, nor robin, nor hedgesparrow, nor any one voice. All
are blent into one seething stream of song. It is one song, not many.
It is one spirit that sings. Mixed with them is the myriad stir of
unborn things, of leaf and blade and flower, many silences at heart and
root of tree, voices of hope and growth, of love that will be satisfied
though it leap upon the swords of life. Yet not during all the day does
the earth truly awaken. Even in town and city the dream prevails, and
only dimly lighted their chalky towers and spires rise out of the sweet
mist and sing together beside the waters.
The earth lies blinking, turning over languidly and talking like a
half-awakened child that now and then lies still and sleeps though
with eyes wide open. The air is still full of the dreams of a night
which this mild sun cannot dispel. The dreams are prophetic as well as
reminiscent, and are visiting the woods, and that is why they will not
cast aside the veil. Who would rise if he could continue to dream?
It is not spring yet. Spring is being dreamed, and the dream is more
wonderful and more blessed than ever was spring. What the hour of
waking will bring forth is not known. Catch at the dreams as they hover
in the warm thick air. Up against the grey tiers of beech stems and
the mist of the buds and fallen leaves rise two columns of blue smoke
from two white cottages among trees; they rise perfectly straight and
then expand into a balanced cloud, and thus make and unmake continually
two trees of smoke. No sound comes from the cottages. The dreams are
over them, over the brows of the children and the babes, of the men and
the women, bringing great gifts, suggestions, shadowy satisfactions,
consolations, hopes. With inward voices of persuasion those dreams
hover and say that all is to be made new, that all is yet before us,
and the lots are not yet drawn out of the urn.
We shall presently set out and sail into the undiscovered seas and find
new islands of the free, the beautiful, the young. As is the dimly
glimmering changeless brook twittering over the pebbles, so is life. It
is but just leaving the fount. All things are possible in the windings
between fount and sea.
Never again shall we demand the cuckoo’s song from the August silence.
Never will July nip the spring and lengthen the lambs’ faces and
take away their piquancy, or June shut a gate between us and the
nightingale, or May deny the promise of April. Hark! before the end of
afternoon the owls hoot in their sleep in the ivied beeches. A dream
has flitted past them, more silent of wing than themselves. Now it is
between the wings of the first white butterfly, and it plants a smile
in the face of the infant that cannot speak: and again it is with the
brimstone butterfly, and the child who is gathering celandine and
cuckoo flower and violet starts back almost in fear at the dream.
The grandmother sitting in her daughter’s house, left all alone in
silence, her hands clasped upon her knees, forgets the courage without
hope that has carried her through eighty years, opens her eyes,
unclasps her hands from the knot as of stiff rope, distends them and
feels the air, and the dream is between her fingers and she too smiles,
she knows not why. A girl of sixteen, ill-dressed, not pretty, has seen
it also. She has tied up her black hair in a new crimson ribbon. She
laughs aloud with a companion at something they know in common and in
secret, and as she does so lifts her neck and is glad from the sole
of her foot to the crown of her head. She is lost in her laughter and
oblivious of its cause. She walks away, and her step is as firm as
that of a ewe defending her lamb. She was a poor and misused child,
and I can see her as a woman of fifty, sitting on a London bench,
grey-complexioned, in old black hat, black clothes, crouching over
a paper bag of fragments, in the beautiful August rain after heat.
But this is her hour. That future is not among the dreams in the air
to-day. She is at one with the world, and a deep music grows between
her and the stars. Her smile is one of those magical things, great and
small and all divine, that have the power to wield universal harmonies.
At sight or sound of them the infinite variety of appearances in
the world is made fairer than before, because it is shown to be a
many-coloured raiment of the one. The raiment trembles, and under leaf
and cloud and air a window is thrown open upon the unfathomable deep,
and at the window we are sitting, watching the flight of our souls
away, away to where they must be gathered into the music that is being
built. Often upon the vast and silent twilight, as now, is the soul
poured out as a rivulet into the sea and lost, not able even to stain
the boundless crystal of the air; and the body stands empty, waiting
for its return, and, poor thing, knows not what it receives back into
itself when the night is dark and it moves away. For we stand ever at
the edge of Eternity and fall in many times before we die. Yet even
such thoughts live not long this day. All shall be healed, says the
dream. All shall be made new. The day is a fairy birth, a foundling not
fathered nor mothered by any grey yesterdays. It has inherited nothing.
It makes of winter and of the old springs that wrought nothing fair a
stale creed, a senseless tale: they are naught: I do not wonder any
longer if the lark’s song has grown old with the ears that hear it or
if it be still unchanged.
What dreams are there for that aged child who goes tottering and
reeling up the lane at mid-day? He carries a basket of watercress on
his back. He has sold two-pennyworth, and he is tipsy, grinning through
the bruises of a tipsy fall, and shifting his cold pipe from one side
of his mouth to the other. Though hardly sixty he is very old, worn and
thin and wrinkled, and bent sideways and forward at the waist and the
shoulders. Yet he is very young. He is just what he was forty years
ago when the thatcher found him lying on his back in the sun instead
of combing out the straw and sprinkling it with water for his use. He
laid no plans as a youth; he had only a few transparent tricks and easy
lies. Never has he thought of the day after to-morrow. For a few years
in his prime he worked almost regularly for one or two masters, leaving
them only now and then upon long errands of his own and known only to
himself. It was then perhaps that he earned or received as a gift,
along with a broken nose, his one name, which is Jackalone. For years
he was the irresponsible jester to a smug townlet which was privately
amused and publicly scandalized, and rewarded him in a gaol, where,
unlike Tasso, he never complained. Since then he has lived by the sale
of a chance rabbit or two, of watercress, of greens gathered when the
frost is on them and nobody looking, by gifts of broken victuals,
by driving a few bullocks to a fair, by casual shelter in barns, in
roofless cottages, or under hedges.
He has never had father or mother or brother or sister or wife or
child. No dead leaf in autumn wind or branch in flooded brook seems
more helpless. He can deceive nobody. He is in prison two or three
times a year for little things: it seems a charity to put a roof over
his head and clip his hair. He has no wisdom; by nothing has he soiled
what gifts were given to him at his birth. The dreams will not pass him
by. They come to give him that confidence by which he lives in spite of
men’s and children’s contumely.
How little do we know of the business of the earth, not to speak of
the universe; of time, not to speak of eternity. It was not by taking
thought that man survived the mastodon. The acts and thoughts that will
serve the race, that will profit this commonwealth of things that live
in the sun, the air, the earth, the sea, now and through all time,
are not known and never will be known. The rumour of much toil and
scheming and triumph may never reach the stars, and what we value not
at all, are not conscious of, may break the surface of eternity with
endless ripples of good. We know not by what we survive. There is much
philosophy in that Irish tale of the poor blind woman who recovered
her sight at St. Brigit’s well. “Did I say more prayers than the rest?
Not a prayer. I was young in those days. I suppose she took a liking
to me, maybe because of my name being Brigit the same as her own.”[1]
Others went unrelieved away that day. We are as ignorant still. Hence
the batlike fears about immortality. We wish to prolong what we can see
and touch and talk of, and knowing that clothes and flesh and other
perishing things may not pass over the borders of death with us, we
give up all, as if forsooth the undertaker and the gravedigger had
archangelic functions. Along with the undertaker and the gravedigger
ranks the historian and others who seem to bestow immortality. Each
is like a child planting flowers severed from their stalks and roots,
expecting them to grow. I never heard that the butterfly loved the
chrysalis; but I am sure that the caterpillar looks forward to an
endless day of eating green leaves and of continually swelling until
it would despise a consummation of the size of a railway train. We can
do the work of the universe though we shed friends and country and
house and clothes and flesh, and become invisible to mortal eyes and
microscopes. We do it now invisibly, and it is not these things which
are us at all. That maid walking so proudly is about the business of
eternity.
[1] _A Book of Saints and Wonders_, by Lady Gregory.
And yet it would be vain to pretend not to care about the visible
many-coloured raiment of which our houses, our ships, our gardens, our
books are part, since they also have their immortal selves and their
everlasting place, else should we not love them with more than sight
and hearing and touch. For flesh loves flesh and soul loves soul.
Yet on this March day the supreme felicity is born of the two loves,
so closely interwoven that it is permitted to forget the boundaries
of the two, and for soul to love flesh and flesh to love soul. And
this ancient child is rid of his dishonours and flits through the
land floating on a thin reed of the immortal laughter. This is “not
altogether fool.” He is perchance playing some large necessary part
in the pattern woven by earth that draws the gods to lean forward out
of the heavens to watch the play and say of him, as of other men, of
birds, of flowers: “They also are of our company.”...
In the warm rain of the next day the chiffchaff sings among the rosy
blossoms of the leafless larches, a small voice that yet reaches from
the valley to the high hill. It is a double, many times repeated note
that foretells the cuckoo’s. In the evening the songs are bold and
full, but the stems of the beeches are faint as soft columns of smoke
and the columns of smoke from the cottages are like them in the still
air.
Yet another frost follows, and in the dim golden light just after
sunrise the shadows of all the beeches lie on the slopes, dark and more
tangible than the trees, as if they were the real and those standing
upright were the returned spirits above the dead.
Now rain falls and relents and falls again all day, and the earth is
hidden under it, and as from a land submerged the songs mount through
the veil. The mists waver out of the beeches like puffs of smoke or
hang upon them or in them like fleeces caught in thorns: in the just
penetrating sunlight the long boles of the beeches shine, and the
chaffinch, the yellowhammer and the cirl bunting sing songs of blissful
drowsiness. The Downs, not yet green, rise far off and look, through
the rain, like old thatched houses.
When a hot sun has dried the woods the wind beats a cloud of pollen
like grey smoke from the yews on the beechen coombes which are
characteristic of Hampshire. They are steep-sided bays, running and
narrowing far into and up the sides of the chalk hills, and especially
of those hills with which the high flinty plateau breaks down to the
greensand and the plain. These steep sides are clothed with beeches,
thousands of beeches interrupted by the black yews that resemble
caverns among the paler trees, or, in the spring, by the green haze of
a few larches and the white flames of the beam tree buds. Sometimes a
stream rises at the head of the coombe, and before its crystal is a
yard wide and ankle deep over the crumbling chalk it is full of trout;
the sunny ripples are meshed like honeycomb. If there is not a stream
there is a hop garden, or there is a grassy floor approached by neither
road nor path and crossed only by huntsman and hounds. All the year
round the coombes, dripping, green and still, are cauldrons for the
making and unmaking of mists, mists that lie like solid level snow or
float diaphanous and horizontal of airiest silk across the moon or the
morning sun. The coombes breed whole families, long genealogical trees,
of echoes which the child delights to call up from their light sleep;
so, too, do fox and owl at night, and the cow on a calm evening; and
as to the horn and the cry of hounds, the hangers entangle and repeat
them as if they would imprison them for ever, so that the phantom
exceeds the true. This is the home of the orchises and of the daintiest
snails. In spring, yellow and white and yellowish green flowers are
before all the rest under the beeches--the flowers of the golden green
saxifrage and delicate moschatel, the spurge and the spurge laurel, the
hellebore, the white violet and wood sorrel, and the saffron-hearted
primrose which becomes greenish in the light of its own leaves; to
these must be added the yellow green of young foliage and of moss.
Fairest of all the white flowers is the frost flower that grows about
some rotten fallen branch day after day in curls that are beyond silk,
or a child’s hair, or wool when it is first exposed to the sun by the
shearer’s hand. Most conspicuous of the early green is that of the
pale swords of sedge that bear purple brown feathers of flower at the
end of March. The crystal wavering water, the pale green stems and
ever so slightly curving blades, and the dark bloom, make the sense
smart with joy. Never was ivy more luxuriant under the beeches, nor
moss so powerful as where it arrays them from crown to pedestal. The
lichens, fine grey-green bushy lichens on the thorns, are as dense as
if a tide full of them had swept through the coombe. From the topmost
branches hangs the cordage of ivy and honeysuckle and clematis. The
missel thrush rolls out his clear song. The woodpecker laughs his loud
shaking laughter as he bounds in his flight. Among the golden green
mistletoe in the old shaggy apple tree at the entrance of the coombe
the blackbird sings, composing phrases all the sweeter for being
strangely like some in the songs that countrymen used to sing. Earth
has no dearer voice than his when it is among the chilly rain at the
end of the light. All day there have been blue skies and parading white
clouds, and no wind, with sudden invasions of violent wind and hail or
rain, followed by perfected calm and warmer sun--sun which lures the
earliest tortoise-shell butterfly to alight on the footworn flints in
the path up the coombe. At last the sky seems securely blue above the
hangers and a clear small star or two pricks through it. But, emerging
from the coombe, whose sides shut out half the heavens, you see that
the west has wonderfully ordered and dressed itself with pale sky and
precipitous, dark, modelled clouds and vague woods, and above them the
new moon. The blackbirds sing, the dim Downs proceed, and the last
shower’s drops glitter on the black boughs and pallid primroses. Why
should this ever change? At the time it seems that it can never change.
A wide harmony of the brain and the earth and the sky has begun, when
suddenly darker clouds are felt to have ascended out of the north-west
and to have covered the world. The beeches roar with rain. Moon and
Downs are lost. The road bubbles and glows underfoot. A distant
blackbird still sings hidden in the bosom of the rain like an enchanter
hidden by his spells....
It is April now, and when it is still dark in the woods and hedges the
birds all sing together and the maze of song is dominated by the owl’s
hoot--like a full moon of sound above myriad rippling noises. Every day
a new invader takes possession of the land. The wryneck is loud and
persistent, never in harmony with other birds, a complete foreigner,
and yet the ear is glad of his coming. He is heard first, not in the
early morning, along a grove of oaks; and the whole day is his.
Then on every hand the gentle willow wrens flit and sing in the purple
ash blossoms. The martins, the swallows, have each a day. One day,
too, is the magpie’s: for he sits low near his mate in a thicket and
chatters not aloud but low and tenderly, almost like the sedgewarbler,
adding a faint plaintive note like the bullfinch’s, and fragments as
of the linnet’s song, and chirrupings; disturbed, he flies away with
chatter as hoarse as ever.
The rooks reign several days. They have a colony in a compact small
oval beech wood that stands in a hollow amidst dry grey ploughland;
and from the foxy-red summits of the trees, in the most genial hot day,
their cawings are loud and mellow and warm as if they were the earth’s
own voice; and all the while the dew is sliding along the branches,
dropping into other drops or to the ground as the birds flutter at
their nests, and from time to time one triple drop catches the sun and
throbs where it hangs like Hesperus among the small stars.
And every tender eve is the blackbird’s. He sings out at the end of
the long bare ash bough. Beneath him the gloomy crystal water stirs
the bronze cresses, and on the banks the white anemones float above
the dark misty earth and under the hazel leaves yet drooping in their
infancy. The dark hollies catch the last light and shine like water.
Behind all, the Downs are clear and so near that I feel as well as see
the carving on their smooth and already green flanks. The blackbird
gathers up all the low-lit beauty into one carol.
The flowers also have days to themselves, as the minute green moschatel
when it is first found among the hedgerow roots, or the violets when,
white and pale purple, they are smelt and then seen bowed with dew in
the weedy sainfoin field which the chain harrow passed over but a few
days before. Another notable day is when the junipers are perfectly
coloured by their sloe-blue, or palest green, but chiefly grey, small
berries. Another, a very great day, belongs to the willows, when their
crowded fragrant catkins are yellow against the burning blue and all
murmurous with bees. And the briers have their day when their green is
a vivid flame in a gloomy air, against a dark immense wood and sepia
sky. There is, too, a solitary maimed sycamore in one of the coombes
that has a glorious hour when it stands yellow-green in separate
masses of half-opened leaf, motionless and languid in the first joy of
commerce with the blue air, yet glowing.
One morning, very early, when the moon has not set and all the fields
are cold and dewy and the woods are still massed and harbouring the
night, though a few thorns stand out from their edge in affrighted
virgin green, and dim starry thickets sigh a moment and are still,
suddenly the silence of the chalky lane is riven and changed into
a song. First, it is a fierce impetuous downfall of one clear note
repeated rapidly and ending wilfully in mid-burst. Then it is a
full-brimmed expectant silence passing into a long ascendant wail,
and almost without intervals another and another, which has hardly
ceased when it is dashed out of the memory by the downpour of those
rapidly repeated notes, their abrupt end and the succeeding silence.
The swift notes are each as rounded and as full of liquid sweetness
as a grape, and they are clustered like the grape. But they are wild
and pure as mountain water in the dawn. They are also like steel for
coldness and penetration. And their onset is like nothing else: it
is the nightingale’s. The long wail is like a shooting star: even as
that grows out of the darkness and draws a silver line and is no more,
so this glides out of the silence and curves and is no more. And yet
it does not die, nor does that liquid onset. They and their ghosts
people each hanging leaf in the hazel thicket so that the silence is
closely stored. Other notes are shut in the pink anemone, in the white
stitchwort under and about the hazels, and in the drops of dew that
begin to glitter in the dawn.
Beautiful as the notes are for their quality and order, it is their
inhumanity that gives them their utmost fascination, the mysterious
sense which they bear to us that earth is something more than a human
estate, that there are things not human yet of great honour and power
in the world. The very first rush and the following wail empty the
brain of what is merely human and leave only what is related to the
height and depth of the whole world. Here for this hour we are remote
from the parochialism of humanity. The bird has admitted a larger air.
We breathe deeply of it and are made free citizens of eternity. We hear
voices that were not dreamed of before, the voices of those spirits
that live in minute forms of life, the spirits that weave the frost
flower on the fallen branch, the gnomes of underground, those who care
for the fungus on the beech root, the lichen on the trunk, the algæ
on the gravestone. This hazel lane is a palace of strange pomp in an
empire of which we suddenly find ourselves guests, not wholly alien nor
ill at ease, though the language is new. Drink but a little draught of
this air and no need is there to fear the ways of men, their mockery,
their cruelty, their foreignness.
The song rules the cloudy dawn, the waiting ranges of hills and their
woods full of shadows yet crested with gold, their lawns of light,
the soft distended grey clouds all over the sky through which the
white sun looks on the world and is glad. But it has ceased when the
perpendicular shafts of rain divide the mists over the hillside woods
and the pewits tangle their flight through the air that is now alive
with the moist gleaming of myriads of leaves on bramble, thorn and
elder. Presently the rain is only a glittering of needles in the sun.
For the sky is all one pale grey cloud, darker at the lowest edge
where it trails upon the downs and veils their summits, except in the
south-east. There the edge is lifted up over a narrow pane of silver
across which fleet the long slender fringes of the clouds. Through
this pane the sun sends a broad cascade of light, and up into this the
fields and the Down beyond rise and are transfigured, the fields into
a lake of emerald, the Down--here crowned by trees in a cluster--into
a castle of pearl set upon the borders of the earth. Slowly this pane
is broadened; the clouds are plumped into shape, are illumined, are
distinguished from one another by blue vales of sky, until at length
the land is all one gleam of river and pool and grass and leaf and
polished bough, whether swollen into hills or folded into valleys or
smoothed into plain. The sky seems to belong to this land, the sky of
purest blue and clouds that are moulded like the Downs themselves but
of snow and sun.
In the clear air each flower stands out with separate and perfect
beauty, moist, soft and bright, a beauty than which I know nothing more
nearly capable of transferring the soul to the days and the pleasures
of infancy. The crust of half a lifetime falls away, and we can feel
what Blake expressed when he wrote those lines in _Milton_--
Thou perceivest the flowers put forth their precious odours,
And none can tell how from so small a centre comes such sweet,
Forgetting that within that centre Eternity expands
Its ever-during doors, that Og and Anax fiercely guard.
First, ere the morning breaks, joy opens in the flowery bosoms,
Joy even to tears, which the Sun rising dries; first the Wild Thyme
And Meadow-sweet, downy and soft, waving among the reeds,
Light springing in the air, lead the sweet Dance; they wake
The Honeysuckle sleeping in the Oak, the flaunting beauty
Revels along upon the wind; the white-thorn lovely May
Opens her many lovely eyes; listening the Rose still sleeps.
None dare to wake her. Soon she bursts her crimson-curtained bed
And comes forth in the majesty of beauty; every Flower--
The Pink, the Jessamine, the Wallflower, the Carnation,
The Jonquil, the mild Lily opes her heavens; every Tree
And Flower and Herb soon fill the air with an innumerable Dance,
Yet all in order sweet and lovely....
Those words or such a morning--when the soul steps back many years;
or is it many centuries?--might have moved M. Maeterlinck to his
descriptions of certain great moments in the lives of plants. The terms
of these descriptions are so chosen as to imply an intelligence and
discriminating vital energy in plants. They prove and explain nothing,
but they take one step towards the truth by disturbing the conventional
scientific view and substituting that of a man who, passionately
looking at many forms of life, finds them to be of one family. After
this, it should be more and more difficult for men to think of
flowers as if they were fragile toys from an exceptionally brilliant
manufacturer.
And now there is a day of sun and high blue sky alternating with low,
grey-yellow sky and driving snow that chequers the northern sides of
the furrows and the beech boles. The sun melts the snow and all is
clear, bright and cold, and the sky blue again with white and lofty
clouds; many thrushes are singing; the broad vale is all one blue
moorland that has buried its houses, and the Downs at the far side are
close at hand. Towards evening the wind falls, and it is a glimpse of
another world that is given as the sun is warm for a moment on a low
curving slope of wet grass, with tall rookery beeches glowing on one
hand and on the other bulging white clouds just emerging from behind
the green edge into the blue, while very far away the Downs, both grass
and wood, are deep blue under a broad pane of yellowish light.
The north wind makes walking weather, and the earth is stretched out
below us and before us to be conquered. Just a little, perhaps, of
the warrior’s joy at seeing an enemy’s fair land from the hill-top
is mingled with the joy in the unfolding landscape. The ploughlands
brighten over twenty miles of country, pale and dry, among dark woods
and wooded hills; for the wind has crumbled the soil almost white, so
that a sudden local sunlight will make one field seem actually of snow.
The old road following a terrace of the hillside curves under yews
away from the flinty arable and the grey, dry desolation round about
the poultry-farmer’s iron house, to the side of a rich valley of oak
and ash and deepening pastures traversed by water in a glitter. The
green fire of the larch woods is yellow at the crest. There and in oak
and ash the missel thrush is an embodiment of the north wind, summing
it up in the boldness of his form and singing, as a coat of arms sums
up a history. Mounted on the plume of the top of the tall fir, and
waving with it, he sings of adventure, and puts a spirit into those
who pass under and adds a mile to their pace. The gorse is in flower.
In the hedges the goose-grass has already set its ladders against the
thorns, ladders that will soon have risen to the top of every hedge
like scaling ladders of an infinite army. Down from tall yew and ash
hang the abandoned ropes of last year’s traveller’s joy that have leapt
that height--who has caught them in the leap?--but the new are on their
way, and even the old show what can be done as they sway from the
topmost branches. At sunset an immense and bountiful land lies at our
feet and the wine-red sun is pouring out large cups of conquest. The
undulating ploughland is warm in the red light, and it is broken up by
some squares of old brown stubble and of misty young wheat, and lesser
green squares full of bleating and tinkling sheep. Out of these fields
the dense beech copses rise sheer. Beyond, in the west, are ridges of
many woods in misty conflagration; in the south-west, the line of the
Downs under the level white clouds of a spacious and luminous sky.
In the south, woods upon the hills are dissolving into a deep blue
smoke, without form except at their upper edges. And in the north and
north-west the high lands of Berkshire and Wiltshire are prostrate and
violet through thirty miles of witching air. That also is a call to go
on and on and over St. Catherine’s Hill and through Winchester until
the brain is drowsed with the colours of night and day.
The colour of the dawn is lead and white--white snow falling out of a
leaden sky to the white earth. The rose branches bend in sharper and
sharper curves to the ground, the loaded yew sprays sweep the snow
with white plumes. On the sedges the snow is in fleeces; the light
strands of clematis are without motion, and have gathered it in clots.
One thrush sings, but cannot long endure the sound of his unchallenged
note; the sparrows chirrup in the ricks; the blackbird is waiting for
the end of that low tingling noise of the snow falling straight in
windless air.
At mid-day the snow is finer and almost rain, and it begins to pour
down from its hives among the branches in short showers or in heavy
hovering lumps. The leaves of ivy and holly are gradually exposed in
all their gloomy polish, and out bursts the purple of the ash buds and
the yellow of new foliage. The beech stems seem in their wetness to be
made of a dark agate. Out from their tops blow rags of mist, and not
far above them clouds like old spiders’ webs go rapidly by.
The snow falls again and the voices of the little summer birds are
buried in the silence of the flakes that whirl this way and that
aimlessly, rising and falling and crossing or darting horizontally,
making the trees sway wearily and their light tops toss and their
numbers roar continually in the legions of the wind that whine and moan
and shriek their hearts out in the solitary house roofs and doors and
round about. The silence of snow co-exists with this roar. One wren
pierces it with a needle of song and is gone. The earth and sky are
drowning in night and snow.