Looking down from the stilts of seven hundred feet into the

Produced by Malcolm Farmer, Juliet Sutherland, Charles

Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading team

FIELD AND HEDGEROW

BEING

THE LAST ESSAYS

OF

RICHARD JEFFERIES

_COLLECTED BY HIS WIDOW_

PREFACE.

For permission to reprint my husband's latest Essays my sincere thanks

are due to the Editors of the following publications:--

_The Fortnightly Review._

_Manchester Guardian._

_Pall Mall Gazette_.

_Standard._

_English Illustrated Magazine._

_Longman's Magazine._

_St. James's Gazette._.

_Art Journal._

_Chambers's Journal._

_Magazine of Art._

_Century Illustrated Magazine._

J.J.

CONTENTS.

HOURS OF SPRING

NATURE AND BOOKS

THE JULY GRASS

WINDS OF HEAVEN

THE COUNTRY SUNDAY

THE COUNTRY-SIDE: SUSSEX

SWALLOW-TIME

BUCKHURST PARK

HOUSE-MARTINS

AMONG THE NUTS

WALKS IN THE WHEAT-FIELDS

JUST BEFORE WINTER

LOCALITY AND NATURE

COUNTRY PLACES

FIELD WORDS AND WAYS

COTTAGE IDEAS

APRIL GOSSIP

SOME APRIL INSECTS

THE TIME OF YEAR

MIXED DAYS OF MAY AND DECEMBER

THE MAKERS OF SUMMER

STEAM ON COUNTRY ROADS

FIELD SPORTS IN ART: THE MAMMOTH HUNTER

BIRDS' NESTS

NATURE IN THE LOUVRE

SUMMER IN SOMERSET

AN ENGLISH DEER-PARK

MY OLD VILLAGE

MY CHAFFINCH

HOURS OF SPRING.

It is sweet on awaking in the early morn to listen to the small bird

singing on the tree. No sound of voice or flute is like to the bird's

song; there is something in it distinct and separate from all other

notes. The throat of woman gives forth a more perfect music, and the

organ is the glory of man's soul. The bird upon the tree utters the

meaning of the wind--a voice of the grass and wild flower, words of the

green leaf; they speak through that slender tone. Sweetness of dew and

rifts of sunshine, the dark hawthorn touched with breadths of open bud,

the odour of the air, the colour of the daffodil--all that is delicious

and beloved of spring-time are expressed in his song. Genius is nature,

and his lay, like the sap in the bough from which he sings, rises without

thought. Nor is it necessary that it should be a song; a few short notes

in the sharp spring morning are sufficient to stir the heart. But

yesterday the least of them all came to a bough by my window, and in his

call I heard the sweet-briar wind rushing over the young grass. Refulgent

fall the golden rays of the sun; a minute only, the clouds cover him and

the hedge is dark. The bloom of the gorse is shut like a book; but it is

there--a few hours of warmth and the covers will fall open. The meadow is

bare, but in a little while the heart-shaped celandine leaves will come

in their accustomed place. On the pollard willows the long wands are

yellow-ruddy in the passing gleam of sunshine, the first colour of spring

appears in their bark. The delicious wind rushes among them and they bow

and rise; it touches the top of the dark pine that looks in the sun the

same now as in summer; it lifts and swings the arching trail of bramble;

it dries and crumbles the earth in its fingers; the hedge-sparrow's

feathers are fluttered as he sings on the bush.

I wonder to myself how they can all get on without me--how they manage,

bird and flower, without me to keep the calendar for them. For I noted it

so carefully and lovingly, day by day, the seed-leaves on the mounds in

the sheltered places that come so early, the pushing up of the young

grass, the succulent dandelion, the coltsfoot on the heavy, thick clods,

the trodden chickweed despised at the foot of the gate-post, so common

and small, and yet so dear to me. Every blade of grass was mine, as

though I had planted it separately. They were all my pets, as the roses

the lover of his garden tends so faithfully. All the grasses of the

meadow were my pets, I loved them all; and perhaps that was why I never

had a 'pet,' never cultivated a flower, never kept a caged bird, or any

creature. Why keep pets when every wild free hawk that passed overhead in

the air was mine? I joyed in his swift, careless flight, in the throw of

his pinions, in his rush over the elms and miles of woodland; it was

happiness to see his unchecked life. What more beautiful than the sweep

and curve of his going through the azure sky? These were my pets, and all

the grass. Under the wind it seemed to dry and become grey, and the

starlings running to and fro on the surface that did not sink now stood

high above it and were larger. The dust that drifted along blessed it and

it grew. Day by day a change; always a note to make. The moss drying on

the tree trunks, dog's-mercury stirring under the ash-poles, bird's-claw

buds of beech lengthening; books upon books to be filled with these

things. I cannot think how they manage without me.

To-day through the window-pane I see a lark high up against the grey

cloud, and hear his song. I cannot walk about and arrange with the buds

and gorse-bloom; how does he know it is the time for him to sing? Without

my book and pencil and observing eye, how does he understand that the

hour has come? To sing high in the air, to chase his mate over the low

stone wall of the ploughed field, to battle with his high-crested rival,

to balance himself on his trembling wings outspread a few yards above the

earth, and utter that sweet little loving kiss, as it were, of song--oh,

happy, happy days! So beautiful to watch as if he were my own, and I felt

it all! It is years since I went out amongst them in the old fields, and

saw them in the green corn; they must be dead, dear little things, by

now. Without me to tell him, how does this lark to-day that I hear

through the window know it is his hour?

The green hawthorn buds prophesy on the hedge; the reed pushes up in the

moist earth like a spear thrust through a shield; the eggs of the

starling are laid in the knot-hole of the pollard elm--common eggs, but

within each a speck that is not to be found in the cut diamond of two

hundred carats--the dot of protoplasm, the atom of life. There was one

row of pollards where they always began laying first. With a big stick in

his beak the rook is blown aside like a loose feather in the wind; he

knows his building-time from the fathers of his house--hereditary

knowledge handed down in settled course: but the stray things of the

hedge, how do they know? The great blackbird has planted his nest by the

ash-stole, open to every one's view, without a bough to conceal it and

not a leaf on the ash--nothing but the moss on the lower end of the

branches. He does not seek cunningly for concealment. I think of the

drift of time, and I see the apple bloom coming and the blue veronica in

the grass. A thousand thousand buds and leaves and flowers and blades of

grass, things to note day by day, increasing so rapidly that no pencil

can put them down and no book hold them, not even to number them--and how

to write the thoughts they give? All these without me--how can they

manage without me?

For they were so much to me, I had come to feel that I was as much in

return to them. The old, old error: I love the earth, therefore the earth

loves me--I am her child--I am Man, the favoured of all creatures. I am

the centre, and all for me was made.

In time past, strong of foot, I walked gaily up the noble hill that leads

to Beachy Head from Eastbourne, joying greatly in the sun and the wind.

Every step crumbled up numbers of minute grey shells, empty and dry, that

crunched under foot like hoar-frost or fragile beads. They were very

pretty; it was a shame to crush them--such vases as no king's pottery

could make. They lay by millions in the depths of the sward, and I

thought as I broke them unwillingly that each of these had once been a

house of life. A living creature dwelt in each and felt the joy of

existence, and was to itself all in all--as if the great sun over the

hill shone for it, and the width of the earth under was for it, and the

grass and plants put on purpose for it. They were dead, the whole race of

them, and these their skeletons were as dust under my feet. Nature sets

no value upon life neither of minute hill-snail nor of human being.

I thought myself so much to the earliest leaf and the first meadow

orchis--so important that I should note the first zee-zee of the

titlark--that I should pronounce it summer, because now the oaks were

green; I must not miss a day nor an hour in the fields lest something

should escape me. How beautiful the droop of the great brome-grass by the

wood! But to-day I have to listen to the lark's song--not out of doors

with him, but through the window-pane, and the bullfinch carries the

rootlet fibre to his nest without me. They manage without me very well;

they know their times and seasons--not only the civilised rooks, with

their libraries of knowledge in their old nests of reference, but the

stray things of the hedge and the chiffchaff from over sea in the ash

wood. They go on without me. Orchis flower and cowslip--I cannot number

them all--I hear, as it were, the patter of their feet--flower and bud

and the beautiful clouds that go over, with the sweet rush of rain and

burst of sun glory among the leafy trees. They go on, and I am no more

than the least of the empty shells that strewed the sward of the hill.

Nature sets no value upon life, neither of mine nor of the larks that

sang years ago. The earth is all in all to me, but I am nothing to the

earth: it is bitter to know this before you are dead. These delicious

violets are sweet for themselves; they were not shaped and coloured and

gifted with that exquisite proportion and adjustment of odour and hue for

me. High up against the grey cloud I hear the lark through the window

singing, and each note falls into my heart like a knife.

Now this to me speaks as the roll of thunder that cannot be denied--you

must hear it; and how can you shut your ears to what this lark sings,

this violet tells, this little grey shell writes in the curl of its

spire? The bitter truth that human life is no more to the universe than

that of the unnoticed hill-snail in the grass should make us think more

and more highly of ourselves as human--as men--living things that think.

We must look to ourselves to help ourselves. We must think ourselves into

an earthly immortality. By day and by night, by years and by centuries,

still striving, studying, searching to find that which shall enable us to

live a fuller life upon the earth--to have a wider grasp upon its violets

and loveliness, a deeper draught of the sweet-briar wind. Because my

heart beats feebly to-day, my trickling pulse scarcely notating the

passing of the time, so much the more do I hope that those to come in

future years may see wider and enjoy fuller than I have done; and so much

the more gladly would I do all that I could to enlarge the life that

shall be then. There is no hope on the old lines--they are dead, like the

empty shells; from the sweet delicious violets think out fresh petals of

thought and colours, as it were, of soul.

Never was such a worshipper of earth. The commonest pebble, dusty and

marked with the stain of the ground, seems to me so wonderful; my mind

works round it till it becomes the sun and centre of a system of thought

and feeling. Sometimes moving aside the tufts of grass with careless

fingers while resting on the sward, I found these little pebble-stones

loose in the crumbly earth among the rootlets. Then, brought out from the

shadow, the sunlight shone and glistened on the particles of sand that

adhered to it. Particles adhered to my skin--thousands of years between

finger and thumb, these atoms of quartz, and sunlight shining all that

time, and flowers blooming and life glowing in all, myriads of living

things, from the cold still limpet on the rock to the burning, throbbing

heart of man. Sometimes I found them among the sand of the heath, the sea

of golden brown surging up yellow billows six feet high about me, where

the dry lizard hid, or basked, of kin, too, to old time. Or the rush of

the sea wave brought them to me, wet and gleaming, up from the depths of

what unknown Past? where they nestled in the root crevices of trees

forgotten before Egypt. The living mind opposite the dead pebble--did you

ever consider the strange and wonderful problem there? Only the thickness

of the skin of the hand between them. The chief use of matter is to

demonstrate to us the existence of the soul. The pebble-stone tells me I

am a soul because I am not that that touches the nerves of my hand. We

are distinctly two, utterly separate, and shall never come together. The

little pebble and the great sun overhead--millions of miles away: yet is

the great sun no more distinct and apart than this which I can touch.

Dull-surfaced matter, like a polished mirror, reflects back thought to

thought's self within.

I listened to the sweet-briar wind this morning; but for weeks and weeks

the stark black oaks stood straight out of the snow as masts of ships

with furled sails frozen and ice-bound in the haven of the deep valley.

Each was visible to the foot, set in the white slope, made individual in

the wood by the brilliance of the background. Never was such a long

winter. For fully two months they stood in the snow in black armour of

iron bark unshaken, the front rank of the forest army that would not

yield to the northern invader. Snow in broad flakes, snow in semi-flakes,

snow raining down in frozen specks, whirling and twisting in fury, ice

raining in small shot of frost, howling, sleeting, groaning; the ground

like iron, the sky black and faintly yellow--brutal colours of

despotism--heaven striking with clenched fist. When at last the general

surface cleared, still there remained the trenches and traverses of the

enemy, his ramparts drifted high, and his roads marked with snow. The

black firs on the ridge stood out against the frozen clouds, still and

hard; the slopes of leafless larches seemed withered and brown; the

distant plain far down gloomy with the same dull yellowish blackness. At

a height of seven hundred feet the air was sharp as a scythe--a rude

barbarian giant wind knocking at the walls of the house with a vast club,

so that we crept sideways even to the windows to look out upon the world.

There was everything to repel--the cold, the frost, the hardness, the

snow, dark sky and ground, leaflessness; the very furze chilled and all

benumbed. Yet the forest was still beautiful. There was no day that we

did not, all of us, glance out at it and admire it, and say something

about it. Harder and harder grew the frost, yet still the forest-clad

hills possessed a something that drew the mind open to their largeness

and grandeur. Earth is always beautiful--always. Without colour, or leaf,

or sunshine, or song of bird and flutter of butterfly's wing; without

anything sensuous, without advantage or gilding of summer--the power is

ever there. Or shall we not say that the desire of the mind is ever

there, and _will_ satisfy itself, in a measure at least, even with the

barren wild? The heart from the moment of its first beat instinctively

longs for the beautiful; the means we possess to gratify it are

limited--we are always trying to find the statue in the rude block. Out

of the vast block of the earth the mind endeavours to carve itself

loveliness, nobility, and grandeur. We strive for the right and the true:

it is circumstance that thrusts wrong upon us.

One morning a labouring man came to the door with a spade, and asked if

he could dig the garden, or try to, at the risk of breaking the tool in

the ground. He was starving; he had had no work for two months; it was

just six months, he said, since the first frost started the winter.

Nature and the earth and the gods did not trouble about _him_, you see;

he might grub the rock-frost ground with his hands if he chose--the

yellowish black sky did not care. Nothing for man! The only good he found

was in his fellow-men; they fed him after a fashion--still they fed him.

There was no good in anything else. Another aged man came once a week

regularly; white as the snow through which he walked. In summer he

worked; since the winter began he had had no employment, but supported

himself by going round to the farms in rotation. They all gave him a

trifle--bread and cheese, a penny, a slice of meat--something; and so he

lived, and slept the whole of that time in outhouses wherever he could.

He had no home of any kind. Why did he not go into the workhouse? 'I be

afeared if I goes in there they'll put me with the rough uns, and very

likely I should get some of my clothes stole.' Rather than go into the

workhouse he would totter round in the face of the blasts that might

cover his weak old limbs with drift. There was a sense of dignity and

manhood left still; his clothes were worn, but clean and decent; he was

no companion of rogues; the snow and frost, the straw of the outhouses,

was better than that. He was struggling against age, against nature,

against circumstance; the entire weight of society, law, and order

pressed upon him to force him to lose his self-respect and liberty. He

would rather risk his life in the snowdrift. Nature, earth, and the gods

did not help him; sun and stars, where were they? He knocked at the doors

of the farms and found good in man only--not in Law or Order, but in

individual man alone.

The bitter north wind drives even the wild fieldfare to the berries in

the garden hedge; so it drives stray human creatures to the door. A third

came--an old gipsy woman--still stout and hearty, with green fresh brooms

to sell. We bought some brooms--one of them was left on the kitchen

floor, and the tame rabbit nibbled it; it proved to be heather. The true

broom is as green and succulent in appearance in January as June. She

would see the 'missis.' 'Bless you, my good lady, it be weather, bean't

it? I hopes you'll never know what it be to want, my good lady. Ah, well,

you looks good-tempered if you don't want to buy nothing. Do you see if

you can't find me an old body, now, for my girl--now do'ee try; she's

confined in a tent on the common--nothing but one of our tents, my good

lady--that's true--and she's doing jest about well' (with briskness and

an air of triumph), 'that she is! She's got twins, you see, my lady, but

she's all right, and as well as can be. She wants to get up; and she says

to me, "Mother, do'ee try and get me a body; 'tis hard to lie here abed

and be well enough to get up, and be obliged to stay here because I've

got nothing but a bedgown." For you see, my good lady, we managed pretty

well with the first baby; but the second bothered us, and we cut up all

the bits of things we could find, and there she ain't got nothing to put

on. Do'ee see if 'ee can't find her an old body.' The common is an open

piece of furze and heath at the verge of the forest; and here, in a tent

just large enough to creep in, the gipsy woman had borne twins in the

midst of the snow and frost. They could not make a fire of the heath and

gorse even if they cut it, the snow and whirling winds would not permit.

The old gipsy said if they had little food they could not do without

fire, and they were compelled to get coke and coal somehow--apologising

for such a luxury. There was no whining--not a bit of it; they were

evidently quite contented and happy, and the old woman proud of her

daughter's hardihood. By-and-by the husband came round with straw

beehives to sell, and cane to mend chairs--a strong, respectable-looking

man. Of all the north wind drove to the door, the outcasts were the best

off--much better off than the cottager who was willing to break his spade

to earn a shilling; much better off than the white-haired labourer, whose

strength was spent, and who had not even a friend to watch with him in

the dark hours of the winter evening--not even a fire to rest by. The

gipsy nearest to the earth was the best off in every way; yet not even

for primitive man and woman did the winds cease. Broad flakes of snow

drifted up against the low tent, beneath which the babes were nestling to

the breast. Not even for the babes did the snow cease or the keen wind

rest; the very fire could scarcely struggle against it. Snow-rain and

ice-rain; frost-formed snow-granules, driven along like shot, stinging

and rattling against the tent-cloth, hissing in the fire; roar and groan

of the great wind among the oaks of the forest. No kindness to man, from

birth-hour to ending; neither earth, sky, nor gods care for him, innocent

at the mother's breast. Nothing good to man but man. Let man, then, leave

his gods and lift up his ideal beyond them.

Something grey and spotted and puffy, not unlike a toad, moved about

under the gorse of the garden hedge one morning, half hidden by the

stalks of old grasses. By-and-by it hopped out--the last thrush, so

distended with puffed feathers against the frost as to be almost

shapeless. He searched about hopelessly round the stones and in the

nooks, all hard and frostbound; there was the shell of a snail, dry and

whitened and empty, as was apparent enough even at a distance. His keen

eye must have told him that it was empty; yet such was his hunger and

despair that he took it and dashed it to pieces against a stone. Like a

human being, his imagination was stronger than his experience; he tried

to persuade himself that there might be something there; hoping against

hope. Mind, you see, working in the bird's brain, and overlooking facts.

A mere mechanism would have left the empty and useless shell

untouched--would have accepted facts at once, however bitter, just as the

balance on the heaviest side declines immediately, obeying the fact of an

extra grain of weight. The bird's brain was not mechanical, and therefore

he was not wholly mastered by experience. It was a purely human

action--just what we do ourselves. Next he came across to the door to see

if a stray berry still remained on a creeper. He saw me at the window,

and he came to the window--right to it--and stopped and looked full at me

some minutes, within touch almost, saying as plainly as could be said, 'I

am starving--help me.' I never before knew a thrush make so unmistakable

an appeal for assistance, or deliberately approach so near (unless

previously encouraged). We tried to feed him, but we fear little of the

food reached him. The wonder of the incident was that a thrush should

still be left--there had not been one in the garden for two months.

Berries all gone, ground hard and foodless, streams frozen, snow lying

for weeks, frost stealing away the vital heat--ingenuity could not devise

a more terrible scene of torture to the birds. Neither for the thrushes

nor for the new-born infants in the tent did the onslaught of the winter

slacken. No pity in earth or heaven. This one thrush did, indeed, by some

exceptional fortune, survive; but where were the family of thrushes that

had sung so sweetly in the rainy autumn? Where were the blackbirds?

Looking down from the stilts of seven hundred feet into the deep coombe

of black oaks standing in the white snow, day by day, built round about

with the rugged mound of the hills, doubly locked with the key of

frost--it seemed to me to take on itself the actuality of the ancient

faith of the Magi. How the seeds of all living things--the germs--of bird

and animal, man and insect, tree and herb, of the whole earth--were

gathered together into a four-square rampart, and there laid to sleep in

safety, shielded by a spell-bound fortification against the coming flood,

not of water, but of frost and snow! With snow and frost and winter the

earth was overcome, and the world perished, stricken dumb and dead, swept

clean and utterly destroyed--a winter of the gods, the silence of snow

and universal death. All that had been passed away, and the earth was

depopulated. Death triumphed. But under the snow, behind the charmed

rampart, slept the living germs. Down in the deep coombe, where the dark

oaks stood out individually in the whiteness of the snow, fortified round

about with immovable hills, there was the actual presentment of

Zoroaster's sacred story. Locked in sleep lay bud and germ--the

butterflies of next summer were there somewhere, under the snow. The

earth was swept of its inhabitants, but the seeds of life were not dead.

Near by were the tents of the gipsies--an Eastern race, whose forefathers

perhaps had seen that very Magian worship of the Light; and in those

tents birth had already taken place. Under the Night of winter--under the

power of dark Ahriman, the evil spirit of Destruction--lay bud and germ

in bondage, waiting for the coming of Ormuzd, the Sun of Light and

Summer. Beneath the snow, and in the frozen crevices of the trees, in the

chinks of the earth, sealed up by the signet of frost, were the seeds of

the life that would replenish the air in time to come. The buzzing crowds

of summer were still under the snow.

This forest land is marked by the myriads of insects that roam about it

in the days of sunshine. Of all the million million heathbells--multiply

them again by a million million more--that purple the acres of rolling

hills, mile upon mile, there is not one that is not daily visited by

these flying creatures. Countless and incalculable hosts of the

yellow-barred hover-flies come to them; the heath and common, the moor

and forest, the hedgerow and copse, are full of insects. They rise under

foot, they rise from the spray brushed by your arm as you pass, they

settle down in front of you--a rain of insects, a coloured shower. Legion

is a little word for the butterflies; the dry pastures among the woods

are brown with meadow-brown; blues and coppers float in endless

succession; all the nations of Xerxes' army were but a handful to these.

In their millions they have perished; but somewhere, coiled up, as it

were, and sealed under the snow, there must have been the mothers and

germs of the equally vast crowds that will fill the atmosphere this year.

The great bumble-bee that shall be mother of hundreds, the yellow wasp

that shall be mother of thousands, were hidden there somewhere. The food

of the migrant birds that are coming from over sea was there dormant

under the snow. Many nations have a tradition of a former world destroyed

by a deluge of water, from the East to the West, from Greece to Mexico,

where the tail of a comet was said to have caused the flood; but in the

strange characters of the Zend is the legend of an ark (as it were)

prepared against the snow. It may be that it is the dim memory of a

glacial epoch. In this deep coombe, amid the dark oaks and snow, was the

fable of Zoroaster. For the coming of Ormuzd, the Light and Life Bringer,

the leaf slept folded, the butterfly was hidden, the germ concealed,

while the sun swept upwards towards Aries.

There is nothing so wearying as a long frost--the endless monotony, which

makes one think that the very fault we usually find with our climate--its

changeableness--is in reality its best quality. Rain, mist,

gales--anything; give us anything but weary, weary frost. But having once

fixed its mind, the weather will not listen to the usual signs of

alteration.

The larks sang at last high up against the grey cloud over the

frost-bound earth. They could not wait longer; love was strong in their

little hearts--stronger than the winter. After a while the

hedge-sparrows, too, began to sing on the top of the gorse-hedge about

the garden. By-and-by a chaffinch boldly raised his voice, ending with

the old story, 'Sweet, will you, will you kiss--me--dear?' Then there

came a hoar-frost, and the earth, which had been black, became white, as

its evaporated vapours began to gather and drops of rain to fall. Even

then the obstinate weather refused to quite yield, wrapping its cloak, as

it were, around it in bitter enmity. But in a day or two white clouds lit

up with sunshine appeared drifting over from the southward, and that was

the end. The old pensioner came to the door for his bread and cheese:

'The wind's in the south' he said, 'and I hopes she'll stay there' Five

dull yellow spots on the hedge--gorse bloom--that had remained unchanged

for so many weeks, took a fresh colour and became golden. By the constant

passing of the waggons and carts along the road that had been so silent

it was evident that the busy time of spring was here. There would be

rough weather, doubtless, now and again, but it would not again be

winter.

Dark patches of cloud--spots of ink on the sky, the 'messengers'--go

drifting by; and after them will follow the water-carriers, harnessed to

the south and west winds, drilling the long rows of rain like seed into

the earth. After a time there will be a rainbow. Through the bars of my

prison I can see the catkins thick and sallow-grey on the willows across

the field, visible even at that distance; so great the change in a few

days, the hand of spring grows firm and takes a strong grasp of the

hedges. My prison bars are but a sixteenth of an inch thick; I could snap

them with a fillip--only the window-pane, to me as impenetrable as the

twenty-foot wall of the Tower of London. A cart has just gone past

bearing a strange load among the carts of spring; they are talking of

poling the hops. In it there sat an old man, with the fixed stare, the

animal-like eye, of extreme age; he is over ninety. About him there were

some few chairs and articles of furniture, and he was propped against a

bed. He was being moved--literally carted--to another house, not home,

and he said he could not go without his bed; he had slept on it for

seventy-three years. Last Sunday his son--himself old--was carted to the

churchyard, as is the country custom, in an open van; to-day the father,

still living, goes to what will be to him a strange land. His home is

broken up--he will potter no more with maize for the chicken; the gorse

hedges will become solid walls of golden bloom, but there will never

again be a spring for him. It is very hard, is it not, at ninety? It is

not the tyranny of any one that has done it; it is the tyranny of

circumstance, the lot of man. The song of the Greeks is full of sorrow;

man was to them the creature of grief, yet theirs was the land of violets

and pellucid air. This has been a land of frost and snow, and here too,

it is the same. A stranger, I see, is already digging the old man's

garden.

How happy the trees must be to hear the song of birds again in their

branches! After the silence and the leaflessness, to have the birds back

once more and to feel them busy at the nest-building; how glad to give

them the moss and fibres and the crutch of the boughs to build in!

Pleasant it is now to watch the sunlit clouds sailing onwards; it is like

sitting by the sea. There is voyaging to and fro of birds; the strong

wood-pigeon goes over--a long course in the air, from hill to distant

copse; a blackbird starts from an ash, and, now inclining this way and

now that, traverses the meadows to the thick corner hedge; finches go by,

and the air is full of larks that sing without ceasing. The touch of the

wind, the moisture of the dew, the sun-stained raindrop, have in them the

magic force of life--a marvellous something that was not there before.

Under it the narrow blade of grass comes up freshly green between the old

white fibres the rook pulled; the sycamore bud swells and opens, and

takes the eye instantly in the still dark wood; the starlings go to the

hollow pollards; the lambs leap in the mead. You never know what a day

may bring forth--what new thing will come next. Yesterday I saw the

ploughman and his team, and the earth gleam smoothed behind the share;

to-day a butterfly has gone past; the farm-folk are bringing home the

fagots from the hedgerows; to-morrow there will be a merry, merry note in

the ash copse, the chiffchaffs' ringing call to arms, to arms, ye leaves!

By-and-by a bennet, a bloom of the grass; in time to come the furrow, as

it were, shall open, and the great buttercup of the waters will show a

broad palm of gold. You never know what will come to the net of the eye

next--a bud, a flower, a nest, a curled fern, or whether it will be in

the woodland or by the meadow path, at the water's side or on the dead

dry heap of fagots. There is no settled succession, no fixed and formal

order--always the unexpected; and you cannot say, 'I will go and find

this or that.' The sowing of life in the spring time is not in the set

straight line of the drill, nor shall you find wild flowers by a foot

measure. There are great woods without a lily of the valley; the

nightingale does not sing everywhere. Nature has no arrangement, no plan,

nothing judicious even; the walnut trees bring forth their tender buds,

and the frost burns them--they have no mosaic of time to fit in, like a

Roman tesselated pavement; nature is like a child, who will sing and

shout though you may be never so deeply pondering in the study, and does

not wait for the hour that suits your mind. You do not know what you may

find each day; perhaps you may only pick up a fallen feather, but it is

beautiful, every filament. Always beautiful! everything beautiful! And

are these things new--the ploughman and his team, the lark's song the

green leaf? Can they be new? Surely they have been of old time! They are,

indeed, new--the only things that are so; the rest is old and grey, and a

weariness.

NATURE AND BOOKS.

What is the colour of the dandelion? There are many dandelions: that

which I mean flowers in May, when the meadow-grass has started and the

hares are busy by daylight. That which flowers very early in the year has

a thickness of hue, and is not interesting; in autumn the dandelions

quite change their colour and are pale. The right dandelion for this

question is the one that comes about May with a very broad disc, and in

such quantities as often to cover a whole meadow. I used to admire them

very much in the fields by Surbiton (strong clay soil), and also on the

towing-path of the Thames where the sward is very broad, opposite Long

Ditton; indeed, I have often walked up that towing-path on a beautiful

sunny morning, when all was quiet except the nightingales in the Palace

hedge, on purpose to admire them. I dare say they are all gone now for

evermore; still, it is a pleasure to look back on anything beautiful.

What colour is this dandelion? It is not yellow, nor orange, nor gold;

put a sovereign on it and see the difference. They say the gipsies call

it the Queen's great hairy dog-flower--a number of words to one stalk;

and so, to get a colour to it, you may call it the yellow-gold-orange

plant. In the winter, on the black mud under a dark, dripping tree, I

found a piece of orange peel, lately dropped--a bright red orange speck

in the middle of the blackness. It looked very beautiful, and instantly

recalled to my mind the great dandelion discs in the sunshine of summer.

Yet certainly they are not red-orange. Perhaps, if ten people answered

this question, they would each give different answers. Again, a bright

day or a cloudy, the presence of a slight haze, or the juxtaposition of

other colours, alters it very much; for the dandelion is not a glazed

colour, like the buttercup, but sensitive. It is like a sponge, and adds

to its own hue that which is passing, sucking it up.

The shadows of the trees in the wood, why are they blue? Ought they not

to be dark? Is it really blue, or an illusion? And what is their colour

when you see the shadow of a tall trunk aslant in the air like a leaning

pillar? The fallen brown leaves wet with dew have a different brown from

those that are dry, and the upper surface of the green growing leaf is

different from the under surface. The yellow butterfly, if you meet one

in October, has so toned down his spring yellow that you might fancy him

a pale green leaf floating along the road. There is a shining, quivering,

gleaming; there is a changing, fluttering, shifting; there is a mixing,

weaving--varnished wings, translucent wings, wings with dots and veins,

all playing over the purple heath; a very tangle of many-toned lights and

hues. Then come the apples: if you look upon them from an upper window,

so as to glance along the level plane of the fruit, delicate streaks of

scarlet, like those that lie parallel to the eastern horizon before

sunrise; golden tints under bronze, and apple-green, and some that the

wasps have hollowed, more glowingly beautiful than the rest; sober leaves

and black and white swallows: to see it you must be high up, as if the

apples were strewn on a sward of foliage. So have I gone in three steps

from May dandelion to September apple; an immense space measured by

things beautiful, so filled that ten folio volumes could not hold the

description of them, and I have left out the meadows, the brooks, and

hills. Often in writing about these things I have felt very earnestly my

own incompetence to give the least idea of their brilliancy and

many-sided colours. My gamut was so very limited in its terms, and would

not give a note to one in a thousand of those I saw. At last I said, I

will have more words; I will have more terms; I will have a book on

colour, and I will find and use the right technical name for each one of

these lovely tints. I was told that the very best book was by Chevreul,

which had tinted illustrations, chromatic scales, and all that could be

desired.

Quite true, all of it; but for me it contained nothing. There was a good

deal about assorted wools, but nothing about leaves; nothing by which I

could tell you the difference between the light scarlet of one poppy and

the deep purple-scarlet of another species. The dandelion remained

unexplained; as for the innumerable other flowers, and wings, and

sky-colours, they were not even approached. The book, in short, dealt

with the artificial and not with nature. Next I went to science--works on

optics, such a mass of them. Some I had read in old time, and turned to

again; some I read for the first time, some translated from the German,

and so on. It appeared that, experimenting with physical colour, tangible

paint, they had found out that red, yellow, and blue were the three

primary colours; and then, experimenting with light itself, with colours

not tangible, they found out that red, green, and violet were the three

primary colours; but neither of these would do for the dandelion. Once

upon a time I had taken an interest in spectrum analysis, and the theory

of the polarisation of light was fairly familiar; any number of books,

but not what I wanted to know. Next the idea occurred to me of buying all

the colours used in painting, and tinting as many pieces of paper a

separate hue, and so comparing these with petals, and wings, and grass,

and trifolium. This did not answer at all; my unskilful hands made a very

poor wash, and the yellow paper set by a yellow petal did not agree, the

scientific reason of which I cannot enter into now. Secondly, the names

attached to many of these paints are unfamiliar to general readers; it is

doubtful if bistre, Leitch's blue, oxide of chromium, and so on, would

convey an idea. They might as well be Greek symbols: no use to attempt to

describe hues of heath or hill in that way. These, too, are only distinct

colours. What was to be done with all the shades and tones? Still there

remained the language of the studio; without doubt a master of painting

could be found who would quickly supply the technical term of anything I

liked to show him; but again no use, because it would be technical. And a

still more insurmountable difficulty occurs: in so far as I have looked

at pictures, it seems as if the artists had met with the same obstacle in

paints as I have in words--that is to say, a deficiency. Either painting

is incompetent to express the extreme beauty of nature, or in some way

the canons of art forbid the attempt. Therefore I had to turn back, throw

down my books with a bang, and get me to a bit of fallen timber in the

open air to meditate.

Would it be possible to build up a fresh system of colour language by

means of natural objects? Could we say pine-wood green, larch green,

spruce green, wasp yellow, humble-bee amber? And there are fungi that

have marked tints, but the Latin names of these agarics are not pleasant.

Butterfly blue--but there are several varieties; and this plan is

interfered with by two things: first, that almost every single item of

nature, however minute, has got a distinctly different colour, so that

the dictionary of tints would be immense; and next, so very few would

know the object itself that the colour attached to it would have no

meaning. The power of language has been gradually enlarging for a great

length of time, and I venture to say that the English language at the

present time can express more, and is more subtle, flexible, and, at the

same time, vigorous, than any of which we possess a record. When people

talk to me about studying Sanscrit, or Greek, or Latin, or German, or,

still more absurd, French, I feel as if I could fell them with a mallet

happily. Study the English, and you will find everything there, I reply.

With such a language I fully anticipate, in years to come, a great

development in the power of expressing thoughts and feelings which are

now thoughts and feelings only. How many have said of the sea, 'It makes

me feel something I cannot say'! Hence it is clear there exists in the

intellect a layer, if I may so call it, of thought yet dumb--chambers

within the mind which require the key of new words to unlock. Whenever

that is done a fresh impetus is given to human progress. There are a

million books, and yet with all their aid I cannot tell you the colour of

the May dandelion. There are three greens at this moment in my mind: that

of the leaf of the flower-de-luce, that of the yellow iris leaf, and that

of the bayonet-like leaf of the common flag. With admission to a million

books, how am I to tell you the difference between these tints? So many,

many books, and such a very, very little bit of nature in them! Though we

have been so many thousand years upon the earth we do not seem to have

done any more as yet than walk along beaten footpaths, and sometimes

really it would seem as if there were something in the minds of many men

quite artificial, quite distinct from the sun and trees and

hills--altogether house people, whose gods must be set in four-cornered

buildings. There is nothing in books that touches my dandelion.

It grows, ah yes, it grows! How does it grow? Builds itself up somehow of

sugar and starch, and turns mud into bright colour and dead earth into

food for bees, and some day perhaps for you, and knows when to shut its

petals, and how to construct the brown seeds to float with the wind, and

how to please the children, and how to puzzle me. Ingenious dandelion! If

you find out that its correct botanical name is _Leontodon taraxacum_ or

_Leontodon dens-leonis_, that will bring it into botany; and there is a

place called Dandelion Castle in Kent, and a bell with the inscription--

John de Dandelion with his great dog

Brought over this bell on a mill cog

--which is about as relevant as the mere words _Leontodon taraxacum_.

Botany is the knowledge of plants according to the accepted definition;

naturally, therefore, when I began to think I would like to know a little

more of flowers than could be learned by seeing them in the fields, I

went to botany. Nothing could be more simple. You buy a book which first

of all tells you how to recognise them, how to classify them; next

instructs you in their uses, medical or economical; next tells you about

the folk-lore and curious associations; next enters into a lucid

explanation of the physiology of the plant and its relation to other

creatures; and finally, and most important, supplies you with the ethical

feeling, the ideal aspiration to be identified with each particular

flower. One moderately thick volume would probably suffice for such a

modest round as this.

Lo! now the labour of Hercules when he set about bringing up Cerberus

from below, and all the work done by Apollo in the years when he ground

corn, are but a little matter compared with the attempt to master botany.

Great minds have been at it these two thousand years, and yet we are

still only nibbling at the edge of the leaf, as the ploughboys bite the

young hawthorn in spring. The mere classification--all plant-lore was a

vast chaos till there came the man of Sweden, the great Linnaeus, till

the sexes were recognised, and everything was ruled out and set in place

again. A wonderful man! I think it would be true to say it was Linnaeus

who set the world on its present twist of thinking, and levered our

mental globe a little more perpendicular to the ecliptic. He actually

gathered the dandelion and took it to bits like a scientific child; he

touched nature with his fingers instead of sitting looking out of

window--perhaps the first man who had ever done so for seventeen hundred

years or so, since superstition blighted the progress of pagan Rome. The

work he did! But no one reads Linnaeus now; the folios, indeed, might

moulder to dust without loss, because his spirit has got into the minds

of men, and the text is of little consequence. The best book he wrote to

read now is the delightful 'Tour in Lapland,' with its quaint pen-and-ink

sketches, so realistically vivid, as if the thing sketched had been

banged on the paper and so left its impress. I have read it three times,

and I still cherish the old yellow pages; it is the best botanical book,

written by the greatest of botanists, specially sent on a botanical

expedition, and it contains nothing about botany. It tells you about the

canoes, and the hard cheese, and the Laplander's warehouse on top of a

pole, like a pigeon-house; and the innocent way in which the maiden

helped the traveller in his bath, and how the aged men ran so fast that

the devil could not catch them; and, best of all, because it gives a

smack in the face to modern pseudo-scientific medical cant about hygiene,

showing how the Laplanders break every 'law,' human and 'divine',

ventilation, bath, and diet--all the trash--and therefore enjoy the most

excellent health, and live to a great old age. Still I have not succeeded

in describing the immense labour there was in learning to distinguish

plants on the Linnaean system. Then comes in order of time the natural

system, the geographical distribution; then there is the geological

relationship, so to say, to Pliocene plants, natural selection and

evolution. Of that let us say nothing; let sleeping dogs lie, and

evolution is a very weary dog. Most charming, however, will be found the

later studies of naturalists on the interdependence of flowers and

insects; there is another work the dandelion has got to do--endless,

endless botany! Where did the plants come from at first? Did they come

creeping up out of the sea at the edge of the estuaries, and gradually

run their roots into the ground, and so make green the earth? Did Man

come out of the sea, as the Greeks thought? There are so many ideas in

plants. Flora, with a full lap, scattering knowledge and flowers

together; everything good and sweet seems to come out of flowers, up to

the very highest thoughts of the soul, and we carry them daily to the

very threshold of the other world. Next you may try the microscope and

its literature, and find the crystals in the rhubarb.