A July fly went sideways over the long grass. His wings made a burr
about him like a net, beating so fast they wrapped him round with a
cloud. Every now and then, as he flew over the trees of grass, a
taller one than common stopped him, and there he clung, and then the
eye had time to see the scarlet spots--the loveliest colour--on his
wings. The wind swung the burnet and loosened his hold, and away he
went again over the grasses, and not one jot did he care if they were
_Poa_ or _Festuca_, or _Bromus_ or _Hordeum_, or any other name. Names
were nothing to him; all he had to do was to whirl his scarlet spots
about in the brilliant sun, rest when he liked, and go on again. I
wonder whether it is a joy to have bright scarlet spots, and to be
clad in the purple and gold of life; is the colour felt by the
creature that wears it? The rose, restful of a dewy morn before the
sunbeams have topped the garden wall, must feel a joy in its own
fragrance, and know the exquisite hue of its stained petals. The rose
sleeps in its beauty.
The fly whirls his scarlet-spotted wings about and splashes himself
with sunlight, like the children on the sands. He thinks not of the
grass and sun; he does not heed them at all--and that is why he is so
happy--any more than the barefoot children ask why the sea is there,
or why it does not quite dry up when it ebbs. He is unconscious; he
lives without thinking about living; and if the sunshine were a
hundred hours long, still it would not be long enough. No, never
enough of sun and sliding shadows that come like a hand over the table
to lovingly reach our shoulder, never enough of the grass that smells
sweet as a flower, not if we could live years and years equal in
number to the tides that have ebbed and flowed counting backwards four
years to every day and night, backward still till we found out which
came first, the night or the day. The scarlet-dotted fly knows nothing
of the names of the grasses that grow here where the sward nears the
sea, and thinking of him I have decided not to wilfully seek to learn
any more of their names either. My big grass book I have left at home,
and the dust is settling on the gold of the binding. I have picked a
handful this morning of which I know nothing. I will sit here on the
turf and the scarlet-dotted flies shall pass over me, as if I too were
but a grass. I will not think, I will be unconscious, I will live.
Listen! that was the low sound of a summer wavelet striking the
uncovered rock over there beneath in the green sea. All things that
are beautiful are found by chance, like everything that is good. Here
by me is a praying-rug, just wide enough to kneel on, of the richest
gold inwoven with crimson. All the Sultans of the East never had such
beauty as that to kneel on. It is, indeed, too beautiful to kneel on,
for the life in these golden flowers must not be broken down even for
that purpose. They must not be defaced, not a stem bent; it is more
reverent not to kneel on them, for this carpet prays itself. I will
sit by it and let it pray for me. It is so common, the bird's-foot
lotus, it grows everywhere; yet if I purposely searched for days I
should not have found a plot like this, so rich, so golden, so glowing
with sunshine. You might pass by it in one stride, yet it is worthy to
be thought of for a week and remembered for a year. Slender grasses,
branched round about with slenderer boughs, each tipped with pollen
and rising in tiers cone-shaped--too delicate to grow tall--cluster at
the base of the mound. They dare not grow tall or the wind would snap
them. A great grass, stout and thick, rises three feet by the hedge,
with a head another foot nearly, very green and strong and bold,
lifting itself right up to you; you must say, "What a fine grass!"
Grasses whose awns succeed each other alternately; grasses whose tops
seem flattened; others drooping over the shorter blades beneath; some
that you can only find by parting the heavier growth around them;
hundreds and hundreds, thousands and thousands. The kingly poppies on
the dry summit of the mound take no heed of these, the populace, their
subjects so numerous they cannot be numbered. A barren race they are,
the proud poppies, lords of the July field, taking no deep root, but
raising up a brilliant blazon of scarlet heraldry out of nothing. They
are useless, they are bitter, they are allied to sleep and poison and
everlasting night; yet they are forgiven because they are not
commonplace. Nothing, no abundance of them, can ever make the poppies
commonplace. There is genius in them, the genius of colour, and they
are saved. Even when they take the room of the corn we must admire
them. The mighty multitude of nations, the millions and millions of
the grass stretching away in intertangled ranks, through pasture and
mead from shore to shore, have no kinship with these their lords. The
ruler is always a foreigner. From England to China the native born is
no king; the poppies are the Normans of the field. One of these on the
mound is very beautiful, a width of petal, a clear silkiness of colour
three shades higher than the rest--it is almost dark with scarlet. I
wish I could do something more than gaze at all this scarlet and gold
and crimson and green, something more than see it, not exactly to
drink it or inhale it, but in some way to make it part of me that I
might live it.
The July grasses must be looked for in corners and out-of-the-way
places, and not in the broad acres--the scythe has taken them there.
By the wayside on the banks of the lane, near the gateway--look, too,
in uninteresting places behind incomplete buildings on the mounds cast
up from abandoned foundations where speculation has been and gone.
There weeds that would not have found resting-place elsewhere grow
unchecked, and uncommon species and unusually large growths appear.
Like everything else that is looked for, they are found under unlikely
conditions. At the back of ponds, just inside the enclosure of woods,
angles of corn-fields, old quarries, that is where to find grasses, or
by the sea in the brackish marsh. Some of the finest of them grow by
the mere road-side; you may look for others up the lanes in the deep
ruts, look too inside the hollow trees by the stream. In a morning you
may easily garner together a great sheaf of this harvest. Cut the
larger stems aslant, like the reeds imitated deep in old green glass.
You must consider as you gather them the height and slenderness of the
stems, the droop and degree of curve, the shape and colour of the
panicle, the dusting of the pollen, the motion and sway in the wind.
The sheaf you may take home with you, but the wind that was among it
stays without.
_Richard Jeffries._