April 20th.--Spring is actually come now, with the fulness and almost
the suddenness of a northern summer. To-day is completely April;--clouds
and sunshine, wind and showers; blossoms on the trees, grass in the
fields, swallows by the ponds, snakes in the hedgerows, nightingales in
the thickets, and cuckoos everywhere. My young friend Ellen G. is going
with me this evening to gather wood-sorrel. She never saw that most
elegant plant, and is so delicate an artist that the introduction will
be a mutual benefit; Ellen will gain a subject worthy of her pencil,
and the pretty weed will live;--no small favour to a flower almost as
transitory as the gum cistus: duration is the only charm which it
wants, and that Ellen will give it. The weather is, to be sure, a little
threatening, but we are not people to mind the weather when we have an
object in view; we shall certainly go in quest of the wood-sorrel, and
will take May, provided we can escape May's followers; for since the
adventure of the lamb, Saladin has had an affair with a gander, furious
in defence of his goslings, in which rencontre the gander came off
conqueror; and as geese abound in the wood to which we are going (called
by the country people the Pinge), and the victory may not always incline
to the right side, I should be very sorry to lead the Soldan to fight
his battles over again. We will take nobody but May.
So saying, we proceeded on our way through winding lanes, between
hedgerows tenderly green, till we reached the hatch-gate, with the white
cottage beside it embosomed in fruit-trees, which forms the entrance to
the Pinge, and in a moment the whole scene was before our eyes.
'Is not this beautiful, Ellen?' The answer could hardly be other than
a glowing rapid 'Yes!'--A wood is generally a pretty place; but
this wood--Imagine a smaller forest, full of glades and sheep-walks,
surrounded by irregular cottages with their blooming orchards, a clear
stream winding about the brakes, and a road intersecting it, and giving
life and light to the picture; and you will have a faint idea of the
Pinge. Every step was opening a new point of view, a fresh combination
of glade and path and thicket. The accessories too were changing every
moment. Ducks, geese, pigs, and children, giving way, as we advanced
into the wood, to sheep and forest ponies; and they again disappearing
as we became more entangled in its mazes, till we heard nothing but the
song of the nightingale, and saw only the silent flowers.
What a piece of fairy land! The tall elms overhead just bursting into
tender vivid leaf, with here and there a hoary oak or a silver-barked
beech, every twig swelling with the brown buds, and yet not quite
stripped of the tawny foliage of autumn; tall hollies and hawthorn
beneath, with their crisp brilliant leaves mixed with the white
blossoms of the sloe, and woven together with garlands of woodbines and
wild-briers;--what a fairy land!
Primroses, cowslips, pansies, and the regular open-eyed white blossom
of the wood anemone (or, to use the more elegant Hampshire name, the
windflower), were set under our feet as thick as daisies in a meadow;
but the pretty weed that we came to seek was coyer; and Ellen began
to fear that we had mistaken the place or the season.--At last she had
herself the pleasure of finding it under a brake of holly--'Oh, look!
look! I am sure that this is the wood-sorrel! Look at the pendent white
flower, shaped like a snowdrop and veined with purple streaks, and the
beautiful trefoil leaves folded like a heart,--some, the young ones, so
vividly yet tenderly green that the foliage of the elm and the hawthorn
would show dully at their side,--others of a deeper tint, and lined, as
it were, with a rich and changeful purple!--Don't you see them?' pursued
my dear young friend, who is a delightful piece of life and sunshine,
and was half inclined to scold me for the calmness with which, amused by
her enthusiasm, I stood listening to her ardent exclamations--'Don't you
see them? Oh how beautiful! and in what quantity! what profusion!
See how the dark shade of the holly sets off the light and delicate
colouring of the flower!--And see that other bed of them springing from
the rich moss in the roots of that old beech-tree! Pray, let us gather
some. Here are baskets.' So, quickly and carefully we began gathering,
leaves, blossoms, roots and all, for the plant is so fragile that
it will not brook separation;--quickly and carefully we gathered,
encountering divers petty misfortunes in spite of all our care, now
caught by the veil in a holly bush, now hitching our shawls in a
bramble, still gathering on, in spite of scratched fingers, till we had
nearly filled our baskets and began to talk of our departure:--
'But where is May? May! May! No going home without her. May! Here she
comes galloping, the beauty!'--(Ellen is almost as fond of May as I
am.)--'What has she got in her mouth? that rough, round, brown substance
which she touches so tenderly? What can it be? A bird's nest? Naughty
May!'
'No! as I live, a hedgehog! Look, Ellen, how it has coiled itself into a
thorny ball! Off with it, May! Don't bring it to me!'--And May, somewhat
reluctant to part with her prickly prize, however troublesome of
carriage, whose change of shape seemed to me to have puzzled her
sagacity more than any event I ever witnessed, for in general she has
perfectly the air of understanding all that is going forward--May
at last dropt the hedgehog; continuing, however, to pat it with her
delicate cat-like paw, cautiously and daintily applied, and caught back
suddenly and rapidly after every touch, as if her poor captive had been
a red-hot coal. Finding that these pats entirely failed in solving the
riddle (for the hedgehog shammed dead, like the lamb the other day, and
appeared entirely motionless), she gave him so spirited a nudge with
her pretty black nose, that she not only turned him over, but sent him
rolling some little way along the turfy path,--an operation which that
sagacious quadruped endured with the most perfect passiveness, the most
admirable non-resistance. No wonder that May's discernment was at fault,
I myself, if I had not been aware of the trick, should have said that
the ugly rough thing which she was trundling along, like a bowl or a
cricket-ball, was an inanimate substance, something devoid of sensation
and of will. At last my poor pet, thoroughly perplexed and tired out,
fairly relinquished the contest, and came slowly away, turning back once
or twice to look at the object of her curiosity, as if half inclined
to return and try the event of another shove. The sudden flight of a
wood-pigeon effectually diverted her attention; and Ellen amused herself
by fancying how the hedgehog was scuttling away, till our notice was
also attracted by a very different object.
We had nearly threaded the wood, and were approaching an open grove
of magnificent oaks on the other side, when sounds other than of
nightingales burst on our ear, the deep and frequent strokes of the
woodman's axe, and emerging from the Pinge we discovered the havoc which
that axe had committed. Above twenty of the finest trees lay stretched
on the velvet turf. There they lay in every shape and form of
devastation: some, bare trunks stripped ready for the timber carriage,
with the bark built up in long piles at the side; some with the spoilers
busy about them, stripping, hacking, hewing; others with their noble
branches, their brown and fragrant shoots all fresh as if they were
alive--majestic corses, the slain of to-day! The grove was like a field
of battle. The young lads who were stripping the bark, the very children
who were picking up the chips, seemed awed and silent, as if conscious
that death was around them. The nightingales sang faintly and
interruptedly--a few low frightened notes like a requiem.
Ah! here we are at the very scene of murder, the very tree that they
are felling; they have just hewn round the trunk with those slaughtering
axes, and are about to saw it asunder. After all, it is a fine and
thrilling operation, as the work of death usually is. Into how grand an
attitude was that young man thrown as he gave the final strokes round
the root; and how wonderful is the effect of that supple and apparently
powerless saw, bending like a riband, and yet overmastering that giant
of the woods, conquering and overthrowing that thing of life! Now it has
passed half through the trunk, and the woodman has begun to calculate
which way the tree will fall; he drives a wedge to direct its
course;--now a few more movements of the noiseless saw; and then a
larger wedge. See how the branches tremble! Hark how the trunk begins
to crack! Another stroke of the huge hammer on the wedge, and the tree
quivers, as with a mortal agony, shakes, reels, and falls. How slow,
and solemn, and awful it is! How like to death, to human death in its
grandest form! Caesar in the Capitol, Seneca in the bath, could not fall
more sublimely than that oak.
Even the heavens seem to sympathise with the devastation. The clouds
have gathered into one thick low canopy, dark and vapoury as the smoke
which overhangs London; the setting sun is just gleaming underneath with
a dim and bloody glare, and the crimson rays spreading upward with a
lurid and portentous grandeur, a subdued and dusky glow, like the light
reflected on the sky from some vast conflagration. The deep flush fades
away, and the rain begins to descend; and we hurry homeward rapidly, yet
sadly, forgetful alike of the flowers, the hedgehog, and the wetting,
thinking and talking only of the fallen tree.