A fir-tree is not a flower, and yet it is associated in my mind with
primroses. There was a narrow lane leading into a wood, where I used to
go almost every day in the early months of the year, and at one corner
it was overlooked by three spruce firs. The rugged lane there began to
ascend the hill, and I paused a moment to look back. Immediately the
high fir-trees guided the eye upwards, and from their tops to the deep
azure of the March sky over, but a step from the tree to the heavens.
So it has ever been to me, by day or by night, summer or winter,
beneath trees the heart feels nearer to that depth of life the far sky
means. The rest of spirit found only in beauty, ideal and pure, comes
there because the distance seems within touch of thought. To the heaven
thought can reach lifted by the strong arms of the oak, carried up by
the ascent of the flame-shaped fir. Round the spruce top the blue was
deepened, concentrated by the fixed point; the memory of that spot, as
it were, of the sky is still fresh--I can see it distinctly--still
beautiful and full of meaning. It is painted in bright colour in my
mind, colour thrice laid, and indelible; as one passes a shrine and
bows the head to the Madonna, so I recall the picture and stoop in
spirit to the aspiration it yet arouses. For there is no saint like the
sky, sunlight shining from its face.
The fir-tree flowered thus before the primroses--the first of all to
give me a bloom, beyond reach but visible, while even the hawthorn buds
hesitated to open. Primroses were late there, a high district and thin
soil; you could read of them as found elsewhere in January; they rarely
came much before March, and but sparingly then. On the warm red sand
(red, at least, to look at, but green by geological courtesy, I think)
of Sussex, round about Hurst of the Pierre-points, primroses are seen
soon after the year has turned. In the lanes about that curious old
mansion, with its windows reaching from floor to roof, that stands at
the base of Wolstanbury Hill, they grow early, and ferns linger in
sheltered overhung banks. The South Down range, like a great wall,
shuts off the sea, and has a different climate on either hand; south by
the sea--hard, harsh, flowerless, almost grassless, bitter, and cold;
on the north side, just over the hill--warm, soft, with primroses and
fern, willows budding and birds already busy. It is a double England
there, two countries side by side.
On a summer's day Wolstanbury Hill is an island in sunshine; you may
lie on the grassy rampart, high up in the most delicate air--Grecian
air, pellucid--alone, among the butterflies and humming bees at the
thyme, alone and isolated; endless masses of hills on three sides,
endless weald or valley on the fourth; all warmly lit with sunshine,
deep under liquid sunshine like the sands under the liquid sea, no
harshness of man-made sound to break the insulation amid nature, on an
island in a far Pacific of sunshine. Some people would hesitate to walk
down the staircase cut in the turf to the beech-trees beneath; the
woods look so small beneath, so far down and steep, and no handrail.
Many go to the Dyke, but none to Wolstanbury Hill. To come over the
range reminds one of what travellers say of coming over the Alps into
Italy; from harsh sea-slopes, made dry with salt as they sow salt on
razed cities that naught may grow, to warm plains rich in all things,
and with great hills as pictures hung on a wall to gaze at. Where there
are beech-trees the land is always beautiful; beech-trees at the foot
of this hill, beech-trees at Arundel in that lovely park which the Duke
of Norfolk, to his glory, leaves open to all the world, and where the
anemones flourish in unusual size and number; beech-trees in
Marlborough Forest; beech-trees at the summit to which the lane leads
that was spoken of just now. Beech and beautiful scenery go together.
But the primroses by that lane did not appear till late; they covered
the banks under the thousand thousand ash-poles; foxes slipped along
there frequently, whose friends in scarlet coats could not endure the
pale flowers, for they might chink their spurs homewards. In one meadow
near primroses were thicker than the grass, with gorse interspersed,
and the rabbits that came out fed among flowers. The primroses last on
to the celandines and cowslips, through the time of the bluebells, past
the violets--one dies but passes on the life to another, one sets light
to the next, till the ruddy oaks and singing cuckoos call up the tall
mowing grass to fringe summer.
Before I had any conscious thought it was a delight to me to find wild
flowers, just to see them. It was a pleasure to gather them and to take
them home; a pleasure to show them to others--to keep them as long as
they would live, to decorate the room with them, to arrange them
carelessly with grasses, green sprays, tree-bloom--large branches of
chestnut snapped off, and set by a picture perhaps. Without conscious
thought of seasons and the advancing hours to light on the white wild
violet, the meadow orchis, the blue veronica, the blue meadow
cranesbill; feeling the warmth and delight of the increasing sun-rays,
but not recognising whence or why it was joy. All the world is young to
a boy, and thought has not entered into it; even the old men with grey
hair do not seem old; different but not aged, the idea of age has not
been mastered. A boy has to frown and study, and then does not grasp
what long years mean. The various hues of the petals pleased without
any knowledge of colour-contrasts, no note even of colour except that
it was bright, and the mind was made happy without consideration of
those ideals and hopes afterwards associated with the azure sky above
the fir-tree. A fresh footpath, a fresh flower, a fresh delight. The
reeds, the grasses, the rushes--unknown and new things at every
step--something always to find; no barren spot anywhere, or sameness.
Every day the grass painted anew, and its green seen for the first
time; not the old green, but a novel hue and spectacle, like the first
view of the sea.
If we had never before looked upon the earth, but suddenly came to it
man or woman grown, set down in the midst of a summer mead, would it
not seem to us a radiant vision? The hues, the shapes, the song and
life of birds, above all the sunlight, the breath of heaven, resting on
it; the mind would be filled with its glory, unable to grasp it, hardly
believing that such things could be mere matter and no more. Like a
dream of some spirit-land it would appear, scarce fit to be touched
lest it should fall to pieces, too beautiful to be long watched lest it
should fade away. So it seemed to me as a boy, sweet and new like this
each morning; and even now, after the years that have passed, and the
lines they have worn in the forehead, the summer mead shines as bright
and fresh as when my foot first touched the grass. It has another
meaning now; the sunshine and the flowers speak differently, for a
heart that has once known sorrow reads behind the page, and sees
sadness in joy. But the freshness is still there, the dew washes the
colours before dawn. Unconscious happiness in finding wild
flowers--unconscious and unquestioning, and therefore unbounded.
I used to stand by the mower and follow the scythe sweeping down
thousands of the broad-flowered daisies, the knotted knapweeds, the
blue scabious, the yellow rattles, sweeping so close and true that
nothing escaped; and, yet although I had seen so many hundreds of each,
although I had lifted armfuls day after day, still they were fresh.
They never lost their newness, and even now each time I gather a wild
flower it feels a new thing. The greenfinches came to the fallen swathe
so near to us they seemed to have no fear; but I remember the
yellowhammers most, whose colour, like that of the wild flowers and the
sky, has never faded from my memory. The greenfinches sank into the
fallen swathe, the loose grass gave under their weight and let them
bathe in flowers.
One yellowhammer sat on a branch of ash the livelong morning, still
singing in the sun; his bright head, his clean bright yellow, gaudy as
Spain, was drawn like a brush charged heavily with colour across the
retina, painting it deeply, for there on the eye's memory it endures,
though that was boyhood and this is manhood, still unchanged. The
field--Stewart's Mash--the very tree, young ash timber, the branch
projecting over the sward, I could make a map of them. Sometimes I
think sun-painted colours are brighter to me than to many, and more
strongly affect the nerves of the eye. Straw going by the road on a
dusky winter's day seems so pleasantly golden, the sheaves lying aslant
at the top, and these bundles of yellow tubes thrown up against the
dark ivy on the opposite wall. Tiles, red burned, or orange coated, the
sea sometimes cleanly definite, the shadows of trees in a thin wood
where there is room for shadows to form and fall; some such shadows are
sharper than light, and have a faint blue tint. Not only in summer but
in cold winter, and not only romantic things but plain matter-of-fact
things, as a waggon freshly painted red beside the wright's shop, stand
out as if wet with colour and delicately pencilled at the edges. It
must be out of doors; nothing indoors looks like this.
Pictures are very dull and gloomy to it, and very contrasted colours
like those the French use are necessary to fix the attention. Their
dashes of pink and scarlet bring the faint shadow of the sun into the
room. As for our painters, their works are hung behind a curtain, and
we have to peer patiently through the dusk of evening to see what they
mean. Out-of-door colours do not need to be gaudy--a mere dull stake of
wood thrust in the ground often stands out sharper than the pink
flashes of the French studio; a faggot; the outline of a leaf; low
tints without reflecting power strike the eye as a bell the ear. To me
they are intensely clear, and the clearer the greater the pleasure. It
is often too great, for it takes me away from solid pursuits merely to
receive the impression, as water is still to reflect the trees. To me
it is very painful when illness blots the definition of outdoor things,
so wearisome not to see them rightly, and more oppressive than actual
pain. I feel as if I was struggling to wake up with dim, half-opened
lids and heavy mind. This one yellowhammer still sits on the ash branch
in Stewart's Mash over the sward, singing in the sun, his feathers
freshly wet with colour, the same sun-song, and will sing to me so long
as the heart shall beat.
The first conscious thought about wild flowers was to find out their
names--the first conscious pleasure,--and then I began to see so many
that I had not previously noticed. Once you wish to identify them there
is nothing escapes, down to the little white chickweed of the path and
the moss of the wall. I put my hand on the bridge across the brook to
lean over and look down into the water. Are there any fish? The bricks
of the pier are covered with green, like a wall-painting to the surface
of the stream, mosses along the lines of the mortar, and among the moss
little plants--what are these? In the dry sunlit lane I look up to the
top of the great wall about some domain, where the green figs look over
upright on their stalks; there are dry plants on the coping--what are
these? Some growing thus, high in the air, on stone, and in the chinks
of the tower, suspended in dry air and sunshine; some low down under
the arch of the bridge over the brook, out of sight utterly, unless you
stoop by the brink of the water and project yourself forward to examine
under. The kingfisher sees them as he shoots through the barrel of the
culvert. There the sun direct never shines upon them, but the sunlight
thrown up by the ripples runs all day in bright bars along the vault of
the arch, playing on them. The stream arranges the sand in the shallow
in bars, minute fixed undulations; the stream arranges the sunshine in
successive flashes, undulating as if the sun, drowsy in the heat, were
idly closing and unclosing his eyelids for sleep.
Plants everywhere, hiding behind every tree, under the leaves, in the
shady places, behind the dry furrows of the field; they are only just
behind something, hidden openly. The instant you look for them they
multiply a hundredfold; if you sit on the beach and begin to count the
pebbles by you, their number instantly increases to infinity by virtue
of that conscious act.
The bird's-foot lotus was the first. The boy must have seen it, must
have trodden on it in the bare woodland pastures, certainly run about
on it, with wet naked feet from the bathing; but the boy was not
conscious of it. This was the first, when the desire came to identify
and to know, fixing upon it by means of a pale and feeble picture. In
the largest pasture there were different soils and climates; it was so
large it seemed a little country of itself then--the more so because
the ground rose and fell, making a ridge to divide the view and enlarge
by uncertainty. The high sandy soil on the ridge where the rabbits had
their warren; the rocky soil of the quarry; the long grass by the elms
where the rooks built, under whose nests there were vast unpalatable
mushrooms--the true mushrooms with salmon gills grew nearer the warren;
the slope towards the nut-tree hedge and spring. Several climates in
one field: the wintry ridge over which leaves were always driving in
all four seasons of the year; the level sunny plain and fallen cromlech
still tall enough for a gnomon and to cast its shadow in the treeless
drought; the moist, warm, grassy depression; the lotus-grown slope,
warm and dry.
If you have been living in one house in the country for some time, and
then go on a visit to another, though hardly half a mile distant, you
will find a change in the air, the feeling, and tone of the place. It
is close by, but it is not the same. To discover these minute
differences, which make one locality healthy and home happy, and the
next adjoining unhealthy, the Chinese have invented the science of
Feng-shui, spying about with cabalistic mystery, casting the horoscope
of an acre. There is something in all superstitions; they are often the
foundation of science. Superstition having made the discovery, science
composes a lecture on the reason why, and claims the credit.
Bird's-foot lotus means a fortunate spot, dry, warm--so far as soil is
concerned. If you were going to live out of doors, you might safely
build your kibitka where you found it. Wandering with the pictured
flower-book, just purchased, over the windy ridge where last year's
skeleton leaves, blown out from the alder copse below, came on with
grasshopper motion--lifted and laid down by the wind, lifted and laid
down--I sat on the sward of the sheltered slope, and instantly
recognised the orange-red claws of the flower beside me. That was the
first; and this very morning, I dread to consider how many years
afterwards, I found a plant on a wall which I do not know. I shall have
to trace out its genealogy and emblazon its shield. So many years and
still only at the beginning--the beginning, too, of the beginning--for
as yet I have not thought of the garden or conservatory flowers (which
are wild flowers somewhere), or of the tropics, or the prairies.
The great stone of the fallen cromlech, crouching down afar off in the
plain behind me, cast its shadow in the sunny morn as it had done, so
many summers, for centuries--for thousands of years: worn white by the
endless sunbeams--the ceaseless flood of light--the sunbeams of
centuries, the impalpable beams polishing and grinding like rushing
water: silent, yet witnessing of the Past; shadowing the Present on the
dial of the field: a mere dull stone; but what is it the mind will not
employ to express to itself its own thoughts?
There was a hollow near in which hundreds of skeleton leaves had
settled, a stage on their journey from the alder copse, so thick as to
cover the thin grass, and at the side of the hollow a wasp's nest had
been torn out by a badger. On the soft and spreading sand thrown out
from his burrow the print of his foot looked as large as an elephant
might make. The wild animals of our fields are so small that the
badger's foot seemed foreign in its size, calling up thought of the
great game of distant forests. He was a bold badger to make his burrow
there in the open warren, unprotected by park walls or preserve laws,
where every one might see who chose. I never saw him by daylight: that
they do get about in daytime is, however, certain, for one was shot in
Surrey recently by sportsmen; they say he weighed forty pounds.
In the mind all things are written in pictures--there is no
alphabetical combination of letters and words; all things are pictures
and symbols. The bird's-foot lotus is the picture to me of sunshine and
summer, and of that summer in the heart which is known only in youth,
and then not alone. No words could write that feeling: the bird's-foot
lotus writes it.
When the efforts to photograph began, the difficulty was to fix the
scene thrown by the lens upon the plate. There the view appeared
perfect to the least of details, worked out by the sun, and made as
complete in miniature as that he shone upon in nature. But it faded
like the shadows as the summer sun declines. Have you watched them in
the fields among the flowers?--the deep strong mark of the noonday
shadow of a tree such as the pen makes drawn heavily on the paper;
gradually it loses its darkness and becomes paler and thinner at the
edge as it lengthens and spreads, till shadow and grass mingle
together. Image after image faded from the plates, no more to be fixed
than the reflection in water of the trees by the shore. Memory, like
the sun, paints to me bright pictures of the golden summer time of
lotus; I can see them, but how shall I fix them for you? By no process
can that be accomplished. It is like a story that cannot be told
because he who knows it is tongue-tied and dumb. Motions of hands,
wavings and gestures, rudely convey the framework, but the finish is
not there.
To-day, and day after day, fresh pictures are coloured instantaneously
in the retina as bright and perfect in detail and hue. This very power
is often, I think, the cause of pain to me. To see so clearly is to
value so highly and to feel too deeply. The smallest of the pencilled
branches of the bare ash-tree drawn distinctly against the winter sky,
waving lines one within the other, yet following and partly parallel,
reproducing in the curve of the twig the curve of the great trunk; is
it not a pleasure to trace each to its ending? The raindrops as they
slide from leaf to leaf in June, the balmy shower that reperfumes each
wild flower and green thing, drops lit with the sun, and falling to the
chorus of the refreshed birds; is not this beautiful to see? On the
grasses tall and heavy the purplish blue pollen, a shimmering dust,
sown broadcast over the ripening meadow from July's warm hand--the
bluish pollen, the lilac pollen of the grasses, a delicate mist of blue
floating on the surface, has always been an especial delight to me.
Finches shake it from the stalks as they rise. No day, no hour of
summer, no step but brings new mazes--there is no word to express
design without plan, and these designs of flower and leaf and colours
of the sun cannot be reduced to set order. The eye is for ever drawn
onward and finds no end. To see these always so sharply, wet and fresh,
is almost too much sometimes for the wearied yet insatiate eye. I am
obliged to turn away--to shut my eyes and say I will not see, I will
not observe; I will concentrate my mind on my own little path of life,
and steadily gaze downwards. In vain. Who can do so? who can care alone
for his or her petty trifles of existence, that has once entered
amongst the wild flowers? How shall I shut out the sun? Shall I deny
the constellations of the night? They are there; the Mystery is for
ever about us--the question, the hope, the aspiration cannot be put
out. So that it is almost a pain not to be able to cease observing and
tracing the untraceable maze of beauty.
Blue veronica was the next identified, sometimes called germander
speedwell, sometimes bird's-eye, whose leaves are so plain and petals
so blue. Many names increase the trouble of identification, and
confusion is made certain by the use of various systems of
classification. The flower itself I knew, its name I could not be sure
of--not even from the illustration, which was incorrectly coloured; the
central white spot of the flower was reddish in the plate. This
incorrect colouring spoils much of the flower-picturing done; pictures
of flowers and birds are rarely accurate unless hand-painted. Any one
else, however, would have been quite satisfied that the identification
was right. I was too desirous to be correct, too conscientious, and
thus a summer went by with little progress. If you really wish to
identify with certainty, and have no botanist friend and no _magnum
opus_ of Sowerby to refer to, it is very difficult indeed to be quite
sure. There was no Sowerby, no Bentham, no botanist friend--no one even
to give the common country names; for it is a curious fact that the
country people of the time rarely know the names put down as the
vernacular for flowers in the books.
No one there could tell me the name of the marsh-marigold which grew
thickly in the water-meadows--"A sort of big buttercup," that was all
they knew. Commonest of common plants is the "sauce alone"--in every
hedge, on every bank, the whitish-green leaf is found--yet _I_ could
not make certain of it. If some one tells you a plant, you know it at
once and never forget it, but to learn it from a book is another
matter; it does not at once take root in the mind, it has to be seen
several times before you are satisfied--you waver in your convictions.
The leaves were described as large and heart-shaped, and to remain
green (at the ground) through the winter; but the colour of the flower
was omitted, though it was stated that the petals of the hedge-mustard
were yellow. The plant that seemed to me to be probably "sauce alone"
had leaves somewhat heart-shaped, but so confusing is _partial_
description that I began to think I had hit on "ramsons" instead of
"sauce alone," especially as ramsons was said to be a very common
plant. So it is in some counties, but, as I afterwards found, there was
not a plant of ramsons, or garlic, throughout the whole of that
district. When, some years afterwards, I saw a white-flowered plant
with leaves like the lily of the valley, smelling of garlic, in the
woods of Somerset, I recognised It immediately. The plants that are
really common--common everywhere--are not numerous, and if you are
studying you must be careful to understand that word locally. My "sauce
alone" identification was right; to be right and not certain is still
unsatisfactory.
There shone on the banks white stars among the grass. Petals delicately
white in a whorl of rays--light that had started radiating from a
centre and become fixed--shining among the flowerless green. The
slender stem had grown so fast it had drawn its own root partly out of
the ground, and when I tried to gather it, flower, stem and root came
away together. The wheat was springing, the soft air full of the growth
and moisture, blackbirds whistling, wood-pigeons nesting, young
oak-leaves out; a sense of swelling, sunny fulness in the atmosphere.
The plain road was made beautiful by the advanced boughs that overhung
and cast their shadows on the dust--boughs of ash-green, shadows that
lay still, listening to the nightingale. A place of enchantment in the
mornings where was felt the power of some subtle influence working
behind bough and grass and bird-song. The orange-golden dandelion in
the sward was deeply laden with colour brought to it anew again and
again by the ships of the flowers, the humble-bees--to their quays they
come, unlading priceless essences of sweet odours brought from the East
over the green seas of wheat, unlading priceless colours on the broad
dandelion disks, bartering these things for honey and pollen. Slowly
tacking aslant, the pollen ship hums in the south wind. The little
brown wren finds her way through the great thicket of hawthorn. How
does she know her path, hidden by a thousand thousand leaves? Tangled
and crushed together by their own growth, a crown of thorns hangs over
the thrush's nest; thorns for the mother, hope for the young. Is there
a crown of thorns over your heart? A spike has gone deep enough into
mine. The stile looks farther away because boughs have pushed forward
and made it smaller. The willow scarce holds the sap that tightens the
bark and would burst it if it did not enlarge to the pressure.
Two things can go through the solid oak; the lightning of the clouds
that rends the iron timber, the lightning of the spring--the
electricity of the sunbeams forcing him to stretch forth and lengthen
his arms with joy. Bathed in buttercups to the dewlap, the roan cows
standing in the golden lake watched the hours with calm frontlet;
watched the light descending, the meadows filling, with knowledge of
long months of succulent clover. On their broad brows the year falls
gently; their great, beautiful eyes, which need but a tear or a smile
to make them human,--without these, such eyes, so large and full, seem
above human life, eyes of the immortals enduring without passion,--in
these eyes, as a mirror, nature is reflected.
I came every day to walk slowly up and down the plain road, by the
starry flowers under the ash-green boughs; ash is the coolest, softest
green. The bees went drifting over by my head; as they cleared the
hedges they passed by my ears, the wind singing in their shrill wings.
White tent-walls of cloud--a warm white, being full to overflowing of
sunshine--stretched across from ash-top to ash-top, a cloud-canvas
roof, a tent-palace of the delicious air. For of all things there is
none so sweet as sweet air--one great flower it is, drawn round about,
over, and enclosing, like Aphrodite's arms; as if the dome of the sky
were a bell-flower drooping down over us, and the magical essence of it
filling all the room of the earth. Sweetest of all things is
wild-flower air. Full of their ideal the starry flowers strained
upwards on the bank, striving to keep above the rude grasses that
pushed by them; genius has ever had such a struggle. The plain road was
made beautiful by the many thoughts it gave. I came every morning to
stay by the starlit bank.
A friend said, "Why do you go the same road every day? Why not have a
change and walk somewhere else sometimes? Why keep on up and down the
same place?" I could not answer; till then it had not occurred to me
that I did always go one way; as for the reason of it I could not tell;
I continued in my old mind while the summers went away. Not till years
afterwards was I able to see why I went the same round and did not care
for change. I do not want change: I want the same old and loved things,
the same wild-flowers, the same trees and soft ash-green; the
turtle-doves, the blackbirds, the coloured yellowhammer sing, sing,
singing so long as there is light to cast a shadow on the dial, for
such is the measure of his song, and I want them in the same place. Let
me find them morning after morning, the starry-white petals radiating,
striving upwards to their ideal. Let me see the idle shadows resting on
the white dust; let me hear the humble-bees, and stay to look down on
the rich dandelion disk. Let me see the very thistles opening their
great crowns--I should miss the thistles; the reed-grasses hiding the
moorhen; the bryony bine, at first crudely ambitious and lifted by
force of youthful sap straight above the hedgerow to sink of its own
weight presently and progress with crafty tendrils; swifts shot through
the air with outstretched wings like crescent-headed shaftless arrows
darted from the clouds; the chaffinch with a feather in her bill; all
the living staircase of the spring, step by step, upwards to the great
gallery of the summer--let me watch the same succession year by year.
Why, I knew the very dates of them all--the reddening elm, the arum,
the hawthorn leaf, the celandine, the may; the yellow iris of the
waters, the heath of the hillside. The time of the nightingale--the
place to hear the first note; onwards to the drooping fern and the time
of the redwing--the place of his first note, so welcome to the
sportsman as the acorn ripens and the pheasant, come to the age of
manhood, feeds himself; onwards to the shadowless days--the long
shadowless winter, for in winter it is the shadows we miss as much as
the light. They lie over the summer sward, design upon design, dark
lace on green and gold; they glorify the sunlight: they repose on the
distant hills like gods upon Olympus; without shadow, what even is the
sun? At the foot of the great cliffs by the sea you may know this, it
is dry glare; mighty ocean is dearer as the shadows of the clouds sweep
over as they sweep over the green corn. Past the shadowless winter,
when it is all shade, and therefore no shadow; onwards to the first
coltsfoot and on to the seed-time again; I knew the dates of all of
them. I did not want change; I wanted the same flowers to return on the
same day, the titlark to rise soaring from the same oak to fetch down
love with a song from heaven to his mate on the nest beneath. No
change, no new thing; if I found a fresh wild-flower in a fresh place,
still it wove at once into the old garland. In vain, the very next year
was different even in the same place--_that_ had been a year of rain,
and the flag flowers were wonderful to see; _this_ was a dry year, and
the flags not half the height, the gold of the flower not so deep; next
year the fatal billhook came and swept away a slow-grown hedge that had
given me crab-blossom in cuckoo-time and hazelnuts in harvest. Never
again the same, even in the same place.
A little feather droops downwards to the ground--a swallow's feather
fuller of miracle than the Pentateuch--how shall that feather be placed
again in the breast where it grew? Nothing twice. Time changes the
places that knew us, and if we go back in after years, still even then
it is not the old spot; the gate swings differently, new thatch has
been put on the old gables, the road has been widened, and the sward
the driven sheep lingered on is gone. Who dares to think then? For
faces fade as flowers, and there is no consolation. So now I am sure I
was right in always walking the same way by the starry flowers striving
upwards on a slender ancestry of stem; I would follow the plain old
road to-day if I could. Let change be far from me; that irresistible
change must come is bitter indeed. Give me the old road, the same
flowers--they were only stitchwort--the old succession of days and
garland, ever weaving into it fresh wild-flowers from far and near.
Fetch them from distant mountains, discover them on decaying walls, in
unsuspected corners; though never seen before, still they are the same:
there has been a place in the heart waiting for them.