The wistaria is faded and the hawthorn dead; but
this is the season of the heather in flower, and
on this calm and gentle evening the caressing
wind brings you the perfumes of poor Campine.
Love them and breathe them in while brooding over
its fate; its soil is bare and harsh and the wind
wars on it; pools make their holes in it; the
sand preys on it, and the little left to it, it
yet gives.
Once in autumn, we lived with it, with its plain
and its woods, with its rain and its sky, even to
December when the Christmas angels crossed its
legend with mighty strokes of their wings.
Your heart became more steadfast there, simpler
and more human; we loved the people of its old
villages, and the women who spoke to us of their
great age and of spinning-wheels fallen from use,
worn out by their hands.
Our calm house on the misty heath was bright to
look upon and ready in its welcome; and dear to
us were its roof and its door and its threshold
and its hearth blackened by the smoky peat.
When night spread out its total splendour over
the vast and pale and innumerable somnolence, the
silence taught us lessons, the glow of which our
soul has never forgotten.
Because we felt more lonely in the vast plain,
the dawns and the evenings sank more deeply
into us; our eyes were franker, our hearts were
gentler and filled to the brim with the fervour
of the world.
We found happiness by not asking for it; even the
sadness of the days was good for us, and the few
sun-rays of that end of autumn gladdened us all
the more because they seemed weak and tired.
The wistaria is faded and the hawthorn dead; but
this is the season of the heather in flower. This
evening, remember, and let the caressing wind
bring you the perfumes of poor Campine.