the ground, there were the nests of happy birds. In the hawthorns
blackbirds and thrushes built, often overhanging the stream, and the
fledglings fluttered out into the flowery grass. Down among the stalks
of the umbelliferous plants, where the grasses were knotted together,
the nettle-creeper concealed her treasure, having selected a hollow by
the bank so that the scythe should pass over. Up in the pollard ashes
and willows here and there wood-pigeons built. Doves cooed in the
little wooded enclosures where the brook curved almost round upon
itself. If there was a hollow in the oak a pair of starlings chose it,
for there was no advantageous nook that was not seized on. Low beside
the willow stoles the sedge-reedlings built; on the ledges of the
ditches, full of flags, moor-hens made their nests. After the swallows
had coursed long miles over the meads to and fro, they rested on the
tops of the ashes and twittered sweetly. Like the flowers and grass,
the birds were drawn towards the brook. They built by it, they came to
it to drink; in the evening a grasshopper-lark trilled in a hawthorn
bush. By night crossing the footbridge a star sometimes shone in the
water underfoot. At morn and even the peasant girls came down to dip;
their path was worn through the mowing-grass, and there was a flat
stone let into the bank as a step to stand on. Though they were poorly
habited, without one line of form or tint of colour that could please
the eye, there is something in dipping water that is
Greek--Homeric--something that carries the mind home to primitive
times. Always the little children came with them; they too loved the
brook like the grass and birds. They wanted to see the fishes dart away
and hide in the green flags: they flung daisies and buttercups into the
stream to float and catch awhile at the flags, and float again and pass
away, like the friends of our boyhood, out of sight. Where there was
pasture roan cattle came to drink, and horses, restless horses, stood
for hours by the edge under the shade of ash trees. With what joy the
spaniel plunged in, straight from the bank out among the flags--you
could mark his course by seeing their tips bend as he brushed them
swimming. All life loved the brook.
Far down away from roads and hamlets there was a small orchard on the
very bank of the stream, and just before the grass grew too high to
walk through I looked in the enclosure to speak to its owner. He was
busy with his spade at a strip of garden, and grumbled that the hares
would not let it alone, with all that stretch of grass to feed on. Nor
would the rooks; and the moor-hens ran over it, and the water-rats
burrowed; the wood-pigeons would have the peas, and there was no rest
from them all. While he talked and talked, far from the object in hand,
as aged people will, I thought how the apple tree in blossom before us
cared little enough who saw its glory. The branches were in bloom
everywhere, at the top as well as at the side; at the top where no one
could see them but the swallows. They did not grow for human
admiration: that was not their purpose; that is our affair only--we
bring the thought to the tree. On a short branch low down the trunk
there hung the weather-beaten and broken handle of an earthenware
vessel; the old man said it was a jug, one of the old folks' jugs--he
often dug them up. Some were cracked, some nearly perfect; lots of them
had been thrown out to mend the lane. There were some chips among the
heap of weeds yonder. These fragments were the remains of Anglo-Roman
pottery. Coins had been found--half a gallon of them--the children had
had most. He took one from his pocket, dug up that morning; they were
of no value, they would not ring. The labourers tried to get some ale
for them, but could not; no one would take the little brass things.
That was all he knew of the Caesars: the apples were in fine bloom now,
weren't they?
Fifteen centuries before there had been a Roman station at the spot
where the lane crossed the brook. There the centurions rested their
troops after their weary march across the downs, for the lane, now
bramble-grown and full of ruts, was then a Roman road. There were
villas, and baths, and fortifications; these things you may read about
in books. They are lost now in the hedges, under the flowering grass,
in the ash copses, all forgotten in the lane, and along the footpath
where the June roses will bloom after the apple blossom has dropped.
But just where the ancient military way crosses the brook there grow
the finest, the largest, the bluest, and most lovely forget-me-nots
that ever lover gathered for his lady.
The old man, seeing my interest in the fragments of pottery, wished to
show me something of a different kind lately discovered. He led me to a
spot where the brook was deep, and had somewhat undermined the edge. A
horse trying to drink there had pushed a quantity of earth into the
stream, and exposed a human skeleton lying within a few inches of the
water. Then I looked up the stream and remembered the buttercups and
tall grasses, the flowers that crowded down to the edge; I remembered
the nests, and the dove cooing; the girls that came down to dip, the
children that cast their flowers to float away. The wind blew the loose
apple bloom and it fell in showers of painted snow. Sweetly the
greenfinches were calling in the trees: afar the voice of the cuckoo
came over the oaks. By the side of the living water, the water that all
things rejoiced in, near to its gentle sound, and the sparkle of
sunshine on it, had lain this sorrowful thing.
MEADOW THOUGHTS
The old house stood by the silent country road, secluded by many a
long, long mile, and yet again secluded within the great walls of the
garden. Often and often I rambled up to the milestone which stood under
an oak, to look at the chipped inscription low down--"To London, 79
Miles." So far away, you see, that the very inscription was cut at the
foot of the stone, since no one would be likely to want that
information. It was half hidden by docks and nettles, despised and
unnoticed. A broad land this seventy-nine miles--how many meadows and
corn-fields, hedges and woods, in that distance?--wide enough to
seclude any house, to hide it, like an acorn in the grass. Those who
have lived all their lives in remote places do not feel the remoteness.
No one else seemed to be conscious of the breadth that separated the
place from the great centre, but it was, perhaps, that consciousness
which deepened the solitude to me. It made the silence more still; the
shadows of the oaks yet slower in their movement; everything more
earnest. To convey a full impression of the intense concentration of
Nature in the meadows is very difficult--everything is so utterly
oblivious of man's thought and man's heart. The oaks stand--quiet,
still--so still that the lichen loves them. At their feet the grass
grows, and heeds nothing. Among it the squirrels leap, and their little
hearts are as far away from you or me as the very wood of the oaks. The
sunshine settles itself in the valley by the brook, and abides there
whether we come or not. Glance through the gap in the hedge by the oak,
and see how concentrated it is--all of it, every blade of grass, and
leaf, and flower, and living creature, finch or squirrel. It is
mesmerised upon itself. Then I used to feel that it really was
seventy-nine miles to London, and not an hour or two only by rail,
really all those miles. A great, broad province of green furrow and
ploughed furrow between the old house and the city of the world. Such
solace and solitude seventy-nine miles thick cannot be painted; the
trees cannot be placed far enough away in perspective. It is necessary
to stay in it like the oaks to know it.
Lime-tree branches overhung the corner of the garden-wall, whence a
view was easy of the silent and dusty road, till overarching oaks
concealed it. The white dust heated by the sunshine, the green hedges,
and the heavily massed trees, white clouds rolled together in the sky,
a footpath opposite lost in the fields, as you might thrust a stick
into the grass, tender lime leaves caressing the cheek, and silence.
That is, the silence of the fields. If a breeze rustled the boughs, if
a greenfinch called, if the cart-mare in the meadow shook herself,
making the earth and air tremble by her with the convulsion of her
mighty muscles, these were not sounds, they were the silence itself. So
sensitive to it as I was, in its turn it held me firmly, like the
fabled spells of old time. The mere touch of a leaf was a talisman to
bring me under the enchantment, so that I seemed to feel and know all
that was proceeding among the grass-blades and in the bushes. Among the
lime trees along the wall the birds never built, though so close and
sheltered. They built everywhere but there. To the broad coping-stones
of the wall under the lime boughs speckled thrushes came almost hourly,
sometimes to peer out and reconnoitre if it was safe to visit the
garden, sometimes to see if a snail had climbed up the ivy. Then they
dropped quietly down into the long strawberry patch immediately under.
The cover of strawberries is the constant resource of all creeping
things; the thrushes looked round every plant and under every leaf and
runner. One toad always resided there, often two, and as you gathered a
ripe strawberry you might catch sight of his black eye watching you
take the fruit he had saved for you.
Down the road skims an eave-swallow, swift as an arrow, his white back
making the sun-dried dust dull and dingy; he is seeking a pool for
mortar, and will waver to and fro by the brook below till he finds a
convenient place to alight. Thence back to the eave here, where for
forty years he and his ancestors built in safety. Two white butterflies
fluttering round each other rise over the limes, once more up over the
house, and soar on till their white shows no longer against the
illumined air. A grasshopper calls on the sward by the strawberries,
and immediately fillips himself over seven leagues of grass-blades.
Yonder a line of men and women file across the field, seen for a moment
as they pass a gateway, and the hay changes from hay-colour to green
behind them as they turn the under but still sappy side upwards. They
are working hard, but it looks easy, slow, and sunny. Finches fly out
from the hedgerow to the overturned hay. Another butterfly, a brown
one, floats along the dusty road--the only traveller yet. The white
clouds are slowly passing behind the oaks, large puffed clouds, like
deliberate loads of hay, leaving little wisps and flecks behind them
caught in the sky. How pleasant it would be to read in the shadow!
There is a broad shadow on the sward by the strawberries cast by a tall
and fine-grown American crab tree. The very place for a book; and
although I know it is useless, yet I go and fetch one and dispose
myself on the grass.
I can never read in summer out-of-doors. Though in shadow the bright
light fills it, summer shadows are broadest daylight. The page is so
white and hard, the letters so very black, the meaning and drift not
quite intelligible, because neither eye nor mind will dwell upon it.
Human thoughts and imaginings written down are pale and feeble in
bright summer light. The eye wanders away, and rests more lovingly on
greensward and green lime leaves. The mind wanders yet deeper and
farther into the dreamy mystery of the azure sky. Once now and then,
determined to write down that mystery and delicious sense while
actually in it, I have brought out table and ink and paper, and sat
there in the midst of the summer day. Three words, and where is the
thought? Gone. The paper is so obviously paper, the ink so evidently
ink, the pen so stiff; all so inadequate. You want colour, flexibility,
light, sweet low sound--all these to paint it and play it in music, at
the same time you want something that will answer to and record in one
touch the strong throb of life and the thought, or feeling, or whatever
it is that goes out into the earth and sky and space, endless as a beam
of light. The very shade of the pen on the paper tells you how utterly
hopeless it is to express these things. There is the shade and the
brilliant gleaming whiteness; now tell me in plain written words the
simple contrast of the two. Not in twenty pages, for the bright light
shows the paper in its common fibre-ground, coarse aspect, in its
reality, not as a mind-tablet.
The delicacy and beauty of thought or feeling is so extreme that it
cannot be inked in; it is like the green and blue of field and sky, of
veronica flower and grass blade, which in their own existence throw
light and beauty on each other, but in artificial colours repel. Take
the table indoors again, and the book; the thoughts and imaginings of
others are vain, and of your own too deep to be written. For the mind
is filled with the exceeding beauty of these things, and their great
wondrousness and marvel. Never yet have I been able to write what I
felt about the sunlight only. Colour and form and light are as magic to
me. It is a trance. It requires a language of ideas to convey it. It is
ten years since I last reclined on that grass plot, and yet I have been
writing of it as if it was yesterday, and every blade of grass is as
visible and as real to me now as then. They were greener towards the
house, and more brown-tinted on the margin of the strawberry bed,
because towards the house the shadow rested longest. By the
strawberries the fierce sunlight burned them.
The sunlight put out the books I brought into it just as it put out the
fire on the hearth indoors. The tawny flames floating upwards could not
bite the crackling sticks when the full beams came pouring on them.
Such extravagance of light overcame the little fire till it was
screened from the power of the heavens. So here in the shadow of the
American crab tree the light of the sky put out the written pages. For
this beautiful and wonderful light excited a sense of some likewise
beautiful and wonderful truth, some unknown but grand thought hovering
as a swallow above. The swallows hovered and did not alight, but they
were there. An inexpressible thought quivered in the azure overhead; it
could not be fully grasped, but there was a sense and feeling of its
presence. Before that mere sense of its presence the weak and feeble
pages, the small fires of human knowledge, dwindled and lost meaning.
There was something here that was not in the books. In all the
philosophies and searches of mind there was nothing that could be
brought to face it, to say, This is what it intends, this is the
explanation of the dream. The very grass-blades confounded the wisest,
the tender lime leaf put them to shame, the grasshopper derided them,
the sparrow on the wall chirped his scorn. The books were put out,
unless a screen were placed between them and the light of the sky--that
is, an assumption, so as to make an artificial mental darkness. Grant
some assumptions--that is, screen off the light--and in that darkness
everything was easily arranged, this thing here, and that yonder. But
Nature grants no assumptions, and the books were put out. There is
something beyond the philosophies in the light, in the grass-blades,
the leaf, the grasshopper, the sparrow on the wall. Some day the great
and beautiful thought which hovers on the confines of the mind will at
last alight. In that is hope, the whole sky is full of abounding hope.
Something beyond the books, that is consolation.
The little lawn beside the strawberry bed, burned brown there, and
green towards the house shadow, holds how many myriad grass-blades?
Here they are all matted together, long, and dragging each other down.
Part them, and beneath them are still more, overhung and hidden. The
fibres are intertangled, woven in an endless basket-work and chaos of
green and dried threads. A blamable profusion this; a fifth as many
would be enough; altogether a wilful waste here. As for these insects
that spring out of it as I press the grass, a hundredth part of them
would suffice. The American crab tree is a snowy mount in spring; the
flakes of bloom, when they fall, cover the grass with a film--a bushel
of bloom, which the wind takes and scatters afar. The extravagance is
sublime. The two little cherry trees are as wasteful; they throw away
handfuls of flower; but in the meadows the careless, spendthrift ways
of grass and flower and all things are not to be expressed. Seeds by
the hundred million float with absolute indifference on the air. The
oak has a hundred thousand more leaves than necessary, and never hides
a single acorn. Nothing utilitarian--everything on a scale of splendid
waste. Such noble, broadcast, open-armed waste is delicious to behold.
Never was there such a lying proverb as "Enough is as good as a feast."
Give me the feast; give me squandered millions of seeds, luxurious
carpets of petals, green mountains of oak leaves. The greater the
waste, the greater the enjoyment--the nearer the approach to real life.
Casuistry is of no avail; the fact is obvious; Nature flings treasures
abroad, puffs them with open ups along on every breeze, piles up lavish
layers of them in the free open air, packs countless numbers together
in the needles of a fir tree. Prodigality and superfluity are stamped
on everything she does. The ear of wheat returns a hundredfold the
grain from which it grew. The surface of the earth offers to us far
more than we can consume--the grains, the seeds, the fruits, the
animals, the abounding products are beyond the power of all the human
race to devour. They can, too, be multiplied a thousandfold. There is
no natural lack. Whenever there is lack among us it is from artificial
causes, which intelligence should remove.
From the littleness, and meanness, and niggardliness forced upon us by
circumstances, what a relief to turn aside to the exceeding plenty of
Nature! There are no bounds to it, there is no comparison to parallel
it, so great is this generosity. No physical reason exists why every
human being should not have sufficient, at least, of necessities. For
any human being to starve, or even to be in trouble about the procuring
of simple food, appears, indeed, a strange and unaccountable thing,
quite upside down, and contrary to sense, if you do but consider a
moment the enormous profusion the earth throws at our feet. In the slow
process of time, as the human heart grows larger, such provision, I
sincerely trust, will be made that no one need ever feel anxiety about
mere subsistence. Then, too, let there be some imitation of this
open-handed generosity and divine waste. Let the generations to come
feast free of care, like my finches on the seeds of the mowing-grass,
from which no voice drives them. If I could but give away as freely as
the earth does!
The white-backed eave-swallow has returned many, many times from the
shallow drinking-place by the brook to his half-built nest. Sometimes
the pair of them cling to the mortar they have fixed under the eave,
and twitter to each other about the progress of the work. They dive
downwards with such velocity when they quit hold that it seems as if
they must strike the ground, but they shoot up again, over the wall and
the lime trees. A thrush has been to the arbour yonder twenty times; it
is made of crossed laths, and overgrown with "tea-plant," and the nest
is inside the lath-work. A sparrow has visited the rose-tree by the
wall--the buds are covered with aphides. A brown tree-creeper has been
to the limes, then to the cherries, and even to a stout lilac stem. No
matter how small the tree, he tries all that are in his way. The bright
colours of a bullfinch were visible a moment just now, as he passed
across the shadows farther down the garden under the damson trees and
into the bushes. The grasshopper has gone past and along the
garden-path, his voice is not heard now; but there is another coming.
While I have been dreaming, all these and hundreds out in the meadow
have been intensely happy. So concentrated on their little work in the
sunshine, so intent on the tiny egg, on the insect captured on the
grass-tip to be carried to the eager fledglings, so joyful in listening
to the song poured out for them or in pouring it forth, quite oblivious
of all else. It is in this intense concentration that they are so
happy. If they could only live longer!--but a few such seasons for
them--I wish they could live a hundred years just to feast on the seeds
and sing and be utterly happy and oblivious of everything but the
moment they are passing. A black line has rushed up from the espalier
apple yonder to the housetop thirty times at least. The starlings fly
so swiftly and so straight that they seem to leave a black line along
the air. They have a nest in the roof, they are to and fro it and the
meadow the entire day, from dawn till eve. The espalier apple, like a
screen, hides the meadow from me, so that the descending starlings
appear to dive into a space behind it. Sloping downwards the meadow
makes a valley; I cannot see it, but know that it is golden with
buttercups, and that a brook runs in the groove of it.
Afar yonder I can see a summit beyond where the grass swells upwards to
a higher level than this spot. There are bushes and elms whose height
is decreased by distance on the summit, horses in the shadow of the
trees, and a small flock of sheep crowded, as is their wont, in the hot
and sunny gateway. By the side of the summit is a deep green trench, so
it looks from here, in the hill-side: it is really the course of a
streamlet worn deep in the earth. I can see nothing between the top of
the espalier screen and the horses under the elms on the hill. But the
starlings go up and down into the hollow space, which is aglow with
golden buttercups, and, indeed, I am looking over a hundred finches
eagerly searching, sweetly calling, happy as the summer day. A thousand
thousand grasshoppers are leaping, thrushes are labouring, filled with
love and tenderness, doves cooing--there is as much joy as there are
leaves on the hedges. Faster than the starling's flight my mind runs up
to the streamlet in the deep green trench beside the hill.
Pleasant it was to trace it upwards, narrowing at every ascending step,
till the thin stream, thinner than fragile glass, did but merely slip
over the stones. A little less and it could not have run at all, water
could not stretch out to greater tenuity. It smoothed the brown growth
on the stones, stroking it softly. It filled up tiny basins of sand and
ran out at the edges between minute rocks of flint. Beneath it went
under thickest brooklime, blue flowered, and serrated water-parsnips,
lost like many a mighty river for awhile among a forest of leaves.
Higher up masses of bramble and projecting thorn stopped the explorer,
who must wind round the grassy mound. Pausing to look back a moment
there were meads under the hill with the shortest and greenest herbage,
perpetually watered, and without one single buttercup, a strip of pure
green among yellow flowers and yellowing corn. A few hollow oaks on
whose boughs the cuckoos stayed to call, two or three peewits coursing
up and down, larks singing, and for all else silence. Between the wheat
and the grassy mound the path was almost closed, burdocks and brambles
thrust the adventurer outward to brush against the wheat-ears. Upwards
till suddenly it turned, and led by steep notches in the bank, as it
seemed down to the roots of the elm trees. The clump of elms grew right
over a deep and rugged hollow; their branches reached out across it,
roofing in the cave.