Taller than the grass and lower than the trees, there is another growth
that feels the implicit spring. It had been more abandoned to winter
than even the short grass shuddering under a wave of east wind, more than
the dumb trees. For the multitudes of sedges, rushes, canes, and reeds
were the appropriate lyre of the cold. On them the nimble winds played
their dry music. They were part of the winter. It looked through them
and spoke through them. They were spears and javelins in array to the
sound of the drums of the north.
The winter takes fuller possession of these things than of those that
stand solid. The sedges whistle his tune. They let the colour of his
light look through--low-flying arrows and bright bayonets of winter day.
The multitudes of all reeds and rushes grow out of bounds. They belong
to the margins of lands, the space between the farms and the river,
beyond the pastures, and where the marsh in flower becomes perilous
footing for the cattle. They are the fringe of the low lands, the sign
of streams. They grow tall between you and the near horizon of flat
lands. They etch their sharp lines upon the sky; and near them grow
flowers of stature, including the lofty yellow lily.
Our green country is the better for the grey, soft, cloudy darkness of
the sedge, and our full landscape is the better for the distinction of
its points, its needles, and its resolute right lines.
Ours is a summer full of voices, and therefore it does not so need the
sound of rushes; but they are most sensitive to the stealthy breezes, and
betray the passing of a wind that even the tree-tops knew not of.
Sometimes it is a breeze unfelt, but the stiff sedges whisper it along a
mile of marsh. To the strong wind they bend, showing the silver of their
sombre little tassels as fish show the silver of their sides turning in
the pathless sea. They are unanimous. A field of tall flowers tosses
many ways in one warm gale, like the many lovers of a poet who have a
thousand reasons for their love; but the rushes, more strongly tethered,
are swept into a single attitude, again and again, at every renewal of
the storm.
Between the pasture and the wave, the many miles of rushes and reeds in
England seem to escape that insistent ownership which has so changed
(except for a few forests and downs) the aspect of England, and has in
fact made the landscape. Cultivation makes the landscape elsewhere,
rather than ownership, for the boundaries in the south are not
conspicuous; but here it is ownership. But the rushes are a gipsy
people, amongst us, yet out of reach. The landowner, if he is rather a
gross man, believes these races of reeds are his. But if he is a man of
sensibility, depend upon it he has his interior doubts. His property, he
says, goes right down to the centre of the earth, in the shape of a
wedge; how high up it goes into the air it would be difficult to say, and
obviously the shape of the wedge must be continued in the direction of
increase. We may therefore proclaim his right to the clouds and their
cargo. It is true that as his ground game is apt to go upon his
neighbour's land to be shot, so the clouds may now and then spend his
showers elsewhere. But the great thing is the view. A well-appointed
country-house sees nothing out of the windows that is not its own. But
he who tells you so, and proves it to you by his own view, is certainly
disturbed by an unspoken doubt, if his otherwise contented eyes should
happen to be caught by a region of rushes. The water is his--he had the
pond made; or the river, for a space, and the fish, for a time. But the
bulrushes, the reeds! One wonders whether a very thorough landowner, but
a sensitive one, ever resolved that he would endure this sort of thing no
longer, and went out armed and had a long acre of sedges scythed to
death.
They are probably outlaws. They are dwellers upon thresholds and upon
margins, as the gipsies make a home upon the green edges of a road. No
wild flowers, however wild, are rebels. The copses and their primroses
are good subjects, the oaks are loyal. Now and then, though, one has a
kind of suspicion of some of the other kinds of trees--the Corot trees.
Standing at a distance from the more ornamental trees, from those of
fuller foliage, and from all the indeciduous shrubs and the conifers
(manifest property, every one), two or three translucent aspens, with
which the very sun and the breath of earth are entangled, have sometimes
seemed to wear a certain look--an extra-territorial look, let us call it.
They are suspect. One is inclined to shake a doubtful head at them.
And the landowner feels it. He knows quite well, though he may not say
so, that the Corot trees, though they do not dwell upon margins, are in
spirit almost as extra-territorial as the rushes. In proof of this he
very often cuts them down, out of the view, once for all. The view is
better, as a view, without them. Though their roots are in his ground
right enough, there is a something about their heads--. But the reason
he gives for wishing them away is merely that they are "thin." A man
does not always say everything.