Essays | Page 7

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