Field and Hedgerow | Page 4

to old time. Or the rush of the sea wave brought
them to me, wet and gleaming, up from the depths of what unknown
Past? where they nestled in the root crevices of trees forgotten before

Egypt. The living mind opposite the dead pebble--did you ever
consider the strange and wonderful problem there? Only the thickness
of the skin of the hand between them. The chief use of matter is to
demonstrate to us the existence of the soul. The pebble-stone tells me I
am a soul because I am not that that touches the nerves of my hand. We
are distinctly two, utterly separate, and shall never come together. The
little pebble and the great sun overhead--millions of miles away: yet is
the great sun no more distinct and apart than this which I can touch.
Dull-surfaced matter, like a polished mirror, reflects back thought to
thought's self within.
I listened to the sweet-briar wind this morning; but for weeks and
weeks the stark black oaks stood straight out of the snow as masts of
ships with furled sails frozen and ice-bound in the haven of the deep
valley. Each was visible to the foot, set in the white slope, made
individual in the wood by the brilliance of the background. Never was
such a long winter. For fully two months they stood in the snow in
black armour of iron bark unshaken, the front rank of the forest army
that would not yield to the northern invader. Snow in broad flakes,
snow in semi-flakes, snow raining down in frozen specks, whirling and
twisting in fury, ice raining in small shot of frost, howling, sleeting,
groaning; the ground like iron, the sky black and faintly yellow--brutal
colours of despotism--heaven striking with clenched fist. When at last
the general surface cleared, still there remained the trenches and
traverses of the enemy, his ramparts drifted high, and his roads marked
with snow. The black firs on the ridge stood out against the frozen
clouds, still and hard; the slopes of leafless larches seemed withered
and brown; the distant plain far down gloomy with the same dull
yellowish blackness. At a height of seven hundred feet the air was
sharp as a scythe--a rude barbarian giant wind knocking at the walls of
the house with a vast club, so that we crept sideways even to the
windows to look out upon the world. There was everything to
repel--the cold, the frost, the hardness, the snow, dark sky and ground,
leaflessness; the very furze chilled and all benumbed. Yet the forest
was still beautiful. There was no day that we did not, all of us, glance
out at it and admire it, and say something about it. Harder and harder
grew the frost, yet still the forest-clad hills possessed a something that
drew the mind open to their largeness and grandeur. Earth is always

beautiful--always. Without colour, or leaf, or sunshine, or song of bird
and flutter of butterfly's wing; without anything sensuous, without
advantage or gilding of summer--the power is ever there. Or shall we
not say that the desire of the mind is ever there, and will satisfy itself,
in a measure at least, even with the barren wild? The heart from the
moment of its first beat instinctively longs for the beautiful; the means
we possess to gratify it are limited--we are always trying to find the
statue in the rude block. Out of the vast block of the earth the mind
endeavours to carve itself loveliness, nobility, and grandeur. We strive
for the right and the true: it is circumstance that thrusts wrong upon us.
One morning a labouring man came to the door with a spade, and asked
if he could dig the garden, or try to, at the risk of breaking the tool in
the ground. He was starving; he had had no work for two months; it
was just six months, he said, since the first frost started the winter.
Nature and the earth and the gods did not trouble about him, you see;
he might grub the rock-frost ground with his hands if he chose--the
yellowish black sky did not care. Nothing for man! The only good he
found was in his fellow-men; they fed him after a fashion--still they fed
him. There was no good in anything else. Another aged man came once
a week regularly; white as the snow through which he walked. In
summer he worked; since the winter began he had had no employment,
but supported himself by going round to the farms in rotation. They all
gave him a trifle--bread and cheese, a penny, a slice of
meat--something; and so he lived, and slept the whole of that time in
outhouses wherever he could. He had no home of any kind. Why