Field and Hedgerow | Page 8

goes to what will be to him a strange land. His home
is broken up--he will potter no more with maize for the chicken; the
gorse hedges will become solid walls of golden bloom, but there will
never again be a spring for him. It is very hard, is it not, at ninety? It is

not the tyranny of any one that has done it; it is the tyranny of
circumstance, the lot of man. The song of the Greeks is full of sorrow;
man was to them the creature of grief, yet theirs was the land of violets
and pellucid air. This has been a land of frost and snow, and here too, it
is the same. A stranger, I see, is already digging the old man's garden.
How happy the trees must be to hear the song of birds again in their
branches! After the silence and the leaflessness, to have the birds back
once more and to feel them busy at the nest-building; how glad to give
them the moss and fibres and the crutch of the boughs to build in!
Pleasant it is now to watch the sunlit clouds sailing onwards; it is like
sitting by the sea. There is voyaging to and fro of birds; the strong
wood-pigeon goes over--a long course in the air, from hill to distant
copse; a blackbird starts from an ash, and, now inclining this way and
now that, traverses the meadows to the thick corner hedge; finches go
by, and the air is full of larks that sing without ceasing. The touch of
the wind, the moisture of the dew, the sun-stained raindrop, have in
them the magic force of life--a marvellous something that was not there
before. Under it the narrow blade of grass comes up freshly green
between the old white fibres the rook pulled; the sycamore bud swells
and opens, and takes the eye instantly in the still dark wood; the
starlings go to the hollow pollards; the lambs leap in the mead. You
never know what a day may bring forth--what new thing will come
next. Yesterday I saw the ploughman and his team, and the earth gleam
smoothed behind the share; to-day a butterfly has gone past; the
farm-folk are bringing home the fagots from the hedgerows; to-morrow
there will be a merry, merry note in the ash copse, the chiffchaffs'
ringing call to arms, to arms, ye leaves! By-and-by a bennet, a bloom of
the grass; in time to come the furrow, as it were, shall open, and the
great buttercup of the waters will show a broad palm of gold. You
never know what will come to the net of the eye next--a bud, a flower,
a nest, a curled fern, or whether it will be in the woodland or by the
meadow path, at the water's side or on the dead dry heap of fagots.
There is no settled succession, no fixed and formal order--always the
unexpected; and you cannot say, 'I will go and find this or that.' The
sowing of life in the spring time is not in the set straight line of the drill,
nor shall you find wild flowers by a foot measure. There are great
woods without a lily of the valley; the nightingale does not sing

everywhere. Nature has no arrangement, no plan, nothing judicious
even; the walnut trees bring forth their tender buds, and the frost burns
them--they have no mosaic of time to fit in, like a Roman tesselated
pavement; nature is like a child, who will sing and shout though you
may be never so deeply pondering in the study, and does not wait for
the hour that suits your mind. You do not know what you may find
each day; perhaps you may only pick up a fallen feather, but it is
beautiful, every filament. Always beautiful! everything beautiful! And
are these things new--the ploughman and his team, the lark's song the
green leaf? Can they be new? Surely they have been of old time! They
are, indeed, new--the only things that are so; the rest is old and grey,
and a weariness.

NATURE AND BOOKS.

What is the colour of the dandelion? There are many dandelions: that
which I mean flowers in May, when the meadow-grass has started and
the hares are busy by daylight. That which flowers very early in the
year has a thickness of hue, and is not interesting; in autumn the
dandelions quite change their colour and are pale. The right dandelion
for this question is the one that comes about May with a very broad
disc, and in such quantities as often to cover a whole meadow. I used to
admire them very much in the fields by Surbiton (strong clay soil), and
also on