Pageant of Summer | Page 6

to fetch a few seeds, and
comes back each time more full of song-talk than ever. He notes no
slow movement of the oak's shadow on the grass; it is nothing to him
and his lady dear that the sun, as seen from his nest, is crossing from
one great bough of the oak to another. The dew even in the deepest and
most tangled grass has long since been dried, and some of the flowers
that close at noon will shortly fold their petals. The morning airs, which
breathe so sweetly, come less and less frequently as the heat increases.
Vanishing from the sky, the last fragments of cloud have left an
untarnished azure. Many times the bees have returned to their hives,
and thus the index of the day advances. It is nothing to the greenfinches;
all their thoughts are in their song-talk. The sunny moment is to them
all in all. So deeply are they rapt in it that they do not know whether it
is a moment or a year. There is no clock for feeling, for joy, for love.
And with all their motions and stepping from bough to bough, they are
not restless; they have so much time, you see. So, too, the whitethroat
in the wild parsley; so, too, the thrush that just now peered out and
partly fluttered his wings as he stood to look. A butterfly comes and
stays on a leaf--a leaf much warmed by the sun--and shuts his wings. In
a minute he opens them, shuts them again, half wheels round, and
by-and-by--just when he chooses, and not before--floats away. The
flowers open, and remain open for hours, to the sun. Hastelessness is
the only word one can make up to describe it; there is much rest, but no
haste. Each moment, as with the greenfinches, is so full of life that it
seems so long and so sufficient in itself. Not only the days, but life
itself lengthens in summer. I would spread abroad my arms and gather
more of it to me, could I do so.
All the procession of living and growing things passes. The grass
stands up taller and still taller, the sheaths open, and the stalk arises, the
pollen clings till the breeze sweeps it. The bees rush past, and the
resolute wasps; the humble-bees, whose weight swings them along.
About the oaks and maples the brown chafers swarm, and the fern-owls
at dusk, and the blackbirds and jays by day, cannot reduce their legions
while they last. Yellow butterflies, and white, broad red admirals, and
sweet blues; think of the kingdom of flowers which is theirs! Heavy

moths burring at the edge of the copse; green, and red, and gold flies:
gnats, like smoke, around the tree-tops; midges so thick over the brook,
as if you could haul a netful; tiny leaping creatures in the grass; bronze
beetles across the path; blue dragonflies pondering on cool leaves of
water-plantain. Blue jays flitting, a magpie drooping across from elm to
elm; young rooks that have escaped the hostile shot blundering up into
the branches; missel thrushes leading their fledglings, already strong on
the wing, from field to field. An egg here on the sward dropped by a
starling; a red ladybird creeping, tortoise-like, up a green fern frond.
Finches undulating through the air, shooting themselves with closed
wings, and linnets happy with their young.
Golden dandelion discs--gold and orange--of a hue more beautiful, I
think, than the higher and more visible buttercup. A blackbird,
gleaming, so black is he, splashing in the runlet of water across the
gateway. A ruddy kingfisher swiftly drawing himself, as you might
draw a stroke with a pencil, over the surface of the yellow buttercups,
and away above the hedge. Hart's-tongue fern, thick with green, so
green as to be thick with its colour, deep in the ditch under the shady
hazel boughs. White meadow-sweet lifting its tiny florets, and
black-flowered sedges. You must push through the reed grass to find
the sword-flags; the stout willow-herbs will not be trampled down, but
resist the foot like underwood. Pink lychnis flowers behind the withy
stoles, and little black moorhens swim away, as you gather it, after their
mother, who has dived under the water-grass, and broken the smooth
surface of the duckweed. Yellow loosestrife is rising, thick comfrey
stands at the very edge; the sandpipers run where the shore is free from
bushes. Back by the underwood the prickly and repellent brambles will
presently present us with fruit. For the squirrels the nuts are forming,
green beechmast is there--green wedges under the spray; up in the oaks
the small knots, like bark rolled up in a dot, will be acorns. Purple
vetches along the mounds, yellow lotus where the grass is