§ 9
This was in the spring. Autumn in England is equally lovely. In the new world—at least in the northern regions—there is a chill in the fall of the year. The cold north-western winds, cradled amidst palæocrystic ice, and blowing over tundra and prairie, are untempered by Gulf Stream or ocean. Untempered, too, by cloud and moisture, they cut keen, and reveal the leafless landscape in all its bareness. And it may be that they bring with them the thought that for many months to come that landscape will be bare indeed—unless covered with a shroud of snow.
Far different is autumn in England—I write (this time) situate in the basin of the Thames, and for many weeks I have been watching summer slowly give up its glowing glories in order that other glories, not less wonderful in colour, may take their place. For England is never colourless; nay, in England, all through the year, the colours are warm and sweet and comforting. The very trunks and twigs of the trees are warm with browns and greens and purples, the result of the mosses and lichens, minute epiphytic and parasitic vegetation which the humid climate so greatly fosters. Even brick walls, the stepping-stones in brooks, wooden palings—everything constructed by man, Nature soon mellows with a gentle hand; so that, in place of stark and staring edifices where the bare boards or the dull paint form blotches on the scene, you have everywhere a great harmony of colour—violets shading into green; greens gliding into softest yellows; and these again deepening into warm and beautiful orange and gold and red.
A long, long tramp through beechy Buckinghamshire one day revealed at every step beauties that filled the eye—and filled the heart. No pen could do them justice; and, among painters, only the brush of a Corot could attempt their depicture without depriving them of their exquisite, their almost evanescent, softness. A great mist lay over the land; a gentle, noiseless mist that hid from you the horizon and the outer world; that shut you in from the outer world; lured you into that mood of quiet reverence in the presence of quiet, wonder-working Nature; and revealed to you ... I cannot tell all that was revealed. I can only point to this and that beautiful little thing or vision, themselves but emblems of a Beauty and a Mystery invisible.
Again I saw the little ivies in the ditches. Again I saw unnumbered little leaves and stalks and tendrils in the hedges; all, of shape and texture and colour actually and positively divine. The hedges, a tangle of twigs thick with a hundred growths, were mighty marvels that no human clipping and pruning and trimming could diminish. And at every few paces rose out of these hedges, on either hand, old majestic elms, great in girth, tall of stature, interlacing their branches high overhead and making for pygmy me, who walked that winding lane, a wondrous fane in which to worship.—It was not exactly what one saw with one's bodily eye that roused worship in that fane. What was it?...
As morning grew towards noon, and the sun gained power, that gentle mist—so noiseless, like an angel's hand laid soothingly on me and on all that hemmed me in—the mist mysteriously withdrew itself. But only to show fresh loveliness. On either hand were meadows, still lush with grass; or brown and furrowed fields, shot through with the myriad tips of growing corn; and here and there in scattered heaps lay the rich leaves of the oak and the elm and the beech, brilliant in their orange and russet, and here and there lit up, like burnished gold, by glints of sunshine from between the clouds.
For miles, quiet little scenes like this filled the eye and the heart—entrancing, exalting, humbling.
Wherein lay the secret of their appeal? Why is it that field and hedgerow, winding lane and interlacing boughs, strike upon the emotions of man?