“Nor ever can those trees be bare.”
Still living in the English landscape is that alert figure, rapt yet ready for the absurdities of the moment, silent in understanding withdrawals and, in her own words of another, “almost as good company as a dog.” This was a masterpiece of praise by inversion, and “those spectacles” gleamed over it prodigiously. One remembers her by the crested blue of Devon and Cornish seas, subdued into stillness and then breaking out in a wild hail of the
“cruel, crawling foam!”
One remembers her on a Midland road, sticking a pheasant’s feather in her hat and swaggering rakishly, or walking into Shrewsbury, so disheveled from the rain and dust of varied weathers, that landladies looked askance, and one, more admittedly curious than the rest, queried:
“Is there a play to-night?”
For the two wayfarers did look the ancient part of rogues and vagabonds, no less.
One remembers her climbing the slope, blue with wild hyacinths, at Haughmond Abbey, or taking the straight “seven long miles” across Egdon Heath, the sun darkened in a livid sky and floods of rain to follow before the wayfarers found refuge in the little church where D’Urbervilles lie, significant in nothing now save an envious immortality on Thomas Hardy’s page. The clouds in that thunderous sky were piled into imperial semblances, Emperors of old Rome, and out of their brief pageant sprang Louise Guiney’s poem of Romans in Dorset, the first three stanzas as illuminative as the sun and dark that ruled the air:
“A stupor on the heath,
And wrath along the sky;
Space everywhere; beneath