Come, lasses, come, ere our rose world falls grey.
We had talked long into the night, and then as sleep came, out of this darkness peered the early timorous warble of a blackbird, and gradually all the birds in orchard, hedge, and wood made a thick mist or curtain of innumerable and indistinguishable notes through which still crept the bolder note of that same nearest blackbird. As the night lost its heaviness, though not its stillness, the continuous mist of songs grew thicker and seemed to produce or to be one with the faint darkness which so soon was to be light. It seemed also to be making the landscape which I saw being made, when I looked out. There, was the side of the hill; there the larches, the dark hedges, and the lingering snow and the orchard: they were what I had seen before, but changed and increased; and very subtle, plaintive, menacing, vast, was the work, though when the light had fully come, once more the larches, the hedges, and the orchard were as if they had never been sung to a new order of beauty by the mist of songs, and yet not the same, any more than a full coffin is the same as the lips and eyes and hands and hair, of which it contains all that we did not love. And still there were many songs; but you could tell who sung each of them, if you wished.
III
At the end of the month, when already the cuckoo had come and the blackthorn flowers among hawthorn branches were deceiving those who desired May, I went again to the hill where the wood-pigeons had cooed. I sat in a room in sight of it, during a cloud-gathering sunset. The white houses, which had earlier been like remnants of winter snow, were now like flowers. They and the misty larches and the birches gave a nuptial splendour to the old hills. Once more the land stood in preparation, as it stands year after year, so that one might think it expected a new dynasty of gods to come on May day, as often happened in the old time. And in the oaks and hazels the wood-pigeons cooed again. But when the sunset was perfect, they ceased as if they also feared and loved the white and green lines of cloud that lay over the hills—of a white and green which I had only seen together before in a crimpled, tender cabbage cut in two and lying half in bright water for the cook. Then the silence grew and grew, exciting and paining and pleasing and never satisfying the ear; so that I knew not whether the silence or the speech that preceded it was the more mysterious. For him that has ears there is nothing more expressive than speech; but it is never unequivocal as silence is. The two are perhaps handmaidens to one another and inseparable parts in the universal harmony, although Maeterlinck says that a silent child is wiser than Plato eloquent.
VIEW OF MOELWYN
A cuckoo had been singing, but now I heard it not; no longer did the yellow-ammer insist, the thrush gossip, the blackbird muse; the sounds of the house were dead: and I saw a hundred cows, some lying down, some moving so lazily—like sailing ships on a wide sea—that I could not see the changing of their pattern on the grass, and I was entangled in the unfathomable dream of the unending hills and the unending valleys.
In the room hung a landscape of savage hills, cloven by dark shadows and bright streams, and the glass reflected the calm grass and the hill and the oak and hazel woods which thus mingled with the picture at times and made a strange palimpsest of winter and spring. Now one and now the other predominated, until some one came in, as three cuckoos flew crying overhead, and sang this song, which gave the victory to spring:—
THE MAIDS OF CAERMARTHENSHIRE