A spirit calling in an old old tongue
Forgotten in lost graves in lonesome places;
A spirit huddled in an old old heart
Like a blind crone crouched o'er a long-dead fire....
Nothing ever happened among the Powells at ——. The lawn was mowed; the fern from the hill was carted down; the little red apples ripened; the Powell hair turned from gold to grey. A stranger, indeed, heard much of them, but when he asked where they lived, he was told that there were thirty of them in the church and one at —— on the hill. Five generations of them had lived there, since the only conspicuous one of the family had died in the first war with Napoleon. Of those five, the last could only say that theirs had been the most desperate of quests, for they knew not what they sought. They had lived in dignity and simplicity, neither sporting nor cultured, yet loving foxhounds and books. Generation after generation of the children had learned "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" from their fathers, and with all their happiness in that dim house, they learned to love "Il Penseroso" best....
A SUDDEN SQUALL, CARDIGAN BAY
September
In the afternoon I climbed out of a valley, descended again, and came on to a road that rolled over many little hills into many little valleys, and at the top of each hill grew the vision of a purple land ahead. But, for some miles, the valleys were solitary. There were brooks in them with cold, fresh voices, and copses of oak, and sometimes the smoke or the white wall of a house. There sang the latest of the willow-wrens, and among the blackthorns a bullfinch, with delicate voices. The air was warm and motionless; the light on oak and grass was steady and rich; the sky was low and leaning gently to the earth, and its large white clouds moved not, though they changed their shapes. But these things belonged to the brooks, the copses, the willow-wrens; or so it seemed, since that warm day, which elsewhere might have seemed so kind with an ancient kindness as if to one returning home after long exile, was not kind, but was indifferent and made an intruder of me. And I should have passed the stony hedges and the little brooks over the road and the desolate mine, in the indifferent little worlds of the valleys, one by one, as if they had been in a museum, or as if I had been taken there to admire them, had it not been that on the crests of the road between valley and valley, I saw the purple beckoning hills far away, and that, at length, towards the last act of the dim, rich, long-drawn out and windless sunset, the road took me into a small valley that was different. Just within reach of the sunset light, on one side of the valley lay a farm, with ricks, outhouses, and two cottages, all thatched. In the corner of the field nearest to the house, the long-horned craggy cattle were beginning to lie down. Those cattle, always vast and fierce, seemed to have sprung from the earth—into which the lines of their recumbent bodies flowed—out of which their horns rose coldly and angrily. The buildings also had sprung from the earth, and only prejudice taught me that they were homes of men. They enmeshed the shadows and lights of sunset in their thatch, and were as some enormous lichen-covered things, half crag, half animal, which the cattle watched, together with five oaks.
There was not a sound, until a child ran to a pump, and sang a verse of some grave hymn lightheartedly, and filled a shining can with dark water, and disappeared.