It is a land that uses a soft compulsion upon the passer-by, a compulsion to meditation, which is necessary before he is attached to a scene rather featureless, to a land that hence owes much of its power to a mood of generous reverie which it bestows. And yet it is a land that gives much. Companionable it is, reassuring to the solitary; he soon has a feeling of ease and seclusion there. The cool-leaved wood! The limitless, unoccupied fields of marsh marigold, seen through the trees, most beautiful when the evening rain falls slowly, dimming and almost putting out the lustrous bloom! Gold of the minute willows underfoot! Leagues of lonely grass where the slow herds tread the daisies and spare them yet!
Towards night, under the sweet rain, at this warm, skyless close of the day, the trees, far off in an indolent, rolling landscape, stand as if disengaged from the world, in a reticent and pensive repose.
But suddenly the rain has ceased. In an old, dense wood the last horizontal beams of the sun embrace the trunks of the trees and they glow red under their moist ceiling of green. A stile to be crossed at its edge, where a little stream, unseen, sways the stiff exuberant angelica that grows from it, gives the word to pause, and with a rush the silence and the solitude fill the brain. The wood is of uncounted age; the ground on which it stands is more ancient than the surrounding fields, for it rises and falls stormily, with huge boulders here and there; not a path intrudes upon it; the undergrowth is impenetrable to all but fox and bird and this cool red light about the trunks of the trees. Far away a gate is loudly shut, and the rich blue evening comes on and severs me irrevocably from all but the light in the old wood and the ghostly white cow-parsley flowers suspended on unseen stalks. And there, among the trees and their shadows, not understood, speaking a forgotten tongue, old dreads and formless awes and fascinations discover themselves and address the comfortable soul, troubling it, recalling to it unremembered years not so long past but that in the end it settles down into a gloomy tranquillity and satisfied discontent, as when we see the place where we were unhappy as children once. Druid and devilish deity and lean wild beast, harmless now, are revolving many memories with me under the strange, sudden red light in the old wood, and not more remote is the league-deep emerald sea-cave from the storm above than I am from the world.
CHAPTER X
IN A FARMYARD
We waited to let the forty cows go past, each of them pausing to lick the forehead of the strawberry cow that leaned over the gate of her stall and lowed continually concerning her newly-born white calf. But so slow they were in their wanton, obedient movement to the milking-shed that we turned and found another path, and thus surprised a pond lying deep among tansy flowers, grey nettles and billows of conquering bramble and brier.
The farmyard was always dusty, or deep with ridgy mire, from the trampling of men and horses and cows in the streets that wound among its cart-lodges, stables, stalls, milking-sheds and barns all glowing with mature tiles, and ricks gleaming with amber thatch. But in a corner lay unused, older than them all, the long-headed and snaky-bodied pond. We learned to know that pond.
Sometimes, when summer has honoured the water with a perfect suit of emerald green, that pond shows itself to be a monstrous, coiled, primæval thing, lying undisturbed, and content to be still and contemplative. Often has the monster been driven away—by draining; often has it returned, still a green, coiled, primæval being that disappears suddenly in November and leaves a soft, dark pool. Some have ventured to intrude upon the monster, to fish for the sleepy carp which are found when it has been driven from its nest of purple mud; but they fish in vain.
The solitary, dying ash tree at the edge of the pond seems, by day, when the monster is powerful there in the summer, to be but the skeleton of an old victim; or, in the winter, the sad and twisted nymph of the water. But every night, like any dreaming child or musing lover, though not perhaps so happily, is it let into a varied, strange, exalted paradise.