You may see it—on still evenings when the mist prevails over all things except the robin’s song, and makes even that more melancholy—or when the songs of many nightingales besiege, enter and possess the house and the deserted farmyard—or when the cold and entirely silent air under a purple November sky chills the blood, so that friendship and hope and purposes are all in vain as in an opiate dream—then you may see the ash-tree take heart. It has the air of one going home upon a lonely road that will not end in loneliness. Those bare and stiff, decaying branches are digits pointing homeward through the sky; the tree forgets the monster at its feet and the children who laugh and the supremacy of the buildings round about. It might seem, with those extended branches, to be a self-torturing and aspiring fanatic who had endured thus for uncounted days and nights, and has his vision at last. For, when night is perfect, the tree exults, and though it is perhaps not joyous, it is as one of those great sorrowful temperaments—of soldier, or explorer, or humorist—so active and inexorable that they may claim kinship with the truly joyous ones. If it is still sad, it is “endiademed with woe.” How large and satanic it is beside the heavy rounded oaks and the stately, feminine elms and the lovely limes.
Even so might a philosopher heighten and lord it, travelling in Charon’s ship along with deflated tyrants and rhetoricians and bold and crimson animals born to eat provinces and to poison worms; even so, Ossian and Arthur and Cuchullain and Achilles triumph over men that were yesterday on thrones and chariots.
Often have I seen the tree, and it alone, giving character to the whole valley and filling the land as a bell fills a cathedral or as the droning of a bee fills a lily.
“With him enthroned
Sat sable-vested night, eldest of things,
The consort of his reign.”
My little thoughts seem to be drawn up among the black branches like twittering birds going to rest in some high cliff that is a chief pillar of the fabric of the night. Half dead and threatened though it be, surely the spirit of it, which is to many a broad and tragical night as the arm of a great painter to his picture, will survive not only me and my words but the tree itself. I have approached it on some moonlit midnights, when the sky was so deep that the tall oaks were as weeds at the bottom of an unfathomed sea, and it has stood up erect and puissant, as if it were the dreamer at one with all he sees, in a world of blind men with open eyes. Then, as the autumn dawn arrived it was still looking towards Orion; defrauded, indeed for a time of its vision, but not of its glory. The swaying cows wandered to the milking-sheds. The little bats ran to and fro in the air and made their little snipping and drumming sounds. It was light; but the ash tree was not utterly cast down; it still walked in the way of the stars; it was inscribed in solemn characters upon the sun that rode up red in the mist.
CHAPTER XI
MEADOWLAND
This is one of the tracts of country which are discovered by few except such as study the railway maps of England in order to know what to avoid. On those maps it is one of several large triangular sections which railways bound, but have not entered. All day long the engines scream along their boundaries, and at night wave fiery arms to the sky, as if to defend a forbidden place or a sanctuary. Within there is peace, and a long ancient lane explores it, with many windings and turnings back, as if it were a humble, diffident inquirer, fortunately creeping on, aiming at some kind of truth and not success, yet without knowing what truth is when he starts. Here it hesitates by a little pool, haunted, as is clear from the scribbled footprints on the shore, only by moorhen and wagtail, and, in the spindle trees beside it, by a witty thrush; there it goes joyously forward, straight among lines of tall oaks and compact thorns; then it turns to climb a hill from which all the country it has passed is visible first, meadow and withy copse and stream, and next the country which it has yet to pass—a simple dairy land with green grass, green woods, and stout grey haystacks round the pale farms. But in a little while it winds, confused again under high maple and dogwood hedges, downhill, as if it had already forgotten what the hilltop showed. On the level again the hollow wood which the willow wren fills with his little lonely song has to be penetrated; the farmyard must be passed through, and the spirit of the road looks in at the dairy window and sees the white discs of cream in the pans and the cool-armed maid lifting a cheese; and yet another farmyard it loiters in, watching the roses and plume-poppy and lupin of the front garden, going between the stables and the barn, and there spreading out as if it had resolved to cease and always watch the idle waggon, the fair-curved hay-rakes leaning against the wall, and the fowls which are the embodiment of senseless reverie—when lo! the path goes straight across wide and level pastures, with a stream at its side. Seen afar off, losing itself among the elms that watch over the hill-side church, the little white road is as some quiet, hermit saint, just returned from long seclusion, and about to take up his home for ever and ever in the chancel; but when we reach the place, he is still as far away, still uncertain in the midst of the corn below. At the charlock-yellow summit the road seems to lead into the sky, where the white ladders are let down from the sun.