Blackbird and thrush in every bush,
Stare, linnet, and cock-sparrow,
You pretty elves, amongst yourselves
Sing my fair love good morrow.
To give my love good morrow,
Sing, birds, in every furrow.”
In those days when the house was built the poets were mainly townsmen, preferring the town. Of the modern sad passion of Nature they had nothing: they loved the fields in their season. They went out into the country and in their fêtes champêtres there was something gay and foreign from us, the thought of which calls up a vision of fields more unspoiled than they are now. There were elves in those days; country people saw them, if poets failed. If you were returning home after nightfall, from a day’s shooting, you might see the torches among the oaks that lit the king of the cats to his grave. The country had always been there and was to be there for ever. Men greeted it and smiled as once they greeted Helen, not thinking of her immortality. And there—yonder, half a mile away—lingers that age. I see it in the green and silver wheat, and its glimmering, rustling hurry, and in the bright path beside; the very noises of a gun rolling and breaking up and embedding themselves in the dense wood cannot mutilate it, but rather hint that somewhere, where the echoes last play, a spirit of mirth is in hiding still.
The farmer himself confirms the superstition. Though nearly seventy, he is staunch and straight, and spending most of his day on horseback, with his calm, large-featured, sandstone face, filling easily and handsomely with clear-souled anger and delight, he suggests the thought of a Centaur, an impossible, noble dream of horse and man created by a god dissatisfied with man and beast. Thirty centuries ago such a man, so marvellously in harmony with the earth, would have gone down in men’s memories as a demi-god or the best-loved of the fauns. His voice rings over the meadows or across the table at the inn as strong as a cow’s, as deep and humming and sweet as a bee’s in a chimney. When he passes by men look at him, I think, as if he cast no shadow, so compact of light is he. He has known sorrow, he has known pains that threaten to crack the brain, but never melancholy. There is a kind of gaiety in his sorrow even as in his joy; for sorrow changes him only as a shadow changes a merry brook. He breathes of a day when men had not so far outstripped the lark and nightingale in heaviness as we have done. His jesting bathes the room or the lane in the light of a Golden Age and the freshness of all the May days we can never recover. Nor do I know anything human more pleasant than his grave smiling as he stands in the newly reaped cornfields under the last light and sees the large purple land and takes it all unto himself, and then turns without a sigh and, drawing a long draught of his own cider in the cool granary, drinks deep. He rises early and yet is as cheerful when he goes first afield as when he goes to bed.
His house, dark with panelling and heavy furniture of every generation since it was built, would be gloomy were it not for his blithe sentiment about the past. He speaks of the long-dead generations not as if they were names, but so that they are known certainly to have lived and worked and enjoyed. That one planted the spreading oak, that globed green world of nightingale and willow-wren and dove; that added the knolled pasture and cut the deep, stony lane that leads to it through the brook; another built the fruit wall and bought the copy of Tristram Shandy that stands with a hundred other books in the dining-room. The books themselves are good to look at, all of them original or early editions. There is The Whole Duty of Man and many sermons, Prior, The Spectator, Thomson’s Seasons, Fielding, The Rambler, The Task, The Deserted Village, The Waverley Novels, Dickens, and nothing later than In Memoriam; at that the family seems to have stopped buying books. He knows them shrewdly enough, but it is as what the family has approved and lived on that he values them. Never was a man who seemed to take his mortality so happily and naturally. One day, showing me a small board of ancient things, he brought out a tray of coins, none earlier than Charles II., but each connected with one or another of the family. Amongst them was a modern sixpence. That was his third deposit, after the guinea and the groat, and he was too much pleased with these slender memorials not to do his own part in continuing them. “What,” he said carelessly, “would they think of me in a hundred years’ time if I had not put a sixpence in?” And he smiled lightly as if he had been on a hill and seen the long tracts of time ahead and his farm and strangers of his own blood working in its fields.