seem all its own; for there it first makes a deep sound in falling over a ledge among its own curded, quivering and moonlit yellow foam. Thereafter it opens wide between broad low banks from which the cattle can step and stand among the reeds under serene tall ashes, and the lily petals float upon it that catch against the branches and against the hearts of men in distant towns. There, too, among the lilies the brook first takes the stars into its heart, but gaily with all its flowers and thick herbage and its rippling fall never still amidst the arrow-headed reed. It moves like the high autumn wain, followed by many children, who have time to leave it and gather flowers and are yet never left behind. The heron comes to it at dawn, knowing from afar the dark pool where it curves under a steep bank and grim oak roots, and slopes down to it solemn and eager and alone in the winter morning. The sand-martin and wagtail often pause in their flight and hover above the placid water and the cool, reflected reeds and watermint. Where it is all of one depth, between straight banks of cowslip, the boys sit and let their feet waver in the flood and then roll or plunge in, with shouts and gurgling talk, while in the reeds, the dabchick waits with head just above water, trembling for her eggs or cheeping young. On Sunday the country lover, cruel all the week, brings his maid to the brook and, suddenly tender and a little proud, shows her the moist, weed-covered nest and delights in her melting eyes. Fed now by other brooks, from its own hills and from little woodland springs, the brook consents to spread into a pool in an old garden, and in the sweet imprisonment of lily and rose and iris and oleander lies as if asleep, an indolent Leda contented with the white swan, and yet escaping all the time, its wild soul rejoicing yonder beneath the heavily overhanging honeysuckled thorns of the wide meadows again. Under the white highway the brook runs and lures men to lean from the parapet by the milestone and look at the water and take up some coolness and some bitterness from it when they return to the blinding miles. Its course is marked by alders and willows, shaping cornfield and pasture in divine meanders that seem to have learnt rather to be contented with travelling than to be eager for the goal. Could a man but wander in that way once more, like the child in the field of flowers so multitudinous that she did not know what to do, but closed her eyes and was happy yet! Now the otter plays there, and where the ash roots twist into many a cave. Through leagues of country the brook runs, passing high, silent woods and misty, hot, luxuriant, flowering thickets and wet, cloudy copses full at evening of confused birds’ singing, which no one sees except the brook and the milk-white heifer who crowns herself in white roses in the shade as she stands in tall, moist, sumptuous angelica and watches her crowned image looking out of that fair sky in purest waters; then, suddenly emerging from this lowly country it falls into a river and is lost or seems to be lost in the turbid, serious flow that is soon to know the sea.
CHAPTER XVIII
AN AUTUMN GARDEN
The cottage gardens are ceremonious and bright with phlox and sunflower and hollyhock; the orchards are yellow with apple, and of all sunburnt hues with plum; in the descending lane you wade in a world of ragwort, knapweed and Canterbury-bell, with your head in the world of honeysuckle; and, parting the hazel branches to seek their branching clusters, you see now and then in the valley a farmhouse on whose walls and roofs the hues of fruit and flower all meet harmoniously. They meet as the colours of many pictures meet in some ancient palette, or as Plato and Catullus and Sidney and Shelley meet in some grey schoolmaster.
In every Autumn the farmhouse, with its old tiles and new and its glowing bricks (suppressing easily a few of a putrid blue scattered here and there), seems, in spite of its age, to be a great new flower. It is the royal flower of autumn. It expresses at once all that fruit and flower upon the hill have been expressing laboriously and word by word.
Perfect gay youth and sage antiquity are mingled in the aspect of the house; just as, in an autumn dawn, the gradual veiled golden pomp of serene victory speaks, to one mood, of the happy and mellow antiquity of the world, but, to another mood, speaks of the sublime, insurgent youth which all nights nourish and equip and send forth over the land. In winter it is old; it has apparently been long fortifying itself against the foreign cold of the landscape, snowy white or windy grey. In spring it is old; the green garlands it as in tender mockery. In summer it is old; it is impatient of the bragging rose on its walls and the multiplication of leaf and flower. But in September it is at home, as if after an exile; it remembers only pleasant things—the autumns of two centuries, their harvest, their fruit, their blossom, their hedgerow vintages of bryony and cornel and thorn, their ruddy moons. Gathered about it are the farm buildings of the same colour, stacks of dark hay, sharp-breasted ricks of corn, maternal, warm oast-houses and orchard and garden, all of the same family.
In the misty days, when no gleam falls from the warm sky on grass or water or fruit, you would say that the sun had stalled his horses for a season within the farmhouse walls; so much they glow; so glorious are they. I have seen the radiant cart-horses coming with grave nods through the farmyard at dawn as if they were to be yoked to the chariot of the sun; the red-haired carter was at least a Phaeton, a son of Apollo if not Apollo himself.
The garden borders are discreetly furnished, so that they are now as clouds in the neighbourhood of the sun, doing it honour by their liveries. They are populous with sun-flowers, hollyhocks (tall, solemn halberds at evening, guarding the outmost edge and held up mysteriously), red-hot pokers rising out of a lake of rose of Sharon and nasturtium, into which run promontories and peninsulas of snap-dragon, rocket, Shirley poppy, carnation and phlox of every hue that white and red confederate can invent; here and there fuchsia trees in rivers of autumn crocus, great poppies and evening primrose, and at their feet, like long, coloured shadows stretching away, red flax and pansies and the recurved stone-crop which the tortoise-shell butterfly loves. These bodies of colour change year by year—in one autumn the pansies made a long, curled purple dragon among all the rest; but always the taller flowers look as if stopped short in the mazes of a dance which is soon to be resumed. Between these two borders are two little lawns divided by a path, whereon the fanciful might see a little beam of the house’s influence in the peacock butterfly that returns continually to one stone, settling there as the wanton light cast on ceiling and wall by a raised glass settles when the glass is put down.
It is not a rich or choice garden, though a fitting one. Yet an earlier head of the farmer’s family—a student of allegorical prints and emblems, the designer of at least one, in which his own garden had notoriously served as a model for the Eden—was so much enamoured of the flowers and the house that he came, towards the end of his life, to think himself over-worldly in his esteem of them, but failed to overcome it, and, a little before his death, in the free wanderings of his mind, announced that he saw Paradise, and that it was even as his garden was, “nasturtiums and all, Jacob” (which was a thrust at the said son, a disliker of those flowers)—except that the vainglorious new carnations were not there.
Travelling beyond the garden, the house declares its lordship over four limes that stand before it, in the home field, at just such a distance that the flying blackbird, frightened from the garden, will stop there instead of going to the hedge beyond. As far as to these trees the house sends out its light and virtue. Approaching them from the hills, the eye of the wayfarer first salutes the out-buildings, the ricks and the elms; it turns to the house and gratefully pauses there; and last it glides to the limes and is at rest, delighted by that one lyric effort, yet with a slight gravity—even a sigh—at the accomplishment of its sweet toil. Then it is to be seen how noble is the order of the four trees. They are not in circle, square or line; they make no figure, except that they are in a sharp curve, straightening out as it nears you, so that they have a power as of the first ships of a fleet, coming into sight round a promontory and suggesting majestic numbers. At nightfall the swallows twitter among the topmost branches, sweetly, trippingly, one at a time, or in pairs and companies, for a little while. Suddenly lamps are lit within the house.