The stream going helpless and fast between high banks is gloomy until it is turned to bright, airy foam and hanging crystal by the mill; over the restless pool below hangs a hawthorn all white and fragrant and murmurous with bloom.
Above the mill, to the north, the land rises in long, lustrous, melodiously swelling lawns of perfect green to the dark borders of a beech wood, where the sweet, thick air fills the hollows among the virginal foliage with blue. In one place the beeches have parted and made a broad avenue for the eye to travel towards a noble stone house, many-angled, many-windowed, grey, discreet, holding, or on such a day seeming to hold, human life worthy to walk upon the long lawns to the mill, where now nothing moves except the divine sunlight and, in the hollows, its little cloudy elves.
Below the mill, to the south, is a land of tall trees standing in conclaves of woods, in whispering groups, or solitary, each in its sovereignty of shade and shining grass; of apple orchards and farmhouses that lie, amidst their haystacks and ricks of straw, in gulfs among the trees; and here and there the yellow skeleton of an oak, encircled by its bark and twigs in piles, thrusts its sharp appealing lines through the neighbouring green.
There is the tall, stony beech, its bole as fair as human shoulders and flanks, lighted and shadowed changefully, its topmost branches curving over as if with the weight of birds alighting, and doves and wood-wrens among the leaves; the twisted birch’s misty, moving foliage as of a pensive fountain; the oak, whose dark branches only yesterday were interwoven like the flight of many bats at twilight, now an enchanted hill of glowing bronze; the straight, lean, athletic ash, like a young prince in short hunting tunic; the calm, feminine sycamore whose fresh foliage hangs in folds as of smoke; the pollard willow, along the stream, an ancient, neglected, grotesque deity, reluctantly assuming its green garlands for yet another spring.
These things and many more the eye sees delightedly, and having ranged, finds its chief joy in some narrow tract of the large land, like the first field below the mill.
It is but an acre or two of sweet, undulating pasture, bounded on two sides by tall hawthorn hedges, on the third by an ash copse, on the other by an orchard of apple trees. The grass is pure green, revealing here and there a purple orchis or dog violet or blue self-heal, except where the crystal brook rushes through it and gathers white and gold about its banks. Here no shadow falls, or if it does the dew and blossoms break it up. The leaning and interwoven apple trees make a white and wine-filled sky by their dense clots of bloom. The swallows embroider the air with their songs and their blue flight. A farmhouse walls are dusky red between the trunks. Overhead, the dim blue sky lets a white cloud roll out at intervals like lilies from a pool. And the blackbird perfects his song indolently; the thrush thinks clearly, sharply aloud, with nothing long drawn out; and the willow wren happily complains for ever—a voice that has wings and must revolve continually through the land to express for one or another the vague pains or pleasures of spring day.
The hedges and the orchard and the copse shut out everything except that, through the ash stems, there is the dim, white sea far off, gentle, like a fantastic tale of men and women that never were, in countries where no discoverer’s keel has ever shrieked upon the beach, to which the eye wanders now and then, returning again to the apple blossom and the grass with an added security.
Over the green grass walks the farmer’s daughter in a white dress, on her head a mushroom-shaped straw hat that reveals black hair curving like the wings of a dove over the half moon of her brow, and like smoke above her golden nape. She stands still like a straight birch in heavy snow—her form and her dress one and yet separate, and definitely female in rise and fall. She walks like a summer cloud, except that her feet, clad in shining black, take firm hold upon the grass and spurn it strongly, yet with the light short steps of a proud bird. Her left hand carries purple orchis and white stitchwort, and carefully, but fantastically and unnecessarily, raises the hem of her skirt to the height of the tallest dandelions. Her right hand is free to gather flowers, to feel the growth of the young greenfinches in the nest, to arrange and disarrange her hair. Her small round head is lifted up, her eyes fully round, her lips too much curved to meet very often yet, her nose clear and straight, and the fair, wing-like curve of bone from ear to chin seeming to be born of the shadow which it creates upon her neck. Her childhood has passed, her maturity has not come. She is a Lady May, careless, proud, at ease. On her lips, indeed, is a childish song; but she has become more strange and distant to children than older women are, for the moment—perhaps for to-day only, since to-morrow she may meet a man and stay late in the lanes. She is as strange as the silver water that gushes among green grass and marigold in the copse, or as the blue swallow slanting down the sunny red wall. To look at her is to take deep breaths as at the savour of warm bread, of honeysuckle, of cows when they come from the meadows into a dusty road. A speech that should be all sapphires and pearls would not be worthy of her—to-day. She is at the altar of Aphrodite “full of pity”—to-day. She has been carried far in the goddess’s dove-drawn chariot over mountains and seas, and has bathed in the same fountain as Aphrodite, nor yet been seen of men—to-day. Delay, sun, above the sea; wait, moon, below the hills; sing, birds; rustle, new-leaved beeches; for to-morrow and the day after and for ever until the end this will be but a memory and may be all she has. She walks hardly faster than the shadows over the fair grass: and you, Time, O Woodman! set not your axe at the foot of this tree, lean not upon it with your strong hands. See! the crest nods and the air trembles; let it not fall to-day.