Summer is perfect now.
The wheat says so, when in the dawn it drips with half-an-hour’s rain and gleams like copper under the fresh, dim sky; it cries aloud the same when it crackles in the midday sun, and the golden sea of it washes murmurously to the feet of the hills.
In the hedges and fields the agrimony wands and mullein staves, the climbing vetch, the cushioned bird’s-foot lotus, the myriads of ragwort and sow thistle, are golden too.
The meadowsweet and honeysuckle flowers and the wild carrot seeds give out sweet scents, but not so strong as not to be drowned, when the wind blows, by a thousand lesser scents from field and wood and farmyard.
Wood pigeons coo in the high-shaded storeys of the beeches and in the wet willow copses where bushes and herbage have grown so dense that hardly a bird’s-nester or a lover would care to penetrate them. In the dark wood alleys, all day long, hang insects whose wings seem to be still in their swiftness, like golden lamps.
The gardens have amber lilies, fuchsia trees, phloxes, poppies, hollyhocks, carnations, snap-dragons, rockets and red flax rising above rose of Sharon and lemon-scented balm and yellow stone-crop, where the tortoise-shell butterflies worship with opening wings.
And on the garden walls the purple plums ooze and heave in the sun with yellow wasps that give a touch of horror to the excellent and abounding life of perfect summer.
These things and many more the eye notes carelessly. We are so rich that we do not count our treasure. We record them as contented worshippers their beads. They are but as dust above the corn when the thresher twists his oaken flail. The mother or master of them all seems to be the line of the chalk hills.
The corn sweeps to these hills, and on the strand which divides them is a hamlet of six thatched cottages and a farmhouse, and new haystacks round these, fine and sharp-angled, and old ones carved in steps and supported by props of ash. The cream pans and the churns glitter outside the house. A girl kneels at the brook that flows past and dips a jug among the cresses, trying to catch a trout at the same time. The eye dwells on these for a little while, saying that it could be content there never to wander again, and then rises to the downs, and away it goes, soaring as at the sound of organ or harp. For how proud-thoughted are these long, curving downs, whether they make a highway at noon for round white clouds or at night for the large moon. They uplift and allure and lead far away the eye. The mind follows the eye as the streaming wake follows the ship and is naught without it. Those curves suggest to the mind, confused and languid after long summer days in the lowland, that it also might follow such curves that lead on—surely—to noble thoughts and high discoveries, though without them it will be happy merely in following with joyous undulations to the windy beeches on the furthest height. To see them close by with our last glance before entering an inn is good, or, far off, on a midsummer night when we are to watch the sun rise from the encampment which makes one of them, or to fancy them by the winter fire; but to see them thus, in full summer, when day is separate from day only by brief, perfumed nights of stars, stimulates like a page of saga or history or a perfect rhyme, setting the heart free. “Let us be brave,” says a shepherd of these hills.
“In lofty numbers let us rave ...