PART IV
THE MOUNTAINS
CHAPTER XXXVI
THE FIRST DAFFODILS
It was one of those early March days in a mountainous country when a warmly clothed man, in good health and walking rapidly, can just foretaste the spring. The icy dark water in stony brooklets shone golden whenever it could find the sun. This gold seemed a brand upon the winter that marked it for death. There was gold also on the turf between the walls and the roadways, for there were hundreds of celandine flowers: it was to be found also in the miniature forests of the moss that made detached and placid worlds upon every stone of the walls; in the little hollow woods, or steep and craggy orchard plots, where the first daffodils were unveiled; in the rickyards where fowls scattered the gleaming straw; in the fur of the squirrel that moved as if the swirling wind dissolved and shaped it again continually; in the warm ale at “The White Hart.”
But when the eye grew proud and the wind rose and every half hour the horizontal snow put out everything of the world except its noises—the cry of the curlew, the buzz of pewits’ wings, the song of the missel thrush that came through the storm like a mere ode to liberty in the midst of revolution—then it was winter still, and the rustling oak leaves talked of December. And when the snowfall ceased with a rush as if upon the wings of a peregrine, those small signs of spring were no more than a child’s sand castles on a vast sea shore, and not so noticeable as the thick suds and flakes of snow hanging from the hedges on the walls and turned to mists by the restless robins.
On one side, for some miles, ran a large fell that was a home and playground of winds, steep and long to be crossed, and all white and grim, shutting out home and the pleasures that are found among men. On the other side, steep also and widely shaped with small, precipitous crags and angry surf of heather and here and there haggish thorns, lay a moor. Between these two the road rose and fell over lesser but steep hills, and from one hilltop I could see the sea beyond the moor. It was grey, without light, with long quivering lines that never ended, but insubstantial; it seemed rather the grisly offspring of a mind made pregnant by the wintry melancholy. The mountains came down to the edge of it, like lions to drink, ten miles away. Not a house was visible, and on the sea the few ships were like the water itself, inventions of my own, as it were, which I had launched upon that infinite desolation for sport.
All day, ahead and always at the same distance, rose high mountains, with crude outlines as of heavy and frosty land fresh turned by the plough; the long ravines of snow upon their sides made their peaks more sharp and their heights more sudden. They haunted the day.
Now and then the snow fell, and in the weak sunshine that followed, the light struck up from the snow and made the white breasts of the gulls seem opal lanterns full of flame, and the hazel thickets were nets of silver and crystal branches, invisible in their own splendour.
I descended to a small deep river that ran, with noble curves of power, solemn and full of some inhuman simple purpose. For a moment the sunlight fell on one curve of it and the windy waves were now a stately glittering cavalcade, and now a dance of fairies into which some ass-headed Bottom suddenly intruded with a gust from a cloud, making them whirl faster and then disappear. But the river was careless of the light; it went on as before, unchanged even when for another moment all that grim, serious water was changed into white spray and light by a fall.