All you that love hunting draw near unto me,
Since Reynard is dead, we have heard of his downfall,
Here’s a health to Squire Sands of High Graythwaite Hall.
Tally-ho, tally-ho! Hark forward, away, tally-ho!”
The road has turned away into a valley. The mountains are close ahead, and the billowy moorland prepares me for them, with hawks in all its hollows, and small ponds, the silent sport of winds that roar in crags and hiss in grasses, and then at length a long, blue pool, edged by yellow reeds and receiving the shadow of a steep oak wood. There the wind is lured into many metamorphoses among the ripples—at one moment a writhing, hundred-headed snake, at another the wraith perhaps of a swift skater who was once drowned in the water, and again a swarm of dark bees. At first sight this blue expanse, with narrow ends running into the moorland, and its edge of shivering reed, lays hold upon the mind. All day, unseen of any but the shepherd, the water reflects the birds and the clouds, and all night the stars, until it might be supposed to have acquired a symbolic sadness and tranquillity by thus keeping watch on all the nights and days since it began. There, in its depths, hang the mountain clouds and the immense spaces of sky, with something added by the reflecting water, as if it were some gloomy opiate personality that turned all things to its own tune. Even the joyous, golden fleece of the perfect summer morning are rendered by the pool with touches of wizardry and night, and when a little breeze erases them for a moment it is like a breath of delight sweeping over an immortal pain. The nearest mountain, too, is there. The highest summit, engraved with snow, shows in the depths like a bleached skull emerging from ridgy tracts of dark sand. There, also, are the long, tawny and olive flanks of the ascent, inlaid with purple and blue by precipices and cloud-shadows, with grey and ruddy woods below, and the silver wounds of birches. Now and then my own shadow flits among them, as if a magician had compelled me to wander in that giddy profound of water and sky. As I look down I seem to see what men have made of the universe in the past, with the help of poet and priest, by plunging it in the sorrows and uncertainties of their own heart and brain. There is superstition, there religion and poetry, confining the great heavens and the hills with sun and moon and stars, within these few acres of desolate mountain water. There are the stories of the gods and of a heaven that overhung mortals with hideous aspect. There, also, the eager courage of man’s soul when first he tried to burst “the strong bars of Nature’s gateways”—while the sun and wind contend upon the water—and set out upon the adventure which has made us “equal with heaven.” Looking up, away from the pool, there still are the mountains and the sky, just as they were, still inscrutably holding out in one hand laughter and in one hand tears for us to choose from. I look down and the singing lark, against a white cloud, is singing high and wise things in some contemplative poet’s verse. I look up and, behold! the new joy of the spring, unintelligible, and for the moment not asking to be understood, but to be shared; and as we climb happily the pool no longer imposes its version of life, for yonder is the True upon the hills, and the eyes dilate and the nostrils and the lungs accept the air and the “darling of men and gods ... mistress of the nature of things” takes her place with us.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
UNDER THE MOOR
It was June, but it had been like March for many miles upon the rough moor until, with the dawn, I came to a lowland where there were mossy fields with clear rain pools among the flowering gorse; and meadows cut into two planes by small, perpendicular cliffs of stone, so that on one the cattle were already feeding in the early light and on the other still lying down; and wheat fields that had islands of stone in their midst; and then at last an immense meadow sloping down towards fresh oak woods and the sea, and rising out of it rounded beechen knolls which, Druid-like, preserved the night under their domes of foliage, though all the grass was flooded by the slow tides of dawn. The white cow-parsley flowers hovered around me on invisible stems and gave out the thick summer flavours of nettles and myriad grasses. And lying down and sleeping in the sun until morning was hot, I awoke and seemed to hear a tale of the south as the air grew mazy with the scent of elder and thyme and the colour of bird’s-foot lotus and all the grass, and the sky leaned down upon the earth in milky purples. It was just such a change from the poor land to the rich as is expressed in the ancient tale of Cherry of Zennor told by Hunt in his Popular Romances of the West of England.
The girl, Cherry of Zennor, could not contentedly put up with her life at home, because her parents were poor, living on potatoes and fish, and she, though she was pretty and could run like a hare, had never a ribbon for her curls nor a new frock to go to church or to fair in. So she set out to get a servant’s place somewhere in the “low countries.”