Nevertheless the town smells heartily of cattle, sheep, and malt; a rookery and white orchard confront the railway station, and in the midst of the streets the long grass is rough and wet and full of jonquils round ancient masonry: seen from a height the town shares the sunlight equally with massy foliage and finds its place as a part of Nature, and the peregrine takes it in its sweep.
The turtle-doves have come and the oaks are budding bronze in the Weald. The steep roadside banks are cloaked in grass, violet, and primrose still, and robin-run-in-the-hedge and stitchwort and cuckoo flowers, and the white-throats talk in the hazel copses. A brooklet runs in a hollow that would almost hold the Thames, and crossing the road fills a rushy mill-pond deep below, and makes a field all golden and shining with marigold. Just beyond, a gnarled lime avenue leads to a grey many-windowed house of stone within a stately park. Opposite the gate an old woman sits on the grass, her feet in the dust at the edge of the road; motor-cars sprinkle her and turn her black to drab; she sits by the wayside eternally, expecting nothing.
Turn out of this main road, and by-ways that tempt neither cyclists nor motorists go almost as straight. Here is no famous house, not a single inn or church, but only the unspoilt Weald, and far away, a long viaduct that carries noiseless trains against the sky above hollow meadows. Bluebell, primrose, anemone—anemone, primrose, bluebell—star and cloud the lush banks and the roots of the blackthorns, hazels and maples of the hedge. A stream washes the roots of many oaks, and flows past flat fields of dusky grass, cuckoo flower and marigold,—black pines at the verge. The light smoke of a roadside fire ascends into the new leaves of the hazels where two tramps are drying their clothes. Many oaks are down, and lie pale and gleaming like mammoth bones among the bluebells in plantations roughened by old flint pits.
The faggots of oak tops and cords of twisted timber are being made up; the woodmen light a fire and the chips fly from the axes. It is only to these men that I am a stranger as I walk through the land. At first I admire the hardihood and simplicity of their necessary toil among the oaks, but they lift their dark eyes, and then—it is as strange as when I pass a white embowered house, and the road is muffled with straw, and I hear by chance that some one unknown is dying behind that open window through which goes the thrush’s song and the children’s homeward chatter. Neither townsman or countryman, I cannot know them. The countryman knows their trades and their speech, and is of their kind; the townsman’s curiosity wins him a greeting. But in May at least I am content, in the steep little valley made by a tributary of the Medway, its sides wooded with oak and the flowers glad of the sun among the lately cleared undergrowth, and the cuckoo now in this oak and now in that, and the turtle-doves whose voices, in the soft lulls after rain, make the earth seem to lie out sleek in the sun, stretching itself to purr with eyes closed. The cuckoo is gone before we know what his cry is to tell us or to remind us of.
There are few things as pleasant as the thunder and lightning of May that comes in the late afternoon, when the air is as solid as the earth with stiff grey rain for an hour. There is no motion anywhere save of this perpendicular river, of the swaying rain-hit bough and quivering leaf. But through it all the thrushes sing, and jolly as their voices are the roars and echoes of the busy thunder quarrying the cliffs of heaven. And then the pleasure of being so wet that you may walk through streams and push through thickets and be none the wetter for it.
Before it is full night the light of the young moon falls for a moment out of a troubled but silent sky upon the young corn, and the tranquil bells are calling over the woods.
Then in the early morning the air is still and warm, but so moist that there is a soul of coolness in the heat, and never before were the leaves of the sorrel and wood sanicle and woodruff, and the grey-green foliage and pallid yellow flowers of the large celandine, so fair. The sudden wren’s song is shrewd and sweet and banishes heaviness. The huge chestnut tree is flowering and full of bees. The parsley towers delicately in bloom. The beech boughs are encased in gliding crystal. The nettles, the millions of nettles in a bed, begin to smell of summer. In the calm and sweet air the turtle-doves murmur and the blackbirds sing—as if time were no more—over the mere.
The roads, nearly dry again, are now at their best, cool and yet luminous, and at their edges coloured rosy or golden brown by the sheddings of the beeches, those gloves out of which the leaves have forced their way, pinched and crumpled by the confinement. At the bend of a broad road descending under beeches these parallel lines of ruddy chaff give to two or three days in the year a special and exquisite loveliness, if the weather be alternately wet and bright and the long white roads and virgin beeches are a temptation. What quests they propose! They take us away to the thin air of the future or to the underworld of the past. This one takes us to the old English sweetness and robustness of an estate of large meadows, sound oak trees not too close together, and a noble house within an oak-paled park. A poet and a man lives there, one who recalls those other poets—they are not many—who please us over the gulf of time almost as much by the personal vigour and courage which we know to have been theirs or is suggested by their work, men like Chaucer, Sidney, Ben Jonson, Drayton, Byron, William Morris, and among the living —— and —— and ——. I think we should miss their poems more than some greater men’s if they were destroyed. They stand for their time more clearly than the greatest. For example, Chaucer’s language, ideas and temper make it impossible for us to read his work, no matter in how remote a study or garden, shut out from time and change, without feeling that he and all those who rode, and talked and were young with him are skeletons or less, though Catullus or Milton may be read with no such feeling. Chaucer seems to remind us of what once we were. His seems a golden age. He wrote before Villon had inaugurated modern literature with the cry—
Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?
before men appear to us to have learned how immense is the world and time. But we, looking back, with the help of this knowledge, see in the work of this man who filled a little nook of time and space with gaiety, something apart from us, an England, a happy island which his verses made. His gaiety bathes the land in the light of a golden age and the freshness of all the May days we can never recover. He “led a lusty life in May”: “in his lust present was all his thought.” And the gaiety is no less in the sorrowful passages than in the joyful; when, for example, he compares the subjection of the fierce, proud Troilus to love, with the whipping of a spirited horse; when he uses the apparent commonplace about age creeping in “always as still as stone” upon fresh youth; when he exclaims to the false Jason—