The South Country

by Edward Thomas

This conception of universal divinity sprang from his doctrine of Love. By love we can be at one with the divine power which he calls God. “Love,” he says, “is the true means by which the world is enjoyed: our love to others, and others’ love to us.” Why, even the love of riches he excuses, since “we love to be rich ... that we thereby might be more greatly delightful.” And just as Richard Jefferies says that Felise loved before ever she loved a man, so Traherne says: “That violence wherewith a man sometimes doteth upon one creature is but a little spark of that love, even towards all, which lurketh in his nature.... When we dote upon the perfections and beauties of some one creature, we do not love that too much, but other things too little.” It is this love by which alone the commonwealth of all forms of life can be truly known, and men are like God when they are “all life and mettle and vigour and love to everything,” and “concerned and happy” in all things. His feeling of the interdependence of all the world is thus inseparable from his doctrine of love; love inspires it; by love alone can it be real and endure. “He that is in all and with all can never be desolate.” And, nevertheless, he cannot always be thinking of the universe—he thought that the sun went round the earth—and just as he regards man as superior to other forms of life, so, perhaps, he has a filial love of “this cottage of Heaven and Earth,” the brown land and blue sky, and one of the most beautiful of his meditations is where he says—

“When I came into the country, and being seated among silent trees, and meads, and hills, had all my time in mine own hands, I resolved to spend it all, whatever it cost me, in the search of happiness, and to satiate that burning thirst which Nature had enkindled in me from my youth. In which I was so resolute, that I chose rather to live upon ten pounds a year, and go in leather clothes, and feed upon bread and water, so that I might have all my time clearly to myself, than to keep many thousands per annum in an estate of life where my time would be devoured in care and labour. And God was so pleased to accept of that desire, that from that time to this, I have had all things plentifully provided for me, without any care at all, my very study of Felicity making me more to prosper, than all the care in the whole world. So that through His blessing I live a free and a kingly life as if the world were turned again into Eden, or much more, as it is at this day.”

Traherne is remarkable in many ways, but for nothing more than for his mingling of man and nature in the celestial light of infancy. He begins, indeed, with the corn—the “orient and immortal wheat”—but he goes on to the dust and stones and gates of the town, and then to the old men and the young men and the children. But it was only on “some gilded cloud or flower” that Vaughan saw “some shadows of eternity”; he longs to travel back to his childish time and to a city of the soul, but a shady city of palm-trees. Wordsworth, though he says that “every common spirit” was “apparell’d in celestial light” in his early childhood, only mentions “meadow, grove and stream”; it is a tree, a single field, a flower, that reminds him of his loss; it is the fountains, meadows, hills and groves which he is anxious to assure of his lasting love. Perhaps many people’s memories in this kind are of Nature more than of men. Even the social Lamb is at his deepest in recalling the child who was solitary in the great house and garden of Blakesmoor. With some the reason for this priority of Nature is that her solitudes are the most rich. The presence of other children and of adults is comparatively commonplace, and in becoming, permanently or temporarily, part of a community, the spirit makes some sacrifice. Provided, then, that a child is happy and at ease in the solitude of Nature, it is more open than in company to what is afterwards regarded as spiritual intercourse. But above all, our memories of Nature are seldom or never flawed by the seeming triviality, the dislikes, the disgusts, the misunderstandings which give to memories of human society something of dulness and the commonplace. Thinking of ourselves and other children, we may also think of things which make idealization impossible. Thinking of ourselves in a great wood or field of flowers ever so long ago, it is hard not to exaggerate whatever give-and-take there was between the spirit of the child and the vast pure forces of the sun and the wind. In those days we did not see a tree as a column of a dark stony substance supporting a number of green wafers that live scarcely half a year, and grown for the manufacture of furniture, gates, and many other things; but we saw something quite unlike ourselves, large, gentle, of foreign tongue, without locomotion, yet full of the life and movement and sound of the leaves themselves, and also of the light, of the birds, and of the insects; and they were givers of a clear, deep joy that cannot be expressed. The brooding mind easily exalts this joy with the help of the disillusions and the knowledge and the folly and the thought of later years. A little time ago I heard of the death of one whom I had once seemed to know well, had roamed and talked and been silent with him, and I should have gone on doing so had he not gone far away and died. And when I heard of his death I kept on recalling his face and figure to my mind under familiar conditions, in the old rooms, by the same river, under the same elms. As before, I saw him in the clothes which he used to wear, smiling or laughing or perhaps grim. But wherever he was and whatever his look, there was always something—the shadow of a shadow, but awful—in his face which made me feel that had I only seen it (and I felt that I ought to have seen it), in those days, I should have known he was to die early, with ambitions unfulfilled, far away.

And in this same way will the brain work in musing of earlier times. All that has come after deepens that candid brow of the child as a legend will darken a bright brook.

I once saw a girl of seven or eight years walking alone down a long grassy path in an old garden. On one hand rose a peaceful long slope of down; on the other, beyond the filberts, a high hedge shut out all but the pale blue sky, with white clouds resting on its lower mist like water-lilies on a still pool. Turning her back to the gabled house and its attendant beeches, she walked upon the narrow level path of perfect grass. The late afternoon sun fell full upon her, upon her brown head and her blue tunic, and upon the flowers of the borders at either side, the lowly white arabis foaming wild, the pansy, the white narcissus, the yellow jonquil and daffodil, the darker smouldering wallflowers, the tall yellow leopard’s-bane, the tufts of honesty among the still dewy leaves of larkspur and columbine. But here and there, as she walked, the light was dimmed by the clusters of cool white humming cherry-blossom hanging out of the hot sky. In front of her the cherry-trees seemed to meet and make a corridor of dark stems on either hand, paved green and white and gold, and roofed by milky white clouds that embowered the clear, wild warble of black-caps. Farther on, the flowers ceased and the grass was shadowed by new-leaved beeches, and at length involved in an uncertain mist of trees and shadows of trees, and there the cuckoo cried. For the child there was no end to the path.

She walked slowly, at first picking a narcissus or two, or stooping to smell a flower and letting her hair fall over it to the ground; but soon she was content only to brush the tips of the flowers with her outstretched hands, or, rising on tiptoe, to force her head up amongst the lowest branches of cherry-bloom. Then she did nothing at all but gravely walk on into the shadow and into Eternity, dimly foreknowing her life’s days. She looked forward as one day she would look back over a broad sea of years, and in a drowsy, haunted gloom, full of the cuckoo’s note, saw herself going always on and on among the interlacing shadows of tree trunks and branches and joys and pleasures and pains and sorrows that must have an end, she knew not how. She stopped, not venturing into that strange future under the beeches. She stared into the mist, where hovered the phantoms of the big girl, the young woman, the lover ... which in turn she was to become. Under the last cherry-tree something went out of her into the shadow, and those phantoms fed upon her blood as she stood still. But presently in the long beech corridors the gloom began to lighten and move and change to a glinting blue that approached her. “Pee-oi,” shouted the peacock, now close at hand; “pee-oi ... pee-oi,” as he passed her by, and turning, she also shouted “pee-oi,” frightening the cuckoo from the beeches, as she ran back among the flowers to the house.

What is to come of our Nature-teaching in schools? What does it aim at? Whence does it arise? In part, no doubt, it is due to our desire to implant information. It is all very well for the poet to laugh—

When Science has discovered something more

We shall be happier than we were before;

but that is the road we are on at a high rate of speed. If we are fortunate we shall complete our inventory of the contents of heaven and earth by the time when the last man or woman wearing the last pair of spectacles has decided that, after all, it is a very good world and one which it is quite possible to live in. That, however, is an end which would not in itself be a sufficient inducement to push on towards it; still less can such a vision have set us upon the road.