BREAN DOWN: FLOTSAM AND JETSAM.
It is a cold, grey world that lies waiting for the dawn—a misty sky, in which one pale planet glimmers; a hazy sea, whose fretted levels shine faintly in the moonlight; shadowy hills, along whose winding line, here darkened with clustering woodlands, and there whitened by still slumbering hamlets, a grey mist hangs. It hangs, too, like a vast canopy, over the wide plain, whose sunburnt meadows seem to melt away into an infinite distance; and along the wandering river whose brown flood loiters idly to the sea.
A silent world, for the most part. Even the voice of the river, that but now was chafing loud against the shingle bar piled high along the shore, is failing in the swift inrush of the tide. It is a slow moving and taciturn stream that, as it wound along the level fringes of the hills, long since forgot the sunshine and the laughter and the crystal clearness of its youth, when, under banks that were hung with fern and meadow-sweet, it sang over the brown pebbles of its bed, round
". . Many a fairy foreland, set
With willow-weed and mallow."
But the tide, that is hushing the hoarse song of the river, swells louder every moment the troubled roar of the sea, whose grey waves are plunging in over the rattling shingle and the shining sand.
And as the light of dawning strengthens over the low grey hills to the eastward, other sounds break in upon the stillness. Far off across the moor a curlew calls. A heron who all night long, it may be, has been keeping his lone vigil in the marshes, and who is now flying leisurely home-ward to the hills, lets fall a muttered croak in passing—midnight revellers both. But the white gulls that rise and fall and toy like butterflies above the broadening stream calling to each other with discordant voices, are children of the sunshine.
Of the sunshine, too, is the music of a lark, who, high up in the grey mist, brooding like a fate over the brown and thirsty meadows, seems to hover at the very gates of dawn. Yet there is a sound of the sea even on his silvery tongue. Among the sweet notes of his familiar "babble of green fields," he brings in at times the cry of the curlew and the whistle of the plover.