How the arches spring overhead, and the brown leaves flutter among them! In and out, and through and through, across and across, with delicacy, veining the very shadows. For miles we may wander beneath them, and see no two alike. How, for fear of wearying us, after infinite twists and turns—but none of them contortions—after playing across the heavens, and sweeping away the sunshine, now in this evening light they hover, and rustle like the skirts of death. Is there one of them with its lichen–mantle copied from its neighbourʼs? Is there one that has borrowed a line, a character, even a cast of complexion from its own brother rubbing against it? Their arms bend over us as we walk, we are in their odour and influence, we know that, like the Magi of old, they adore only God and His sun; and, when we come out from under them, we never ask why we are sad.
CHAPTER XX.
There is a long, mysterious thrill, a murmur rather felt than heard, a shudder of profundity, which traverses the woodland hollows at the sunʼs departure. In autumn most especially, when the glory of trees is saddening, and winter storms are in prospect, this dark disquietude moves the wood, this horror at the nightfall, and doubt of the coming hours. Touched as with a subtle stream, the pointlets of the oak–leaves rise, the crimped fans of the beech are fluttered, and lift their glossy ovals, the pendulous chains of the sycamore swing; while the poplar flickers its silver skirts, the tippets and ruffs of the ivy are ruffling, and even the three–lobed bramble–leaf cannot repress a shiver.
Touched with a stream at least as subtle, we, who are wandering among the dark giants, shiver and shrink, we know not why; and our hearts beat faster, to feel how they beat. The cause is the same both for tree and for man. Earthly nature has not learned to count upon immortality. Therefore all her works, unaided, loathe to be undone.
Whether it were this, or his craving for his dinner, that made Sir Cradock Nowell feel chilled, as he waited under the shuddering trees for his friend John Rosedew—far be it from me to say, because it may have been both, sir. And the other cause to which he always ascribed it—after the event—to wit, a divine afflatus of diabolical presentiment, is one we have no faith in, until we own to nightmare. Anyhow, there he was, for upwards of an hour; and no John Rosedew came up the hill, which Sir Cradock did not feel it at all his duty to descend, on the very safe presentiment of the distress revocare gradum.
Meanwhile John Rosedew was speeding merrily, according to his ideas of speed (which were relative to the last degree), along a narrow bridle–way, some two miles to the westward. It would be a serious insult—so the parson argued—to the understanding of any man who understood a horse, and now John Rosedew had owned Coræbus very nearly nine months, and though he had never owned a horse before, surely by this time he could set papers in the barbara celarent of the most recondite horse–logic—or was it dialectics?—an insult it would be to that Hippicus who felt himself fit now to go to a fair and discuss many points with the jockeys, if anybody suggested to him that Coræbus ought to trot.
“Trot, sir”! cried John Rosedew, to an imaginary Hippodamas, “hasnʼt he been trotting for nearly an hour to–day, sir? Quite an equus tolutarius. And upon my word, I only hope he is not so sore as I am”. Then he threw the reins over the ponyʼs neck, and let him crop some cytisus.