NO. XIX.—MOTIVE POWER (continued).
The next morning the sun shone into my windows so brightly that I rose at an earlier hour than I had been accustomed to do for months, and strolled into the gardens, interesting myself in considering the painter’s charge against dressed ground and Tracey’s ingenious reply to it. The mowers were at work upon the lawns. Perhaps among rural sounds there is none which pleases me more than that of the whetting of the scythe—I suppose less from any music in itself, than from associations of midsummer, and hay-fields, and Milton’s ‘Allegro,’ in which the low still sound is admitted among the joyous melodies of Morn. As the gardens opened upon me, with their variety of alleys and by-walks, I became yet more impressed than I had been on the day before, with the art which had planned and perfected them, and the poetry of taste with which the images of the sculptor were so placed, that at every turn they recalled some pleasing but vague reminiscence of what one had seen in a picture, or in travel; or brought more vividly before the mind some charming verse in the poets, whose busts greeted the eye from time to time in bowery nook or hospitable alcove, where the murmur of a waterfall, or the view of a distant landscape opened from out the groves, invited pause and allured to contemplation.
At last, an arched trellis overhung with vine leaves led me out into that part of the park which fronted the library, and to which the Painter had given his preference over the grounds I had just quitted. There, the wildness of the scenery came on me with the suddenness of a surprise. The table-land, on which the house stood on the other side of the building, here abruptly sloped down into a valley through which a stream wound in many a maze, sometimes amidst jagged rocklike crags, sometimes through low grassy banks, round which the deer were grouping. The view was very extensive, but not unbrokenly so; here and there thick copses, in the irregular outline of natural groves, shut out the valley, but still left towering in the background the wavy hill-tops, softly clear in the blue morning sky. Hitherto I had sided with Tracey; now I thought the Painter right. In the garden, certainly, man’s mind forms a visible link with Nature, but in those scenes of Nature not trimmed and decorated to the book-lore of man, Thought takes a less finite scope, and perhaps from its very vagueness is less inclined to find monotony and sameness in the wide expanse over which it wanders to lose itself in reverie.
Descending the hillside, I reached the stream, and came suddenly upon Henry Thornhill, who, screened behind a gnarled old pollard-tree, was dipping his line into a hollow where the waves seemed to calm themselves, and pause before they rushed, in cascade, down a flight of crags, and thence brawled loudly onward.
As I know by experience how little an angler likes to be disturbed, I contented myself with a nod and a smile to the young man, and went my own way in silence; but about an hour afterwards, as I was winding back towards the house, I heard his voice behind me. I turned; he showed me, with some pride, his basket already filled with trout; and after I had sufficiently admired and congratulated, we walked slowly up the slope together. The evening before, Captain Thornhill had prepossessed me less than the other members of the party. He had spoken very little, and appeared to me to have that air of supreme indifference to all persons and things around him, which makes so many young gentlemen like—so many young gentlemen. But this morning he was frank and communicative.
“You have known Sir Percival very long, I think?” said he.
“Very long. I knew him before I had left Cambridge. In my rambles during a summer vacation, chance brought us together; and though he was then one of the most brilliant oracles of the world of fashion, and I an unknown collegian, somehow or other we became intimate.”
“I suppose you find him greatly altered?”
“Do you mean in person or in mind?”
“Well, in both.”