Where the forest murmurs

by William Sharp

And the teller would say, ‘Because its secret name is Peace, and Peace is the secret name of Christ.’

It is no wonder the poets have loved so well this month whose name has in it all the witchery of the North. There is the majesty of the hill-solitudes in it, when the moorlands are like a purple sea. It has the freshness of the dew-white bramble-copses, of the bracken become russet and pale gold, of the wandering frostfire along the highways of the leaf, that mysterious breath whose touch is silent flame. It is the month when the sweet, poignant second-song of the robin stirs the heart as a child’s gladness among tears. ‘The singer of September,’ a Gaelic poet calls it, and many will recall the lovely lines of the old half-forgotten Elizabethan poet on the bird

“That hath the bugle eyes and ruddy breast
And is the yellow autumn’s nightingale.”

It is strange how much bird-lore and beast-lore lie with September. The moorcock, the stag, the otter, the sea-wandering salmon, the corncrake, and the cuckoo and the swift, I know not how many others, have their tale told or their farewell sung to the sound and colour of September. The poets have loved it for the unreturning feet of Summer whose vanishing echoes are in its haunted aisles, and for the mysterious silences of the veiled arrivals of Winter. It is the month of the year’s fulfillings—

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close-bosom’d friend of the maturing sun.”

And yet there are other Septembers than the Septembers of memory, than the Septembers of the imagination. For three years past the month has come with rains from the sea and cold winds out of the east and north. The robin’s song has been poignantly sweet as of yore, but the dream-glow has been rare upon the hill and valley, and in the woods and on the moor-slopes the leaf has hung bannerets of dusky yellow, and the bracken burned dully without amber and flamelit bronze. This year, though, there has been some return of those September days which we believe in while yet a long way off, as we believe in May, as we feel assured of June. This last June was truly a month of roses, and in May the east wind slept: but last year the roses trailed along flooded byways, and the east wind nipped bud and blossom through the bleak days of ‘the merry month,’ and a colourless and forlorn September must have chilled even that ‘darke fyre in the heartes of poetes’ of which the old naturalist wrote. There have been days of peace this year, and of the whole beauty of Summer-end. In the isles, among the hills, on forest lands and uplands, and by the long plains and valleys of the south, the September blue—which is part a flame of azure and part a haze of the dust of pearls—has lain over land and sea like a benediction. How purple the western moors, what depths of floating violet and pale translucencies of amethyst on the transfigured mountains. What loveliness of pale blue mist in the hollows of quiet valleys; what richness of reds and ambers where the scarlet-fruited ash hangs over the unruffled brown pool; what profuse gold and ungathered amber where the yellow gorse climbs the hillside and the armies of the bracken invade every windy solitude. How lovely those mornings when the dew is frost-white and the gossamer is myriad in intricate interlacings that seem woven of aerial diamond-dust. What peace in that vast serenity of blue where not the smallest cloud is seen, where only seaward the gannet may hang immeasurably high like a winged star, or, above inland pastures, the windhover poise in his miraculous suspense.

But, alas, only ‘days.’ It has not been the September of the heart’s desire, of the poet’s dream. The advance-guard of the equinox has again and again come in force: the grey wind has wailed from height to height, and moaned among the woods. Even in the gardens the wall-fruits have hardly given the wonted rich warmth, though the apples have made a brave show. Yesterday there was a hush in the wind; a delicate frost lingered after a roseflusht dawn; and the inward light came out of the heather, the bracken and the gorse, out of the yellow limes and the amber planes and the changing oaks, and upon the hillside turned the great pine on the further crag into a column of pale gold and made the lichened boulders like the half-sunken gates of buried cities of topaz and jasper and chalcedony. But to-day vast masses of sombre cloud have been swung inland from the Atlantic, and the gale has the wild mournful sough that we look for in the dark months. It is in the firelight that one must recapture September. It lies hidden in that warm heart, amid the red and yellow flowers of flame: and in that other heart, which, also, has its ‘darke fyre,’ that heart in whose lands lit by neither sun nor moon are the secret glens where old dreams live again, and where the dreams of the hour are radiant in their new wonder and their new beauty.

THE CHILDREN OF WIND AND THE CLAN OF PEACE

I was abroad on the moors one day in the company of a shepherd, and we were talking of the lapwing that were plentiful there, and were that day wailing continuously in an uneasy wavering flight. I had seen them act thus, in this excess of alarm, in this prolonged restless excitement, when the hill-falcons were hovering overhead in the nesting season: and, again, just before the unloosening of wind and rain and the sudden fires of the thundercloud. But John Logan the shepherd told me that now it was neither coming lightnings nor drifting hawk nor eagle that made all this trouble among the ‘peewits.’ “The wind’s goin’ to mak’ a sudden veer,” he said—adding abruptly a little later, “an’ by the same token we’ll have rain upon us soon.”

I looked at the cold blue of the sky, and at the drift of the few clouds trailing out of the east or south-east, and could see no sign of any change of wind or likelihood of rain.