Not less strangely or sweetly than it creeps in among dreams, came in the whisper of the first swallows of the dawn among our books; and Cleopatra, the cat, slipped out through the window and left me.
But it happened that I rose and drew a curtain aside to see whether she went to the woods or to the barn. The night was over. The pool at the bottom of the garden was glazed and dim and slightly crumpled, like the eye of a dead bird; and all its willows were grim.
In the garden there was a bee. A little wind broke up the poppies petal by petal, so that they vanished like fair children in the midst of their perfections--cut off, and marked in the memory chiefly by the blank they leave, and not by an abundance such as older people entail upon us to mimic life. Hardly had I ceased to watch them than it was day. The cattle in a distant meadow stood still at the edge of their own shadows as if at the edges of pools. The dead elm tree seemed but a skull-capped, foolish jester who set a sharper edge upon our appetite for summer and the sun. The corn, the woods, rejoiced. The green woodpecker laughed and shone in his flight, which undulated as if he had been crossing invisible hedges. A south-west wind arose and rain fell softly, yet not so soothingly but that an odd thought thrust itself into my mind.
I thought of how Cervantes was not enjoying it, and in a moment I saw him and Burton and Wordsworth and Charles Lamb close by, crouching and grey, as if they had been buried alive, under knotted cables of oak root, deep under the earth which was then bearing carnation and wild rose. The wind found out the dead elm tree and took counsel in its branches and moaned, although the broad light now reigned steadfastly over leagues of shining fields.
The sun has been up for an hour without impediment, but the meadows are rough silver under a mist after last night’s frost. The greens in cottage gardens are of a bright, cold hue between blue and grey, which is fitter for the armour of heaven, or the landscape of some strong mystic, than for one who loathes to leave his bed. The blackbirds are scattering the frost, and they live in glittering little hazes while they flutter in the grass.
But the sky is of an eager, luminous pale blue that speaks of health and impetuousness and success. Across it, low down, lie pure white clouds, preserving, though motionless, many torn and tumultuous forms; they have sharp edges against the blue and invade it with daggers of the same white; they are as vivid in their place in that eager sky as yews on a pale, bright lawn, or as lightning in blue night. If pure and hale intelligence could be visibly expressed, it would be like that. The eyes of the wayfarer at once either dilate in an effort for a moment at least to be equal in beauty with the white and blue, clear sky, or they grow dim with dejection at the impossibility. The brain also dilates and takes deep breaths of life, and casts out stale thought and coddled emotion. It scorns afterthought as the winds are flouting the penitent half moon.