And yonder is the wide prospect again, and the dawn,--the green hedges starred with white stitchwort flower, misty with the first hawthorn clusters, a-flutter with whitethroat, wild with the warbling of the blackcap in their depths; wide, lustrous meadows dimmed by cuckoo flowers, and at the edges of them the oaks beginning to bud and their branches like great black brands about to break into golden flame; and about the oaks that stood in the midst of them the grass waving in the sun like brooks plunging from their roots; farmhouses known only by their encircling apple trees all in bloom; radiant pools where the sand-piper laughed; woods where the oak and ash waded deep in the translucent green of the undergrowth’s rising tide and even then glowed with brown and unborn greens, and the nightingale sang far withdrawn, and at the edge the hurdle-maker worked by his thatched cote; and ridge beyond ridge of hills cloudily wooded; and over all the low sky like a blue bowl just emptied of its cream.
And as we sat at breakfast the village children came up the path between borders dense with tall yellow leopard’s bane and red honesty and sang by the windows--
“Please to remember the first of May, For the first of May is Garland Day.”
And they carried garlands of ivy entwined among bluebells and cowslips from the moist warm copses and the meadows.
On the twin vanes of the oasts, one pointing east, one north, the south wind and the west wind were asleep in one another’s arms.
The chestnut blossom is raining steadily and noiselessly down upon a path whose naked pebbles receive mosaic of emerald light from the interlacing boughs. At intervals, once or twice an hour, the wings of a lonely swallow pass that way, when alone the shower stirs from its perpendicular fall. Cool and moist, the perfumed air flows, without lifting the most nervous leaf or letting fall a suspended bead of the night’s rain from a honeysuckle bud. In an indefinite sky of grey, through which one ponderous cloud billows into sight and is lost again, no sun shines: yet there is light--I know not whence; for the brass trappings of the horses beam so as to be extinguished in their own fire. There is no song in wood or sky. Some one of summer’s wandering voices--bullfinch or willow-wren--might be singing, but unheard, at least unrealised. From the dead nettle spires, with dull green leaves stained by purple and becoming more and more purple towards the crest, which is of a sombre uniform purple, to the elms reposing at the horizon, all things have bowed the head, hushed, settled into a perfect sleep. Those elms are just visible, no more. The path has no sooner emerged from one shade than another succeeds, and so, on and on, the eye wins no broad dominion.