1 86 Winter 



building as they do only in Spring. So, too, of Autumn 

 days she has taken one, and at will causes the faint 

 sunlight to fall again on low fields with mist rising 

 from them, and the glassy river wandering between 

 hazy meadows, while an idle cawing, and lowing, and 

 bleating speak the fatness and content of the ingather- 

 ing. And no happy event of maturity lives with a 

 vigour so pure and sweet as the early and trivial 

 triumphs of childhood. The glad tension of nerve 

 and brain when my first big fish made the reel sing 

 as he dashed headlong across the stream repeats, and 

 repeats, and repeats itself; so does the breezy May 

 morning whereon I learned to shoot, and the troubled 

 sleep of the succeeding night, when thejgun still went 

 off in dreamland, and young rooks with'a tremble and 

 a flutter of their black wings dropped through the green 

 foliage on the grass. 



From the earth, too, memory has chosen specks 

 and spots for preservation. Into the oblivion where 

 all the dead hours are,, she has thrust towns and 

 streets, railways and shops, but has engraven the 

 grassy sloping hills, clear tidepools, and blue flashing 

 .seas, and trembling rivulets, and green nooks, and 

 sedgy river-banks. From the gliding stream of hours 

 she has stayed this and that, and married to each 

 scene its appropriate moment, so that in the life I 

 live over again, action, place, and time all fused in 

 one form for me a conception and foretaste of eternity. 

 What I have had a deep and true consciousness of 



