THE FINCHES 101 



for the rest, the masterly way in which it is dashed in, and its coming, 

 as it were, out of nothing, pleases me more. It is not such a finished, or 

 seeming-finished, performance for here, perhaps, we have the summa 

 ars of nature but it is freer, less studied, and so more artistically 

 effective. The way it begins is beautiful, and so is the way it ends; 

 those tragic stains full of dramatic suggestiveness ! It surprises 

 one too I give but my field impressions even when one most looks 

 for it, for, not only in the bird's quiet colouring, otherwise, but in 

 his ways and actions, careless, as they are, and unstudied, there is 

 nothing that leads up to or ushers it in, which makes that when it 

 does come full, in some careless turn or poise it never comes 

 tamely, but as though it had leapt from the dark. True, there is the 

 blood-red forehead also, and the shafts of white light in the tail, but for 

 the last to flash out, the tail must be fanned ; and, withal, the bird 

 is but little, and, from only the least distance, looks as sober and 

 unpronounced as many a duller one as a hedge-sparrow, sometimes, 

 almost till, all in a moment, that breast like a wound bursts 

 upon one. 



One may envy the hen linnet, that has a breast like this carefully 

 shown her for here there is nothing unstudied but I was once, my- 

 self, all undesignedly, almost as highly favoured ; indeed, for the time it 

 lasted, which was by much too short, I doubt if ever a hen of them all 

 had a finer (I do not say a closer) view. It was one of those lonely 

 little pools ponds, tarns I know not which to call them that in 

 Suffolk often surprise one, suddenly, in the middle of a ploughed field 

 or other such agricultural surroundings, as unpeopled, very often, as 

 the desert itself. This one, where it happened, was deep set in the 

 ground, almost circular, a steep brushwood bank running up from 

 it, topped with young elms, still slender, but tall in their degree, 

 the two together shutting out, as though it could never have 

 existed, the more familiar little world around a place of stillness, 

 of absolute peace and forgetting, with a disc of late sunlight 

 on the dark water, decked, from shore to shore, with delicate, 



