MEADOW THOUGHTS. 69 



paper, the ink so evidently ink, the pen so stiff; all so 

 inadequate. Yoa want colour, flexibility, light, sweet 

 low sound — all these to paint it and play it in music, at 

 the same time you want something that will answer 

 to and record in one touch the strong throb of life and 

 the thought, or feeling, or whatever it is that goes out 

 into the earth and sky and space, endless as a beam 

 of light. The very shade of the pen on the paper 

 tells you how utterly hopeless it is to express these 

 things. There is the shade and the brilliant gleaming 

 whiteness ; now tell me in plain written words the 

 simple contrast of the two. Not in twenty pages, for 

 the bright light shows the paper in its common fibre- 

 ground, coarse aspect, in its reality, not as a mind- 

 tablet. 



The delicacy and beauty of thought or feeling 

 is so extreme that it cannot be inked in; it is like 

 the green and blue of field and sky, of veronica 

 flower and grass blade, which in their own existence 

 throw light and beauty on each other, but in artificial 

 colours repel. Take the table indoors again, and the 

 book ; the thoughts and imaginings of others are vain, 

 and of your own too deep to be written. For the 

 mind is filled with the exceeding beauty of these 

 things, and their great wondrousness and marvel. 

 Never yet have I been able to write what I felt about 

 the sunlight only. Colour and form and light are as 

 magic to me. It is a trance. It requires a language 

 of ideas to convey it. It is ten years since I last 

 reclined on that grass plot, and yet I have been writing 

 of it as if it was yesterday, and every blade of grass is 

 as visible and as real to me now as then. They were 



