THE SOUTH COUNTRY 13 



expressed in these three houses, the trees on the flat green, 

 the slightly curving road across it, the uneven posts and 

 rails leaning this way and that at the edge of the pond. 

 The trees are so arranged about the road that they weave 

 a harmony of welcome, of blessing, a viaticum for 

 whosoever passes by and only for a moment tastes their 

 shade, acknowledges unconsciously their attitudes, hears 

 their dry summer murmuring, sees the house behind 

 them. The wayfarer knows nothing of those who built 

 them and those who live therein, of those who planted 

 the trees just so and not otherwise, of the causes that 

 shaped the green, any more than of those who reaped and 

 threshed the barley, and picked and dried and packed the 

 hops that made the ale at the "White Hart." He only 

 knows that centuries of peace and hard work and plan- 

 ning for the undreaded future have made it possible. The 

 spirit of the place, all this council of time and Nature and 

 men, enriches the air with a bloom deeper than summer's 

 blue of distance; it drowses while it delights the respond- 

 ing mind with a magic such as once upon a time men 

 thought to express by gods of the hearth, by Faunus and 

 the flying nymphs, by fairies, angels, saints, a magic 

 which none of these things is too strange and "super- 

 natural " to represent. For after the longest inventory 

 of what is here visible and open to analysis, much remains 

 over, imponderable but mighty. Often when the lark is 

 high he seems to be singing in some keyless chamber of 

 the brain; so here the house is built in shadowy replica. 

 If only we could make a graven image of this spirit 

 instead of a muddy untruthful reflection of words ! I have 

 sometimes thought that a statue, the statue of a human 



