34 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



about the hazels, and in the drops of dew that begin to 

 glitter in the dawn. 



Beautiful as the notes are for their quality and order, it 

 is their inhumanity that gives them their utmost fascina- 

 tion, the mysterious sense which they bear to us that 

 earth is something more than a human estate, that there 

 are things not human yet of great honour and power in 

 the world. The very first rush and the following wail 

 empty the brain of what is merely human and leave only 

 what is related to the height and depth of the whole 

 world. Here for this hour we are remote from the 

 parochialism of humanity. The bird has admitted a larger 

 air. We breathe deeply of it and are made free citizens 

 of eternity. We hear voices that were not dreamed of 

 before, the voices of those spirits that live in minute forms 

 of life, the spirits that weave the frost flower on the fallen 

 branch, the gnomes of undergound, those who care for the 

 fungus on the beech root, the lichen on the trunk, the 

 algae on the gravestone. This hazel lane is a palace of 

 strange pomp in an empire of which we suddenly find 

 ourselves guests, not wholly alien nor ill at ease, though 

 the language is new. Drink but a little draught of this 

 air and no need is there to fear the ways of men, their 

 mockery, their cruelty, their foreignness. 



The song rules the cloudy dawn, the waiting ranges 

 of hills and their woods full of shadows yet crested with 

 gold, their lawns of light, the soft distended grey clouds 

 all over the sky through which the white sun looks on 

 the world and is glad. But it has ceased when the per- 

 pendicular shafts of rain divide the mists over the hillside 

 woods and the pewits tangle their flight through the air 



