42 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



violet sky. In the misty shutting of the light there are 

 a thousand songs laced by cuckoos' cries and the first 

 hooting of owls, and the beeches have become merely 

 straight lines of pearl in a mist of their own boughs. 

 Below them, in the high woods, goes on the fall of the 

 melting snow through the gloomy air, and the splash on 

 the dead leaves. This gloom and monotonous sound make 

 an exquisite cloister, visited but not disturbed by the sound 

 of the blackbirds singing in the mist of the vale under- 

 neath. Slowly the mist has deepened from the woods to 

 the vale and now the eye cannot see from tree to tree. 

 Then the straight heavy rain descends upon the songs 

 and the clatterings of blackbirds, and when they are 

 silenced the moorhen's watery hoot announces that the 

 world belongs to the beasts and the rainy dark until to- 

 morrow. 



Beautiful upon the waters, beautiful upon the moun- 

 tains, is the cuckoo's song, and most rare over the snow. 

 But of all places and hours I should choose the crags 

 of Land's End in a dawn of June; and let it be the end 

 of that month and the wind be grey and cold, so that the 

 ships stagger in the foam and crag-like waves as they 

 catch the early light tenderly upon their sails. The cold 

 beams, the high precipices yet full of shadow and of the 

 giddy calling of daw and gull, the black but white-lipped 

 water and the blacker cormorant flying straight across it 

 just over the foam, the sky golden yet still pallid and 

 trembling from the dungeon of night through it floats 

 that beloved voice breaking, breaking, and the strong 

 year at the summit of its career has begun to decline. 

 The song is memorable and fair also when the drenched 



