SPRING 47 



when they bear corn : at noon when there are cattle 

 grazing on the steep slope, their shadows are an exact 

 inversion of themselves, as in water. 



Out of the rain and mist spring has now risen full- 

 grown, tender and lusty, fragrant, many-coloured, many- 

 voiced, fair to see, so that it is beyond a lover's power 

 to make even an inventory of her lovely ways. She is 

 tall, she is fresh and bold, sweet in her motion and in 

 her tranquillity; and there is a soft down upon her lip as 

 there is a silken edge to the young leaves of the beeches. 



KENT. 



Even the motor road is pleasant now when the 

 nightingales sing out of the bluebell thickets under oak 

 and sweet chestnut and hornbeam and hazel. Presently 

 it crosses a common, too small ever to draw a crowd, a 

 rough up-and-down expanse of gorse and thorn, pierced by 

 grassy paths and surrounded by turf that is rushy and 

 mounded by old ant heaps; and here, too, there are 

 nightingales singing alone, the sweeter for the contrast 

 between their tangled silent bowers and the sharp, straight 

 white road. The common is typical of the lesser commons 

 of the south. Crouch's Croft in Sussex is another, in 

 sight of the three dusk moorland breasts of Crowborough; 

 gorse-grown, flat, possessing a pond, and walled by 

 tall hollies in a hedge. Piet Down, close by, is a fellow 

 to it grass and gorse and irregular pine a pond, too 

 rough, like a fragment of Ashdown or Woolmer, and 

 bringing a wild sharp flavour into the mellow cultivated 



