216 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



verge of the city. There, by the inn piano, soldiers and 

 their friends and women sing with vague pathos songs 

 about "Mother" and "Dear Love" and "Farewell" 

 and " Love is all " and " The girls," while the streets 

 glitter and gurgle with rain. Just before night the sky 

 clears. It is littered with small dark clouds upon rose, 

 like rocks on a wild and solitary coast of after- tempest 

 calm, and it is infinitely remote and infinitely alluring. 

 Those clouds are the Islands of the Blest. Even so allur- 

 ing might be this life itself, this world, if I were out of it, 

 For a moment I fancy how I might lean and watch it all, 

 being dead. For a moment only, since the poverty of 

 death is such that we cannot hope from it such a gift of 

 contemplation from afar, cannot hope even that once out 

 of the world we may turn round and look at it and feel 

 that we are not of it any more, nor hope that we shall 

 know ourselves to be dead and be satisfied. Rain shrouds 

 the islands of the sky : the singers find them in their song. 

 In the morning the ground is beautiful with blue light 

 from one white-clouded pane of sky that will not be 

 hidden by the tumultuous rain. Outside the city the 

 new thatch of the ricks shines pale in the sodden land, 

 which presently gives way to a great water with leaning 

 masts and a majestic shadowy sweep of trees down to the 

 flat shore, to level green marsh and bridges crossing the 

 streams that are announced by ripples in the sun, by 

 swishing sedge, by willows blenching. Beyond is forest 

 again. First, scattered cottages and little yellow apples 

 beaming pale on crooked trees; then solitudes of heather 

 and bracken, traversed and lighted by blue waters, ponds 

 and streams among flats of rushes; and beyond, at either 

 hand, woods on low and high land endlessly changing 



