THE END OF SUMMER 259 



be moving and adding themselves to the clumps. Above 

 all is the abstract beauty of pure line coupled with the 

 beauty of the serene and the uninhabited and remote 

 that holds the eye until at length the hills are humbled 

 and dispread as part of the ceremony of sunset in a 

 tranquil, ensanguined, quietly travelling sky. The blue 

 swallows go slowly along the silent road beside me, and 

 the last rays bless a grooved common grazed upon by 

 cows and surrounded by ranges of low white buildings 

 and a row of lichened grotesque limes, dark of bole, 

 golden-leaved, where children are playing and an anvil 

 rings. 



Frost follows after the blue silence and chill of twi- 

 light, and the dawn is dimmest violet in a haze that 

 reveals the candied grass, the soaking blue dark elms 

 painted yellow only in one place, the red roofs, all in a 

 world of the unborn, and the waters steaming around 

 invisible crying coots. Gradually round white clouds 

 so dim that the sky seems but to dream of round white 

 clouds appear imbedded in the haze; the beams grow 

 hot, and a breeze joins with them in sucking and scatter- 

 ing all the sweet of the first fallen leaves, the weed fires 

 and the late honeysuckle. 



Why are there no swifts to race and scream ? We 

 fret over these stages of the descending year; we dream 

 on such a day as this that there is no need of farther 

 descent. We would preserve those days of the reaping; 

 we have lost them; but we recall them now when the 

 steam-plough has furrowed the sheeny stubble, and long 

 for the day when the gentle north wind can only just stir 

 the clusters of aspen-leaves, and the branches are motion- 

 less. The nut bushes hang dreamily, heavily, over the 

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