THE SINGEKS 47 



singing from a tree just outside the window in the 

 half-light of a winter morning cannot be told in words. 

 The language of pleasure is never, I think, more 

 inarticulate than when it tries to put into words the 

 impression which these common things of Nature 

 make upon us. We say a pudding is " nice," or a 

 room pretty, or the play good, and there is an end 

 of it ; tbe epithet has served ; it leaves no sense of 

 a gap or woeful failure to tell how these things touch 

 us. But a thrush's ringing notes at dawn, or the 

 sappy coppice in April with a blue and green ground 

 of hyacinth and dog mercury, or the first sight of 

 the orange-tip butterfly these pleasures seem to get 

 into the blood and brain. Simple, innocent pleasures 

 we say they are; innocent, yes, but I am not sure 

 of their simplicity : if so simple, why should it be 

 hard to analyse the pleasure they give, and impossible 

 to express that pleasure in words? This points to 

 complexity rather than to simplicity. Perhaps there 

 is a kindred emotion, but rarer and, I think, inferior, 

 about certain things in art about a picture of Millet 

 or Mason, or about the fine arrangement of a few 

 words in literature. A friend, not at all given to 

 ecstasies, has told me of lines in Shakespeare which 

 almost bring tears to his eyes, though the passages 

 in which they occur are not what we call pathetic. 

 There are lines in Wordsworth which have a similar 

 effect. I cannot read the line or two in Wordsworth's 

 poem on Fox, which describes how the Vale is loud 



