' NATURE NEAR LONDON ' 153 



forward. For some reason when thus gazing the edge 

 of the eye becomes exceedingly sensitive, and you are 

 conscious of slight motion or of a thickness — not a 

 defined object, but a thickness which indicates an object 

 — which is otherwise quite invisible.'* Some of his 

 minute descriptions read like instructions to an artist, 

 and they prove a busy eye and nothing more ; others, 

 again, with an excellent curiosity and patient attempt 

 to record visible things not noticed before, may call for 

 the admiration of the humble, but can please few — as, 

 for example, in a description like this of the waves of an 

 eddy : 



' Now, walking behind the waves that roll away from 

 you, dark shadowy spots fluctuate to and fro in the trough 

 of the water. Before a glance can define its shape, the 

 shadow elongates itself from a spot to an oval, the oval 

 melts into another oval, and reappears afar off. When, 

 too, in flood-time, the hurrying current seems to respond 

 more sensitively to the shape of the shallows and the 

 banks beneath, there boils up from below a ceaseless 

 succession of irregular circles, as if the water there ex- 

 panded from a centre, marking the verge of its outflow 

 with bubbles and raised lines upon the surface. 'f 



But in ' A Barn ' this observation has fallen into its 

 place, and has made a real picture, where there is 

 no detail impeding the whole, nor any struggle with 

 dead words, as in the piece just quoted. ' Wheat- 

 fields,' too, is beautiful in the exact detail and in the 

 suffused spirit of the whole. * Sweet summer,' he says, 

 ' is but just long enough for the happy loves of the 

 larks.' How tender he is now in speaking of the birds, 

 even of the sparrows ! ' I like sparrows,' he says, in 

 ' The Spring of the Year, 'J ' and am always glad to hear 

 their chirp ; the house seems still and quiet after the 

 nesting-time, when they leave us for the wheatfields, 

 where they stay the rest of the summer. What happy 



* ' A Brook,' Nature near London. f * The River,' idid. 



X Longtnan's Magazine^ June, 1894. 



