'THE DEWY MORN' 227 



could not purchase — a superb health in their carriage 

 princesses could not obtain. It came, then, from the 

 air and sunlight, and still more, from some alchemy un- 

 known to the physician or the physiologist, some faculty 

 exercised by the body, happily endowed with a special 

 power of extracting the utmost richness and benefit from 

 the rudest element^. Thrice blessed and fortunate, 

 beautiful golden-brown in their cheeks, superb health in 

 their gait, they walked as the immortals on earth.'* 



The beauty of a woman seemed to him so large and full 

 of divine correspondencies that in ' Beauty in the Country ' 

 he says : ' Her physique excels man's ' ; and that paper 

 is a prose counterpart to Wordsworth's * Three years she 

 grew in sun and shower.' 



' She walks, and the very earth smiles beneath her feet. 

 Something comes with her that is more than mortal ; 

 witness the yearning welcome that stretches towards her 

 from all. As the sunshine lights up the aspect of things, 

 so her presence sweetens the very flowers like dew. But 

 the yearning welcome is, I think, the most remarkable of 

 the evidence that may be accumulated about it. So deep, 

 so earnest, so forgetful of the rest, the passion of beauty is 

 almost sad in its intense abstraction. It is a passion, this 

 yearning. She walks in the glory of young life ; she is 

 really centuries old. 



' A hundred and fifty years at the least — more probably 

 twice that — have passed away, while from all enchanted 

 things of earth and air this preciousness has been dra^vn. 

 From the south wind that breathed a century and a half 

 ago over the green wheat. From the perfume of the grow- 

 ing grasses waving over honey-laden clover and laughing 

 veronica, hiding the greenfinches, baffling the bee. From 

 rose-loved hedges, woodbine, and cornflower azure-blue, 

 where yellowing wheat-stalks crowd up under the shadow 

 of green firs. All the devious brooklet's sweetness where 

 the iris stays the sunlight ; all the wild woods hold of 

 beauty ; all the broad hill's thyme and freedom : thrice a 



* The Open Air, 



15—2 



