306 December Peace 



dawn sound through a lonely and not an empty 

 world. But in December the notes of a singing 

 thrush travel far across the dim green pastures ; 

 and the robin's challenge in the oakwood rings with 

 a sense of space among the rain-blackened boles. 



So far from the earth's habitual stillness at this 

 season being destroyed by such unwonted songs, 

 it is emphasized. The robin's and even the thrush's 

 notes are but a thin anticipation of their full out- 

 pouring in the spring ; they recall that omnipresent 

 music, and make us more conscious of the calm. 

 Alone in the afternoon's greyness, the, thrush sings 

 in the bare oak-top beyond the pasture, and slips 

 down when the light grows dull and the farmboy 

 calls the cattle to the hay. The silence seems to 

 become absolute when the boy has clanged the farm- 

 gate under the dun sunset ; and yet, as we listen, 

 it is a tissue of subtle sounds. The bat pipes above 

 us as it passes ; far away in the next meadow a 

 peewit calls once, with a cry as thin and illusory as 

 an empty chrysalis- shell. Another film of silence 

 detaches itself into sound ; it is the water oozing 

 in the soaked soil of the meadow under our own feet. 

 We take a step, and can hear a wide simmering and 

 sucking ; and now when the bat comes back, its 

 cry seems twice as loud. Then comes an inter- 

 mittent pulse in the air that seems at times to fail 

 altogether and never to become an actual sound. 

 When we gain the lane beyond the meadow, it 

 grows into a dog's bark at a distant house. Even 

 now it would hardly be audible unless attention were 

 keenly concentrated upon it ; and the dog may be 



