THE END OF WINTER 33 



solitary maimed sycamore in one of the coombes that has 

 a glorious hour when ft stands yellow-green in separate 

 masses of half-opened leaf, motionless and languid 

 in the first joy of commerce with the blue air, yet 

 glowing. 



One morning, very early, when the moon has not set 

 and all the fields are cold and dewy and the woods are 

 still massed and harbouring the night, though a few 

 thorns stand out from their edge in affrighted virgin 

 green, and dim starry thickets sigh a moment and are still, 

 suddenly the silence of the chalky lane is riven and 

 changed into a song. First, it is a fierce impetuous down- 

 fall of one clear note repeated rapidly and ending wilfully 

 in mid-burst. Then it is a full-brimmed expectant 

 silence passing into a long ascendant wail, and almost with- 

 out intervals another and another, which has hardly ceased 

 when it is dashed out of the memory by the downpour of 

 those rapidly repeated notes, their abrupt end and the 

 succeeding silence. The swift notes are each as rounded 

 and as full of liquid sweetness as a grape, and they are 

 clustered like the grape. But they are wild and pure as 

 mountain water in the dawn. They are also like steel 

 for coldness and penetration. And their onset is like 

 nothing else : it is the nightingale's. The long wail is 

 like a shooting star : even as that grows out of the dark- 

 ness and draws a silver line and is no more, so this glides 

 out of the silence and curves and is no more. And yet 

 it does not die, nor does that liquid onset. They and 

 their ghosts people each hanging leaf in the hazel thicket 

 so that the silence is closely stored. Other notes are shut 

 in the pink anemone, in the white stitchwort under and 



D 



