SPRING 45 



about her that she may toil and sing low at her myriad 

 divine domesticities untroubled. Delicate snails climb 

 the young stalks of grass and flower, and their houses, 

 pearly, chocolate, tawny, pure or ringed or chequered, 

 slide after them. The leaves, with their indescribable 

 charm of infinitely varied division, of wild clematis, 

 maple, brier, hawthorn, and many more, come forth into 

 the rain which hangs on their drooping points and on 

 the thorns. The lichen enjoys the enduring mist of the 

 woods; the blackthorns are crusted and bearded with 

 lichens of fleshy green-silver and ochre which grow even 

 on the thorns themselves and round the new leaves and 

 flowers. The birch is now an arrested shower of green, 

 but not enough to hide the white limbs of the nymph in 

 the midst of it. The beech trunk is now most exquisitely 

 coloured : it is stained and spotted and blotched with grey 

 and rough silver and yellow-green lichen, palest green 

 mould, all the greens of moss, and an elusive dappling 

 and graining of greys, of neutral tints and almost blacks 

 in the wood itself, still more diversified by the trickling 

 rain and the changing night. The yew bark is plated 

 and scaled and stained with greens and reds and greys, 

 powdered with green mould, and polished in places to 

 the colour of mahogany. Even the long-deserted thistly 

 cornfields are dim purple with ground-ivy flowers and 

 violets. The marsh, the pasture, the wood, the hedge, 

 has each its abundance of bloom and of scent; so, too, has 

 the still water and tlie running water. But this is the 

 perfect hour of the green of grass, so intense that it has 

 an earthly light of its own in the sunless mist. It is best 

 seen in meadows bounded on two or three sides by the 



