54 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



before the fresh beech leaves like ghosts in shadowy pro- 

 cession; and once again the white clouds roll over the 

 tops of the trees, and the green is virginal, and out of the 

 drip and glimmer of the miles of blissful country rises the 

 blackbird's song and the cuckoo's shout. The rain seems 

 not only to have brightened what is to be seen but the 

 eye that sees and the mind that knows, and suddenly we 

 are aware of all the joy in the grandeur and mastery of 

 an oak's balance, in those immobile clouds revealed on 

 the farthest horizon shaped like the mountains which a 

 child imagines, in the white candles of the beam tree, in 

 the black-eyed bird sitting in her nest in the hawthorn 

 with uplifted beak, and in the myriad luxuriant variety 

 of shape and texture and bright colour in the divided 

 leaves of wood sanicle and moschatel and parsley and 

 cranesbill, in the pure outline of twayblade and violet 

 and garlic. Newly dressed in the crystal of the rain the 

 landscape recalls the earlier spring; the flowers of white 

 wood-sorrel, the pink and white anemone and cuckoo 

 flower, the thick-clustered, long-stalked primroses and 

 darker cowslips with their scentless sweetness pure as an 

 infant's breath; the solitary wild cherry trees flowering 

 among still leafless beech; the blackbirds of twilight and 

 the flower- faced owls; the pewits wheeling after dusk; 

 the jonquil and daffodil and arabis and leopard's bane of 

 cottage gardens; the white clouds plunged in blue floating 

 over the brown woods of the hills; the delicate thrushes 

 with speckled breasts paler than their backs, motionless 

 on dewy turf; and all the joys of life that come through 

 the nostrils from the dark, not understood world which 

 is unbolted for us by the delicate and savage fragrances 



