THE END OF SUMMER 259 



be moving and adding themselves to the clumps. Above 

 all is the abstract beauty of pure line — coupled with the 

 beauty of the serene and the uninhabited and remote — 

 that holds the eye until at length the hills are humbled 

 and dispread as part of the ceremony of sunset in a 

 tranquil, ensanguined, quietly travelling sky. The blue 

 swallows go slowly along the silent road beside me, and 

 the last rays bless a grooved common grazed upon by 

 cows and surrounded by ranges of low white buildings 

 and a row of lichened grotesque limes, dark of bole, 

 golden-leaved, where children are playing and an anvil 

 rings. 



Frost follows after the blue silence and chill of twi- 

 light, and the dawn is dimmest violet in a haze that 

 reveals the candied grass, the soaking blue dark elms 

 painted yellow only in one place, the red roofs, all in a 

 world of the unborn, and the waters steaming around 

 invisible crying coots. Gradually round white clouds — 

 so dim that the sky seems but to dream of round white 

 clouds — appear imbedded in the haze; the beams grow 

 hot, and a breeze joins with them in sucking and scatter- 

 ing all the sweet of the first fallen leaves, the weed fires 

 and the late honeysuckle. 



Why are there no swifts to race and scream ? We 

 fret over these stages of the descending year; we dream 

 on such a day as this that there is no need of farther 

 descent. We would preserve those days of the reaping; 

 we have lost them; but we recall them now when the 

 steam-plough has furrowed the sheeny stubble, and long 

 for the day when the gentle north wind can only just stir 

 the clusters of aspen-leaves, and the branches are motion- 

 less. The nut bushes hang dreamily, heavily, over the 

 s 2 



