274 ^HE SOUTH COUNTRY 



are always at the bloom with crystal wings, except when 

 a passing shadow disperses them for a moment with one 

 buzz. But these cannot long detain the eye from the 

 crumbling woods in the haze or under the large white 

 clouds — from the amber and orange bracken about our 

 knees and the blue recesses among the distant golden 

 beeches when the sky is blue but beginning to be laden 

 with loose rain-clouds, from the line of leaf-tipped poplars 

 that bend against the twilight sky; and there is no scent 

 of flowers to hide that of dead leaves and rotting fruit. 

 We must watch it until the end, and gain slowly the 

 philosophy or the memory or the forgetfulness that fits 

 us for accepting winter's boon. Pauses there are, of 

 course, or what seem pauses in the declining of this 

 pomp; afternoons when the rooks waver and caw over 

 their beechen town and the pigeons coo content; dawns 

 when the white mist is packed like snow over the vale 

 and the high woods take the level beams and a hundred 

 globes of dew glitter on every thread of the spiders' 

 hammocks or loose perpendicular nets among the thorns, 

 and through the mist rings the anvil a mile away with a 

 music as merry as that of the daws that soar and dive 

 between the beeches and the spun white cloud; mornings 

 full of the sweetness of mushrooms and blackberries from 

 the short turf among the blue scabious bloom and the 

 gorgeous brier; empurpled evenings before frost when 

 the robin sings passionate and shrill and from the garden 

 earth float the smells of a hundred roots with messages of 

 the dark world; and hours full of the thrush's soft 

 November music. The end should come in heavy and 

 lasting rain. At all times I love rain, the early momen- 

 tous thunderdrops, the perpendicular cataract shining, or 



