HARMONY IN BLUE 81 



sheep-bell sounds no longer with muffled jangle from 

 the wether's woolly neck ; and the waves beneath me, 

 lazily dying in narrow ribbons of foam, utter no sigh 

 at the throb of the sea's great heart, tinkle no little 

 shell, whisper no news. To the door of the ear come 

 messengers on every wind that blows. Fasten it up 

 for an hour, and your straining nerves and starving 

 ears will tell the nature of the daily debt more clearly 

 than words. 



So I throw open those portals again, and the dumb 

 picture speaks and sings ; and I am thankful. Now 

 can I listen to the music of bird and beast, of wind 

 and water, of tree and underwood ; of adult life on 

 feet and wings ; of the callow, young, comic jackdaws, 

 hopping open-beaked after their mother ; of the lambs 

 upon their knees under the yellow-eyed ewes. 



Far away northerly, like a pale blue gauze stretched 

 along the sky, rise outlines of another world than this. 

 There Dartmoor swells solemnly under granite crowns 

 a sea of lonely stone and heather. But there also 

 do bluebells nod under the sun ; there also cloud 

 shadows race free over hills and valleys, over streams 

 and rivers, over granite ruins of Danmonian homes, 

 over those wild waste places where Devon men toiled 

 for metal when Shakespeare wrote, over many a 

 wilderness of riven peat, from which the venville 

 tenant will cut his winter firing presently. There, 

 too, ring cries as sad as the seagull's, where curlew 

 wheel and make plaintive to-do about the little stone- 

 coloured chicks squeaking and tumbling through their 

 G 



