8 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 
specks, whirling and twisting in fury, ice raining in small 
shot of frost, howling, sleeting, groaning ; the ground 
like iron, the sky black and faintly yellow - - brutal 
colours of despotism—heaven striking with clenched 
fist. When at last the general surface cleared, still 
there remaincd the trenches and traverses of the enemy, 
his ramparts drifted high, and his roads marked with 
snow. The black firs on the ridge stood out against the 
frozen clouds, still and hard; the slopes of leafless 
larches seemed withered and brown; the distant plain 
far down gloomy with the same dull yellowish blackness. 
At a height of seven hundred feet the air was sharp as 
a scythe—a rude barbarian giant wind knocking at the 
walls of the house with a vast club, so that we crept 
sideways even to the windows to look out upon the 
world. There was everything to repel—the cold, the 
frost, the hardness, the snow, dark sky and ground, leaf- 
lessness ; the very furze chilled and all benumbed. Yet 
the forest was still beautiful. There was no day that 
we did not, all of us, glance out at it and admire it, and 
say something about it. Harder and harder grew the 
frost, yet still the forest-clad hills possessed a something 
that drew the mind open to their largeness and grandeur. 
Earth is always beautiful—always. Without colour, or 
leaf, or sunshine, or song of bird and flutter of butterfly’s 
wing ; without anything sensuous, without advantage or 
gilding of summer—the power is ever there. Or shall 
we not say that the desire of the mind is ever there, and 
wil satisfy itself, in a measure at least, even with the 
barren wild? The heart from the moment of its first 
beat instinctively longs for the beautiful ; the means we 
possess to gratify it are limited—we are always trying 
to find the statue in the rude block. Out of the vast 
block of the earth the mind endeavours to carve itself. 
