Peter trampled among the brambles and swore at them because they caught
his legs. He saw nothing beautiful in their foliage. It was too common
for him to admire. The colours had been like that the year before; they
would be the same the year after. Peter appreciated bluebells and
primroses because they were soft to walk upon; but the blood-red
"brimmles" only pricked his legs and made him stumble; and the golden
bracken was only of use in the cow-shed, or in his hut as a
floor-litter; and the gracious heather was only good for stuffing
mattresses; and the guinea-gold gorse would have been an encumbrance
upon the side of the moor had it not been so useful as a thatch for his
hut, and a fence for his garden, and a mud-scraper for his boots. Peter,
though very much below the ordinary moorman, was artistically like them
all--insensible to beauty which is not of the flesh. Not a Dartmoor
commoner would pause a moment to regard the sun setting and glowing in a
mist upon the tors. Yet a Cornish fisherman would; and a Norman peasant
perhaps would take off his hat and cross himself, not so much with a
sense of religion, as because there is something in his mind which can
respond to the beauty and poetry and romance of the sun in a mist.
Possibly, with the Dartmoor commoner, it is his religion which is to
blame. His faith is as dark and ugly as the bottom of a well. The
Cornish fisherman has his Cymric blood, his instincts, his knowledge of
folklore, to help him through. The Norman peasant has the daily help of
gleaming vestments, glowing candles, clouds of sun-tinted
incense--pretty follies perhaps, but still pretty--the ritual of his
mass, and the Angelus bell. But the Dartmoor commoner has little but his
hell-fire.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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