certain traditions, can it be supplied. It is a pity.
On Some Little Horses
All the upland was full of little horses, little ponies of the upland.
They looked with curious and interested eyes at man, but none of them
had known his command. When men passed them riding they saw that there
was some alliance between men and their brothers, and they asked news
of it. Then they bent their heads down again soberly, to graze on the
new pasture, and the wind blew through their manes and their tails;
they were happy beasts, thinking of nothing, and knowing nothing but
themselves, yet in their movements and the look of their eyes one could
see what the skies were round them, and what the world--they were so
much a part of it all.
In the hollows of the forest there were not many birds, not nearly as
many as one had heard in the Weald, but one great hawk circled up in
spirals against the wind. The wind was blowing splendidly through an
air quite blue and clear for many miles, and growing clearer as the
afternoon advanced in gladness. It was a sea wind that had been a gale
the day before, but during the night everything had changed in South
England, and the principal date of the year was passed, the date which
is the true beginning of the year. The mist of the morning had scudded
before thick Atlantic weather; by noon it was lifted into clouds, by
mid-afternoon those clouds were large, heralding clouds of Spring
against an unbounded capacity of sky. There was no longer any struggle
between them and the gale; they went together in procession over the
country and towards the east.
The ridges of the land, like great waves, rolled in also from the
westward; they were clearer and they were sharper with every hour,
until at last the points of white chalk pits upon hills a day’s ride
away showed clearly under the sunlight, and a man could see the trees
even upon the horizon line.
The water that one passed in the long ride seemed to grow clearer,
and the woods to have more echoes. Then, whatever in the mind turned
to memory, as the mind of all men does in Spring when they have done
with their own springtime, turned to memory transformed and was full
of visions; and whatever of the mind turned to the future, as most of
the mind must do in men of any age when the vigour of the Almighty is
abroad, looked at it through a veil which was magical.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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