Studies and Essays: Quality, and OthersGalsworthy, John
General
Studies and Essays: Quality, and Others
Galsworthy, John
Autobiographical fiction; Essays
When God is so good to the fields, of what use are words--those poor
husks of sentiment! There is no painting Felicity on the wing! No way
of bringing on to the canvas the flying glory of things! A single
buttercup of the twenty million in one field is worth all these dry
symbols--that can never body forth the very spirit of that froth of May
breaking over the hedges, the choir of birds and bees, the
lost-travelling down of the wind flowers, the white-throated swallows in
their Odysseys. Just here there are no skylarks, but what joy of song
and leaf; of lanes lighted with bright trees, the few oaks still golden
brown, and the ashes still spiritual! Only the blackbirds and thrushes
can sing-up this day, and cuckoos over the hill. The year has flown so
fast that the apple-trees have dropped nearly all their bloom, and in
"long meadow" the "daggers" are out early, beside the narrow bright
streams. Orpheus sits there on a stone, when nobody is by, and pipes to
the ponies; and Pan can often be seen dancing with his nymphs in the
raised beech-grove where it is always twilight, if you lie still enough
against the far bank.
Who can believe in growing old, so long as we are wrapped in this cloak
of colour and wings and song; so long as this unimaginable vision is here
for us to gaze at--the soft-faced sheep about us, and the wool-bags
drying out along the fence, and great numbers of tiny ducks, so trustful
that the crows have taken several.
Blue is the colour of youth, and all the blue flowers have a "fey" look.
Everything seems young too young to work. There is but one thing busy, a
starling, fetching grubs for its little family, above my head--it must
take that flight at least two hundred times a day. The children should be
very fat.
When the sky is so happy, and the flowers so luminous, it does not seem
possible that the bright angels of this day shall pass into dark night,
that slowly these wings shall close, and the cuckoo praise himself to
sleep, mad midges dance-in the evening; the grass shiver with dew, wind
die, and no bird sing . . . .
Yet so it is. Day has gone--the song and glamour and swoop of wings.
Slowly, has passed the daily miracle. It is night. But Felicity has not
withdrawn; she has but changed her robe for silence, velvet, and the
pearl fan of the moon. Everything is sleeping, save only a single star,
and the pansies. Why they should be more wakeful than the other flowers,
I do not know. The expressions of their faces, if one bends down into
the dusk, are sweeter and more cunning than ever. They have some compact,
no doubt, in hand.
What a number of voices have given up the ghost to this night of but one
voice--the murmur of the stream out there in darkness!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account