Then in the early morning the air is still and warm, but so moist that there is a soul of coolness in the heat, and never before were the leaves of the sorrel and wood sanicle and woodruff, and the grey-green foliage and pallid yellow flowers of the large celandine, so fair. The sudden wren’s song is shrewd and sweet and banishes heaviness. The huge chestnut tree is flowering and full of bees. The parsley towers delicately in bloom. The beech boughs are encased in gliding crystal. The nettles, the millions of nettles in a bed, begin to smell of summer. In the calm and sweet air the turtle-doves murmur and the blackbirds sing--as if time were no more--over the mere. The roads, nearly dry again, are now at their best, cool and yet luminous, and at their edges coloured rosy or golden brown by the sheddings of the beeches, those gloves out of which the leaves have forced their way, pinched and crumpled by the confinement. At the bend of a broad road descending under beeches these parallel lines of ruddy chaff give to two or three days in the year a special and exquisite loveliness, if the weather be alternately wet and bright and the long white roads and virgin beeches are a temptation. What quests they propose! They take us away to the thin air of the future or to the underworld of the past. This one takes us to the old English sweetness and robustness of an estate of large meadows, sound oak trees not too close together, and a noble house within an oak-paled park. A poet and a man lives there, one who recalls those other poets--they are not many--who please us over the gulf of time almost as much by the personal vigour and courage which we know to have been theirs or is suggested by their work, men like Chaucer, Sidney, Ben Jonson, Drayton, Byron, William Morris, and among the living ---- and ---- and ----. I think we should miss their poems more than some greater men’s if they were destroyed. They stand for their time more clearly than the greatest. For example, Chaucer’s language, ideas and temper make it impossible for us to read his work, no matter in how remote a study or garden, shut out from time and change, without feeling that he and all those who rode, and talked and were young with him are skeletons or less, though Catullus or Milton may be read with no such feeling. Chaucer seems to remind us of what once we were. His seems a golden age. He wrote before Villon had inaugurated modern literature with the cry-- _Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?_