Bitter it is to think of that talk and laughter of shadows on the long lawns under those oaks; for though their shadows are even yet better than other men’s bone or blood, never yet did dead man lift up a hand to strike a blow or lay a brick. In a churchyard behind I saw the tombstone of one Robert Page, born in the year 1792 here in Sussex, and dead in 1822--not in the Bay of Spezzia but in Sussex. He scared the crows, ploughed the clay, fought at Waterloo and lost an arm there, was well pleased with George the Fourth, and hoed the corn until he was dead. That is plain sense, and I wish I could write the life of this exact contemporary of Shelley. That is quite probably his great granddaughter, black-haired, of ruddy complexion, full lips, large white teeth, black speechless eyes, dressed in a white print dress and stooping in the fresh wind to take clean white linen out of a basket, and then rising straight as a hazel wand, on tiptoe, her head held back and slightly on one side while she pegs the clothes to the line and praises the weather to a passer-by. She is seventeen, and of such is the kingdom of earth. Now at the coming on of night the wind has carried away all the noises of the world. The lucid air under the hazels of the lane is dark as if with dream, and the roadway leads glimmering straight on to a crystal planet low in the purple of the west. I cannot hear my footsteps, so full charged is the silence. I am no more in this tranquillity than one of the trees. The way seems paved that some fair spirit may pass down in perfect beauty and bliss and ease. The leaves will hail it and the blue sky lean down to bless, and the planet lend its beams for a path. Suddenly, the name of Mary is called by some one invisible. Mary! For a little while the cry is repeated more loudly but always sweetly; then the caller is entranced by the name, by the sound of her own voice and the silence into which it falls as into a well, and it grows less and less and ceases and is dead except in the brain of the bearer. I thought of all the music to ear and mind of that sound of “m.” I suppose the depth of its appeal is due to its place at the beginning of the word “mother,” or rather to the need of the soul which gave it that place; and it is a sound as dear to the animals as to us, since the ewe hears it first from her lamb and the cow from her calf as the woman from her child. It is the main sound in “music,” “melody,” “harmony,” “measure,” “metre,” “rhythm,” “minstrel,” “madrigal.” It endears even sadness by its presence in “melancholy,” “moan” and “mourn.” It makes melody on the lips of friends and lovers, in the names of “mistress,” “comrade,” “mate,” “companion.” It murmurs autumnally in all mellow sounds, in the music of wind and insect and instrument. To “me” and “mine” it owes a meaning as deep as to “mother.” And this mild air could bear no more melodious burden than the name that floated upon it