June 8, 1893. Is it not the experience of every one that at rare intervals, by some happy accident, life presents one with a sudden and delicious thrill of beauty? I have often tried to analyse the constituent elements of these moments, but the essence is subtle and defies detection. They cannot be calculated upon, or produced by any amount of volition or previous preparation. One thing about these tiny ecstasies I have noticed—they do not come as a rule when one is tranquil, healthy, serene—they rather come as a compensation for weariness and discontent; and yet they are the purest gold of life, and a good deal of sand is well worth washing for a pellet or two of the real metal.
To-day I was more than usually impatient; over me all the week had hung the shadow of some trying, difficult business—the sort of business which, whatever you do, will be done to nobody’s satisfaction. After a vain attempt to wrestle with it, I gave it up, and went[189] out on a bicycle; the wind blew gently and steadily this soft June day; all the blue sky was filled with large white clouds, blackening to rain. I made for the one piece of flat ground in our neighbourhood. It is tranquillising, I have often found, to the dweller in a hilly land, to cool and sober the eye occasionally with the pure breadths of a level plain. The grass was thick and heavy-headed in the fields, but of mere wantonness I turned down a lane which I know has no ending,—a mere relief-road for carts to have access to a farm,—and soon came to the end of it in a small grassy circle, with a cottage or two, where a footpath strikes off across the fields.
Heretofore Unvisited
Why did I never come here before, I thought. Through a gap in the hedge I saw a large broad pasture, fringed in the far distance with full-foliaged, rotund elms in thick leaf; a row of willows on the horizon marked the track of a stream. In the pasture in front of me was a broad oblong pool of water with water-lilies; down one side ran a row of huge horse-chestnuts, and the end was rich in elders full of flat white cakes of blossom. In the field grazed an old horse; while a pigeon sailed lazily down from the trees and ran to the pool[190] to drink. That was all there was to see. But it brought me with a deep and inexplicable thrill close to the heart of the old, kindly, patient Earth, the mother and the mistress and the servant of all—she who allows us to tear and rend her for our own paltry ends, and then sets, how sweetly and tranquilly, to work, with what a sense of inexhaustible leisure, to paint and mellow and adorn the rude and bleeding gaps. We tear up a copse, and she fills the ugly scars in the spring with a crop of fresh flowers—of flowers, perhaps, which are not seen in the neighbourhood, but whose seeds have lain vital and moist in the ground, but too deep to know the impulse born of the spring sun. Yet now they burst their armoured mail, and send a thin, white, worm-like arm to the top, which, as soon as it passes into the light, drinks from the rays the green flush that it chooses to hide its nakedness. We dig a pool in the crumbling marl. At the time the wound seems irreparable; the ugly, slobbered banks grin at us like death; the ground is full of footprints and slime, broken roots and bedabbled leaves,—and next year it is all a paradise of green and luscious water-plants, with a hundred quiet lives being lived[191] there, of snail and worm and............