Far up on the Downs the air of day and night is flavoured by honeysuckle and new hay. It is good to walk, it is good to lie still; the rain is good and so is the sun; and whether the windy or the quiet air be the better let us leave to a December judgment to decide. One day the rain falls and there is no wind, and all the movement is in the chaos of the dark sky; and thus is made the celestial fairness of an earth that is brighter than the heavens; for the green and lilac of the grasses and the yellow of the goat’s-beard flowers glow, and the ripening corn is airy light. But next day the sun is early hot. The wet hay steams and is sweet. The beams pour into a southward coombe of the hills and the dense yew is warm as a fruit-wall, so that the utmost of fragrance is extracted from the marjoram and thyme and fanned by the coming and going of butterflies; and in contrast with this gold and purple heat on flower and wing, through the blue sky and along the hill-top moist clouds are trooping, of the grey colour of melting snow. The great shadows of the clouds brood long over the hay, and in the darker hollows the wind rustles the dripping thickets until mid-day. On another morning after night rain the blue sky is rippled and crimped with high, thin white clouds by several opposing breezes. Vast forces seem but now to have ceased their feud. The battle is over, and there are all the signs of it plain to be seen; but they have laid down their arms, and peace is broad and white in the sky,[181] but of many colours on the earth—for there is blue of harebell and purple of rose-bay among the bracken and popping gorse, and heather and foxglove are purple above the sand, and the mint is hoary lilac, the meadow-sweet is foam, there is rose of willow-herb and yellow of fleabane at the edge of the water, and purple of gentian and cistus yellow on the Downs, and infinite greens in those little dense Edens which nettle and cow-parsnip and bramble and elder make every summer on the banks of the deep lanes. A thousand swifts wheel as if in a fierce wind over the highest places of the hills, over the great seaward-looking camp and its three graves and antique thorns, down to the chestnuts that stand about the rickyards in the cornland below. These are the hours that seem to entice and entrap the airy inhabitants of some land beyond the cloud mountains that rise farther than the farthest of downs. Legend has it that long ago strange children were caught upon the earth, and being asked how they had come there, they said that one day as they were herding their sheep in a far country they chanced on a cave; and within they heard music as of heavenly bells, which lured them on and on through the corridors of that cave until they reached our earth; and here their eyes, used only to a twilight between a sun that had set for ever and a night that had never fallen, were dazed by the August glow, and lying bemused they were caught before they could find the earthly entrance to their cave. Small wonder would this adventure be from a region no matter how blessed, when the earth is wearing the best white wild roses or when August is at its height.
The last hay-waggon has hardly rolled between the[182] elms before the reaper and the reaping-machines begin to work. The oats and wheat are in tents over all the land. Then, then it is hard not to walk over the brown in the green of August grass. There is a roving spirit everywhere. The very tents of the corn suggest a bivouac. The white clouds coming up out of the yellow corn and journeying over the blue have set their faces to some goal. The traveller’s-joy is tangled over the hazels and over the faces of the small chalk-pits. The white beam and the poplar and the sycamore fluttering show the silver sides of their leaves and rustle farewells. The perfect road that goes without hedges under elms and through the corn says, “Leave all and follow.” How the bridges overleap the streams at one leap, or at three, in arches like those of running hounds! The far-scattered, placid sunsets pave the feet of the spirit with many a road to joy; the huge, vacant halls of dawn give a sense of godlike power.
But it is hard to make anything like a truce between these two incompatible desires, the one for going on and on over the earth, the other that would settle for ever, in one place as in a grave and have nothing to do with change. Suppose a man to receive notice of death, it would be hard to decide whether to walk or sail until the end, seeing no man, or none but strangers; or to sit—alone—and by thinking or not thinking to make the change to come as little as is permitted. The two desires will often painfully alternate. Even on these harvest days there is a temptation to take root for ever in some corner of ............