ALL the upland was full of little horses, little ponies of the upland. They looked with curious and interested eyes at man, but none of them had known his command. When men passed them riding they saw that there was some alliance between men and their brothers, and they asked news of it. Then they bent their heads down again soberly, to graze on the new pasture, and the wind blew through their manes and their tails; they were happy beasts, thinking of nothing, and knowing nothing but themselves, yet in their movements and the look of their eyes one could see what the skies were round them, and what the world—they were so much a part of it all. In the hollows of the forest there were not many birds, not nearly as many as one had heard in the Weald, but one great hawk circled up in spirals against the wind. The wind was blowing splendidly through an air quite blue and clear for many miles, and growing clearer as the afternoon advanced in gladness. It was a sea wind that had been a gale the day before, but during the night everything had changed in South England, and the principal date of the year was passed, the date which is the true[218] beginning of the year. The mist of the morning had scudded before thick Atlantic weather; by noon it was lifted into clouds, by mid-afternoon those clouds were large, heralding clouds of Spring against an unbounded capacity of sky. There was no longer any struggle between them and the gale; they went together in procession over the country and towards the east.
The ridges of the land, like great waves, rolled in also from the westward; they were clearer and they were sharper with every hour, until at last the points of white chalk pits upon hills a day’s ride away showed clearly under the sunlight, and a man could see the trees even upon the horizon line.
The water that one passed in the long ride seemed to grow clearer, and the woods to have more echoes. Then, whatever in the mind turned to memory, as the mind of all men does in Spring when they have done with their own springtime, turned to memory transformed and was full of visions; and whatever of the mind turned to the future, as most of the mind must do in men of any age when the vigour of the Almighty is abroad, looked at it through a veil which was magical.
It seemed as though under the growing sunlight the change that had come, the touch, the spell, was a thing appreciable in moments of time and growing as one watched. You would have said that all the forest was wakening. The flowers you would have said, and especially the daffodils, had just broken[219] from the bud, and evergreens that had been in leaf all winter you would have said had somehow put on a new green. The movement of the wind in the branches of the beeches did not seem to move them but to find a movement responding to its own, and the colour of those branches against the blue sky and touched by the sun as it grew low was full of vivid promise. If it be not too much to ascribe a mood to all inanimate and animate things, there was a mood about one which was a complete forgetfulness of decay, a sort of trampling upon it, a rising out of it, and a using of it into life: a using of it up into life.
Over three ridges of land to the southward lay the sea. When the sea is in movement before a clear wind that is not a storm, and under a clear, sharp sky, its movement may be perceived for miles and miles. No one can see the waves, but the distant belt is shot with a pattern which one feels so far as the eye commands it, and that belt is alive, and it is a moving thing. Moreover, the high sea downs, the great chalk lifts of that shore of the world, are different on such days from what they are upon any others, and receive life from the sea that made them. All that world upon that morning you would have said was not only receiving gifts from the sea, but was itself apparently born from the sea, lived by the air of............