Page:The Heart of England.djvu/67

over Lethe and breathed upon our eyelids, coming as delicate intercessors between us and life. We forgot that ours had been the sin of Alcyone and Ceyx who, in their proud happiness, called one another Zeus! and Here! and for that were cast down by the gods. Once again we did so, for this was the wood of youth, and in the old streets of the soul where the grass grows among the long-untrodden stones, and in the doorways of deserted homes, the sound of footsteps and the click of a frequented latch was heard.

And yonder is the wide prospect again, and the dawn,—the green hedges starred with white stitchwort flower, misty with the first hawthorn clusters, a-flutter with whitethroat, wild with the warbling of the blackcap in their depths; wide, lustrous meadows dimmed by cuckoo flowers, and at the edges of them the oaks beginning to bud and their branches like great black brands about to break into golden flame; and about the oaks that stood in the midst of them the grass waving in the sun like brooks plunging from their roots; farmhouses known only by their encircling apple trees all in bloom; radiant pools where the sand-piper laughed; woods where the oak and ash waded deep in the translucent green of the undergrowth's rising tide and even then glowed with brown and unborn greens, and the nightingale sang far withdrawn, and at the edge the hurdle-maker worked by his thatched cote; and ridge beyond ridge of hills cloudily wooded; and over all the low sky like a blue bowl just emptied of its cream.

And as we sat at breakfast the village children came up the path between borders dense with tall yellow