“What a wonderful world it was to be born into, that little England that was mine,” said Rupert, “and how it seemed as if the days were not half long enough for one to taste all the joys they brought. How I loved everything--sights and sounds, the feel and breath of living, stirring things! I loved not only rainbows and dewdrops sparkling in cool flowers, but also footprints in the dew and washed stones gay for an hour. Wet roofs beneath the lamplight had their gleam of enchantment, and the blue bitter smoke of an autumn fire was like magic incense.”
Most people have eyes to see only that which is exceptional--the exclamation marks of nature’s round, like sunset, moonrise, mountains wrapped in purple mists, or still water under a starry sky. They do not see the beauty in the changes of the common daylight, in familiar trees, a winding path, and a few dooryard posies.
But Rupert noted with lingering tenderness the shapes and colors of all the simple daily things.
“White plates and cups, clean-gleaming, Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust; And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new; And new-peeled sticks; and shining pools on grass;-- All these have been my loves--”
he said, when dreaming fondly and whimsically of his boyish days. And how he loved little shy, half-hidden things--elfin moss flowers, downy curled-up ferns under the dry leaves, the musty smell of the dead leaves themselves and of the moist, moldy earth. But he was never one of those who must seek beauty in the haunts of nature untouched by man. The splendid copper beech, kingly and kind, in the headmaster’s garden, and Dr. Arnold’s own fern-leaved tree, whose tender gleams and flickerings gladdened every one who lingered in its shade, were dearer than any aloof forest monarchs could have been.
It seemed as if all the things that Rupert saw and loved somehow became part of himself. Something of the swift life of darting birds, of quivering winged insects, and furtive scurrying creatures in fur was in the alert swiftness of his lithe young body. One found oneself thinking of fair fields under a bright sky, of hedgerows abloom, of all the singing, golden warmth that makes an English summer sweet, in looking into the glowing beauty of the boy’s eager face.