Youth with its heat in the blood may be more capable of exultation at this season, but to the old man it brings the sounder hope and deeper joy.
‘Proceeding from a source of untaught things’
HERE is Appledore; over there is Romney Marsh. The sky has partly cleared after heavy, south-westerly rain. On the horizon where the sea lies the clouds are in a line, and the air is so clear that their edges are sharp against the blue. Nearer to me they are slowly dissolving, re-forming, and moving eastwards, and their shadows are crossing the wide grassy plain on which in the distance Lydd Church is just discernible. I can report something of those greys and that azure, but the best part of what is before me will not outline itself to me. Still less can I shape it in speech. Necessity, majestic inevitable movement, the folly of heat and hurry, all this emerges and again is blended in the simple unity of transcendent loveliness. But beyond there is something so close, so precious! and yet elusive of every effort to grasp it.
She came to meet me from the line Where lies the ocean miles away; And now she’s close; she must be mine: I wait the word that she must say.
The magic word is not for me: The vision fades, and far and near The west wind stirs the grassy sea In whispers to the watching ear.
A TRUE Devonshire village, sloping upwards from the Axe. The cottages are thatched, and the walls are of cobbles, plastered. A little gurgling stream runs down the village street, and over the stream each cottage on its bank has a little bridge. The poor brook is much troubled, unhappily, by cabbage leaves and the like defilement, and does its best to oversweep them and carry them away, but does not quite succeed. In a few minutes, however, it will be in the Axe, and in half an hour it will be in the pure sea. A farmhouse stands at the end of the village with a farmyard of deep manure and black puddles coming up to the side-door. The church, once interesting, has been restored with more than usual barbarity, blue slates, villa ridge-tiles, the vulgarest cheap pavement, tawdry decorations and furniture, such as are supplied to churchwardens by ecclesiastical tradesmen. But the tower is still grey, and has looked unchanged over the Axe estuary for hundreds of years. Turning up from the main street is a Devonshire lane eight feet wide or thereabouts. It ascends to a farm on the hillside, and its steep high banks are covered with ferns and primroses. A tiny brooklet twitters down by its side. At the top of the down is a line of old hawthorns blown slantingly by south-west storms into a close, solid mass of shoots and prickles. They are dwarfed in their struggle, but have thick trunks, many of them covered with brilliant yellow lichen.