Page:The Heart of England.djvu/140

 children in the midst of their perfections—cut off, and marked in the memory chiefly by the blank they leave, and not by an abundance such as older people entail upon us to mimic life. Hardly had I ceased to watch them than it was day. The cattle in a distant meadow stood still at the edge of their own shadows as if at the edges of pools. The dead elm tree seemed but a skull-capped, foolish jester who set a sharper edge upon our appetite for summer and the sun. The corn, the woods, rejoiced. The green woodpecker laughed and shone in his flight, which undulated as if he had been crossing invisible hedges. A south-west wind arose and rain fell softly, yet not so soothingly but that an odd thought thrust itself into my mind.

I thought of how Cervantes was not enjoying it, and in a moment I saw him and Burton and Wordsworth and Charles Lamb close by, crouching and grey, as if they had been buried alive, under knotted cables of oak root, deep under the earth which was then bearing carnation and wild rose. The wind found out the dead elm tree and took counsel in its branches and moaned, although the broad light now reigned steadfastly over leagues of shining fields.