Page:The Heart of England.djvu/168

 powerfully, never quite expressing itself in any known language—as was natural in what seemed to belong to an early brood of the giant earth—the waggon emerged, with ponderous wheels and slender, curving timbers and trailing shafts. The chariot of Dis coming up to Persephone looked thus majestic. Yet the waggon suggested nothing definite, at least no history. It had no such articulate power. But antiquity played about it as, an hour before, it had played about my shelves and books. It was simply the richer for its long life, like a violin or a wise man; and, like them, it neither carried its legend on its exterior nor encouraged anything more than joyful surmise.

It was the one clearly visible piece of man's work among all those potent shadows and uncertain forms of roof and wall; it was crowned by the last stars. Becoming clearer as morning came, it was an important part of the recreation of the world, and involved in it, just as a brazen image may seem to be part of the good fortune or calamity which follows prayer to it. It filled the white road with emotion. It was more intelligible than some men are when they say "I worship" or "I love." Keats left my mind. From my memory, I added melodies of voice and harp and reed, and noise of seas and winds in forests and houses by night, and organ music, with its many demons blithe and terrible, exploring the skiey roof of some cathedral and knocking at the clerestory to get out, floating, sad or happy, about the aisles, and settling at last to make the old purples and greens and blues in the glass more solemn than before; and yet I could not reproduce the melody or anything like it, with which the old waggon pervaded the farm-