Page:The Heart of England.djvu/232

 that seems on this fair morning to have brought the spring out of the sea; and that is why they strain grimly to have her safe on the storm-strewn shore. She is laden with flowers, with anemones and primroses for the woods, violets for the banks, marigolds for the brooks and the ungrazed, rushy corners of long fields, daffodils for the stone walls and the short turf at the edges of copses, stitchwort for the hedgerows, bittersweet may for the hawthorns, gold for the willows, white and rosy blossom for the old orchards among the hills, mezereon, jonquils, rockets, plume poppies and snapdragons and roses for the gardens; and the men heave and groan as if they feared lest the sea should still rob them of some.

All the leaves are there—the sweet hawthorn green which the children chew, the dewy, pensile leaves of hazel and beech and lime, the palmy ash leaves still misty with purple flower, the oak leaves bronzed or gilded among their rosy galls, and the streamers of the willow, and all the grasses and reeds, and the tall young adder-headed bracken for the moor, and ferns for the dripping ledges of the waterfall; and the men heave without resting, lest any should escape and so cheat them of shaded ways for rest and sport and love.

There also are the birds—the gentle martins, swallows that will seem the perfect flower of the home sweetness in stern cottages on the heights and warm farmhouses in the valleys, the chiffchafFs that shall sing in the ash and the larch, the delicate wrens of the woodland crests and the tempestuous nightingales of the thick-budded copses, silent fly-catchers for the plum trees on southern walls, cuckoos to shout over the dim water-meadows and in the