Page:The Heart of England.djvu/238

 and they change and vanish and reappear beneath the restless sculptor's hand. If a man loves what is passing away, he loves then.

Those little dove-like clouds that for a moment stain the dusky clouds after an April storm—are they a metamorphosis of the Pleiades? They are gone like music; for sometimes the memory of them equals the reality and sometimes they are not to be recalled.

Those Elysian, white sierras in the east, which, at the end of a day of frowns and humours, stretch far away in still and lucid air, their bases lost in blue, making the world immense, as if it were to be thus for ever and the gods to walk again.

The cliffs that hold the moon imprisoned in their clefts and lure the mind to desire useless things.

The flocks that go down into the sea or behind the mountains, and thrill the heart with adventurousness and yet never move it to an adventure, but rather persuade us to care greatly for nothing except to muse and mesmerise ourselves with that old song—

The parcels of aerial gold which at sunset make one canopy as of a golden-foliaged tree planted over the world. The night does not believe that they were ever there.

Those caravans that go down the blue precipices of night intently; those dragons, lean and black, that prepare the dawn and ruin the morning star.

They change, they tarry, they travel far, they pass