Page:The Heart of England.djvu/65

 ash-flowers wood-pigeons shook the rain down to the leaves beneath. Amongst the ash trees were hazels, new leaved, their olive stems gloomily shining.

Over all, the ancient beeches stood up with hard sculptured boles supporting storey after storey of branch and shade which were traversed at the top and at the fringes by fair fresh leaves. The rain had run down the main trunks for generations, and made paths of green and black that tried to gleam. Here and there, low down, the beeches extended long priestly branches clothed in leaf, still and curved, to call for silence in the cool, shadowy, crystal air.

Far away among the branches whitened the chalk cliffs. On this side and on that, immense mossy boulders made tables for thrushes and cast perfect shadows.

High up in the beeches, the invisible wood-wrens sang, and their songs were as if, overhead in the stainless air, little waves of pearls dropped and scattered and shivered on a shore of pearls. Below them the wood-pigeons began to coo—with notes that were but as rounded bubbles emerging from the silence and lost again. Just within hearing, in the hawthorn hedge of the wood, blackbirds were singing: they opened with the most high, arrogating notes that slowly rolled on to noble ends, when suddenly they laughed and ceased; again and again they began so, and again and again they laughed, as if they had grown too wise to believe utterly in noble things. As we went deeper into the wood they ceased, and those moist shades welcomed us as if they held what we desired.