Page:The Heart of England.djvu/66

 The trees were very old; their leaves were fresh and wet as when beauty and joy shed a few tears. The soil was centuries deep in black beech mast; the herbage seemed to have been born from it in that very hour. The boulders had stood among the primroses so long that the thrushes had chiselled shallow cups in them as they fed there in the mornings; they were embossed with the most tender green and golden moss. The shadows were as solemn and imperturbable as to a child a cathedral, when he first steps into its solitude alone, and a god is created anew out of his marvelling; and yet the hems of their mantles, where they swept the ground, disclosed a flashing underside of crystals newly-born. And for ourselves—we seemed to be home from a long exile, and the pains of it, such as they were, turned like the shadows into crystal. Here, then, was the land to which had fled those children who once bore our names, who were our companions in the days when sunshine was more than wine had ever been since, and they left us long ago, not suddenly, but so strangely, that we knew not that they were far off; hither those children had fled, and their companions of that time; here they had been hiding these many years; abiding here they had become immortal in the green-fledged antique wood, and we had come back to them. Perhaps they recognised us: perhaps they re-entered these bodies of ours. For once more the cuckoo was clear, golden, joyous. When we heard the blackbird again we did not quarrel with the laugh at his own solemnity, since it was not there. It was not memory, nor hope. Memory perished, and hope that never rests lay asleep; and winds blew softly from