Page:The Heart of England.djvu/73

 pool. Some have ventured to intrude upon the monster, to fish for the sleepy carp which are found when it has been driven from its nest of purple mud; but they fish in vain.

The solitary, dying ash tree at the edge of the pond seems, by day, when the monster is powerful there in the summer, to be but the skeleton of an old victim; or, in the winter, the sad and twisted nymph of the water. But every night, like any dreaming child or musing lover, though not perhaps so happily, is it let into a varied, strange, exalted paradise.

You may see it—on still evenings when the mist prevails over all things except the robin's song, and makes even that more melancholy—or when the songs of many nightingales besiege, enter and possess the house and the deserted farmyard—or when the cold and entirely silent air under a purple November sky chills the blood, so that friendship and hope and purposes are all in vain as in an opiate dream—then you may see the ash-tree take heart. It has the air of one going home upon a lonely road that will not end in loneliness. Those bare and stiff, decaying branches are digits pointing homeward through the sky; the tree forgets the monster at its feet and the children who laugh and the supremacy of the buildings round about. It might seem, with those extended branches, to be a self-torturing and aspiring fanatic who had endured thus for uncounted days and nights, and has his vision at last. For, when night is perfect, the tree exults, and though it is perhaps not joyous, it is as one of those great sorrowful temperaments—of soldier, or explorer, or humorist—so active and inexorable that they