Page:Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne.djvu/227

Rh of a grain, dissolved in a drop of water; and it cast its measured bars, for ever recognisable now to human sight, on the chord of the seven colours. And no drop of that red rain can now be shed, so small as that the stain of it cannot be known, and the voice of it heard out of the ground.

166. But the seeing these flower colours, and the iris of blood together with them, just while I was trying to gather into brief space the right laws of war, brought vividly back to me my dreaming fancy of long ago, that even the trees of the earth were "capable of a kind of sorrow, as they opened their innocent leaves in vain for men; and along the dells of England her beeches cast their dappled shades only where the outlaw drew his bow, and the king rode his careless chase; amidst the fair defiles of the Apennines, the twisted olive-trunks hid the ambushes of treachery, and on their meadows, day by day, the lilies, which were white at the dawn, were washed with crimson at sunset."

And so also now this chance word of