But the stray things of the
hedge, how do they know? The great blackbird has planted his nest by the
ash-stole, open to every one's view, without a bough to conceal it and
not a leaf on the ash - nothing but the moss on the lower end of the
branches. He does not seek cunningly for concealment. I think of the
drift of time, and I see the apple bloom coming and the blue veronica in
the grass. A thousand thousand buds and leaves and flowers and blades of
grass, things to note day by day, increasing so rapidly that no pencil
can put them down and no book hold them, not even to number them - and how
to write the thoughts they give? All these without me - how can they
manage without me?
For they were so much to me, I had come to feel that I was as much in
return to them. The old, old error: I love the earth, therefore the earth
loves me - I am her child - I am Man, the favoured of all creatures. I am
the centre, and all for me was made.
In time past, strong of foot, I walked gaily up the noble hill that leads
to Beachy Head from Eastbourne, joying greatly in the sun and the wind.
Every step crumbled up numbers of minute grey shells, empty and dry, that
crunched under foot like hoar-frost or fragile beads. They were very
pretty; it was a shame to crush them - such vases as no king's pottery
could make. They lay by millions in the depths of the sward, and I
thought as I broke them unwillingly that each of these had once been a
house of life. A living creature dwelt in each and felt the joy of
existence, and was to itself all in all - as if the great sun over the
hill shone for it, and the width of the earth under was for it, and the
grass and plants put on purpose for it. They were dead, the whole race of
them, and these their skeletons were as dust under my feet. Nature sets
no value upon life neither of minute hill-snail nor of human being.
I thought myself so much to the earliest leaf and the first meadow
orchis - so important that I should note the first zee-zee of the
titlark - that I should pronounce it summer, because now the oaks were
green; I must not miss a day nor an hour in the fields lest something
should escape me. How beautiful the droop of the great brome-grass by the
wood! But to-day I have to listen to the lark's song - not out of doors
with him, but through the window-pane, and the bullfinch carries the
rootlet fibre to his nest without me.
