For here I sit
With bricks all round me, bilious and brown;
And not a chance this summer to quit
The bustle and roar and the cries of town,
Nor to cease to breathe this over-breathed air,
Heavy with toil and bitter with care.
Well, - face it and chase it, this vain regret;
Which would I choose, to see my moor
With eyes such as many that I have met,
Which see and are blind, which all wealth leaves poor,
Or to sit, brick-prisoned, but free within,
Freeborn by a charter no gold can win?
When my turn came, the poem I wrote, which duly appeared, was, like my
friend's Moor, a recollected emotion, a mental experience
relived. Mine was in the New Forest; when walking there on day, the
loveliness of that green leafy world, its silence and its melody and
the divine sunlight, so wrought on me that for a few precious moments
it produced a mystical state, that rare condition of beautiful
illusions when the feet are off the ground, when, on some occasions, we
appear to be one with nature, unbodied like the poet's bird, floating,
diffused in it. There are also other occasions when this transfigured
aspect of nature produces the idea that we are in communion with or in
the presence of unearthly entities.
THE VISIONARY
I
It must be true, I've somtimes thought,
That beings from some realm afar
Oft wander in the void immense,
Flying from star to star.
In silence through this various world,
They pass, to mortal eyes unseen,
And toiling men in towns know not
That one with them has been.
But oft, when on the woodland falls
A sudden hush, and no bird sings;
When leaves, scarce fluttered by the wind,
Speak low of sacred things,
My heart has told me I should know,
In such a lonely place, if one
From other worlds came there and stood
Between me and the sun.
II
At noon, within the woodland shade
I walked and listened to the birds;
And feeling glad like them I sang
A low song without words.
When all at once a radiance white,
Not from the sun, all round me came;
The dead leaves burned like gold, the grass
Like tongues of emerald flame.
The murmured song died on my lips;
Scarce breathing, motionless I stood;
So strange that splendour was! so deep
A silence held the wood!
The blood rushed to and from my heart,
Now felt like ice, now fire in me,
Till putting forth my hands, I cried,
"O let me hear and see!"
But even as I spake, and gazed
Wide-eyed, and bowed my trembling knees,
The glory and the silence passed
Like lightning from the trees.
And pale at first the sunlight seemed
When it was gone; the leaves were stirred
To whispered sound, and loud rang out
The carol of a bird.
End of A Traveller in Little Things, by W. H. Hudson
