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Pageant of Summer

by Richard Jefferies

January, 1996 [Etext #414]


*The Project Gutenberg Etext of Pageant of Summer, by Jefferies*
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The Pageant of Summer by Richard Jefferies.  Scanned and Proofed by
David Price, email [e-mail]




THE PAGEANT OF SUMMER




I.



GREEN rushes, long and thick, standing up above the edge of the
ditch, told the hour of the year as distinctly as the shadow on the
dial the hour of the day.  Green and thick and sappy to the touch,
they felt like summer, soft and elastic, as if full of life, mere
rushes though they were.  On the fingers they left a green scent;
rushes have a separate scent of green, so, too, have ferns, very
different from that of grass or leaves.  Rising from brown sheaths,
the tall stems enlarged a little in the middle, like classical
columns, and heavy with their sap and freshness, leaned against the
hawthorn sprays.  From the earth they had drawn its moisture, and
made the ditch dry; some of the sweetness of the air had entered
into their fibres, and the rushes - the common rushes - were full
of beautiful summer.  The white pollen of early grasses growing on
the edge was dusted from them each time the hawthorn boughs were
shaken by a thrush.  These lower sprays came down in among the
grass, and leaves and grass-blades touched.  Smooth round stems of
angelica, big as a gun-barrel, hollow and strong, stood on the
slope of the mound, their tiers of well-balanced branches rising
like those of a tree.  Such a sturdy growth pushed back the ranks
of hedge parsley in full white flower, which blocked every avenue
and winding bird's-path of the bank.  But the "gix," or wild
parsnip, reached already high above both, and would rear its fluted
stalk, joint on joint, till it could face a man.  Trees they were
to the lesser birds, not even bending if perched on; but though so
stout, the birds did not place their nests on or against them.
Something in the odour of these umbelliferous plants, perhaps, is
not quite liked; if brushed or bruised they give out a bitter
greenish scent.  Under their cover, well shaded and hidden, birds
build, but not against or on the stems, though they will affix
their nests to much less certain supports.  With the grasses that
overhung the edge, with the rushes in the ditch itself, and these
great plants on the mound, the whole hedge was wrapped and
thickened.  No cunning of glance could see through it; it would
have needed a ladder to help any one look over.

It was between the may and the June roses.  The may bloom had
fallen, and among the hawthorn boughs were the little green bunches
that would feed the red-wings in autumn.  High up the briars had
climbed, straight and towering while there was a thorn or an ash
sapling, or a yellow-green willow, to uphold them, and then curving
over towards the meadow.  The buds were on them, but not yet open;
it was between the may and the rose.

As the wind, wandering over the sea, takes from each wave an
invisible portion, and brings to those on shore the ethereal
essence of ocean, so the air lingering among the wood and hedges -
green waves and billows - became full of fine atoms of summer.
Swept from notched hawthorn leaves, broad-topped oak-leaves, narrow
ash sprays and oval willows; from vast elm cliffs and sharp-taloned
brambles under; brushed from the waving grasses and stiffening
corn, the dust of the sunshine was borne along and breathed.
Steeped in flower and pollen to the music of bees and birds, the
stream of the atmosphere became a living thing.  It was life to
breathe it, for the air itself was life.  The strength of the earth
went up through the leaves into the wind.  Fed thus on the food of
the Immortals, the heart opened to the width and depth of the
summer - to the broad horizon afar, down to the minutest creature
in the grass, up to the highest swallow.  Winter shows us Matter in
its dead form, like the Primary rocks, like granite and basalt -
clear but cold and frozen crystal.  Summer shows us Matter changing
into life, sap rising from the earth through a million tubes, the
alchemic power of light entering the solid oak; and see! it bursts
forth in countless leaves.  Living things leap in the grass, living
things drift upon the air, living things are coming forth to
breathe in every hawthorn bush.  No longer does the immense weight
of Matter - the dead, the crystallized - press ponderously on the
thinking mind.  The whole office of Matter is to feed life - to
feed the green rushes, and the roses that are about to be; to feed
the swallows above, and us that wander beneath them.  So much
greater is this green and common rush than all the Alps.

Fanning so swiftly, the wasp's wings are but just visible as he
passes; did he pause, the light would be apparent through their
texture.  On the wings of the dragon-fly as he hovers an instant
before he darts there is a prismatic gleam.  These wing textures
are even more delicate than the minute filaments on a swallow's
quill, more delicate than the pollen of a flower.  They are formed
of matter indeed, but how exquisitely it is resolved into the means
and organs of life!  Though not often consciously recognized,
perhaps this is the great pleasure of summer, to watch the earth,
the dead particles, resolving themselves into the living case of
life, to see the seed-leaf push aside the clod and become by
degrees the perfumed flower.  From the tiny mottled egg come the
wings that by-and-by shall pass the immense sea.  It is in this
marvellous transformation of clods and cold matter into living
things that the joy and the hope of summer reside.  Every blade of
grass, each leaf, each separate floret and petal, is an inscription
speaking of hope.  Consider the grasses and the oaks, the swallows,
the sweet blue butterfly - they are one and all a sign and token
showing before our eyes earth made into life.  So that my hope
becomes as broad as the horizon afar, reiterated by every leaf,
sung on every bough, reflected in the gleam of every flower.  There
is so much for us yet to come, so much to be gathered, and enjoyed.
Not for you or me, now, but for our race, who will ultimately use
this magical secret for their happiness.  Earth holds secrets
enough to give them the life of the fabled Immortals.  My heart is
fixed firm and stable in the belief that ultimately the sunshine
and the summer, the flowers and the azure sky, shall become, as it
were, interwoven into man's existence.  He shall take from all
their beauty and enjoy their glory.  Hence it is that a flower is
to me so much more than stalk and petals.  When I look in the glass
I see that every line in my face means pessimism; but in spite of
my face - that is my experience - I remain an optimist.  Time with
an unsteady hand has etched thin crooked lines, and, deepening the
hollows, has cast the original expression into shadow.  Pain and
sorrow flow over us with little ceasing, as the sea-hoofs beat on
the beach.  Let us not look at ourselves but onwards, and take
strength from the leaf and the signs of the field.  He is indeed
despicable who cannot look onwards to the ideal life of man.  Not
to do so is to deny our birthright of mind.

The long grass flowing towards the hedge has reared in a wave
against it.  Along the hedge it is higher and greener, and rustles
into the very bushes.  There is a mark only now where the footpath
was; it passed close to the hedge, but its place is traceable only
as a groove in the sorrel and seed-tops.  Though it has quite
filled the path, the grass there cannot send its tops so high; it
has left a winding crease.  By the hedge here stands a moss-grown
willow, and its slender branches extend over the sward.  Beyond it
is an oak, just apart from the bushes; then the ground gently
rises, and an ancient pollard ash, hollow and black inside, guards
an open gateway like a low tower.  The different tone of green
shows that the hedge is there of nut-trees; but one great hawthorn
spreads out in a semicircle, roofing the grass which is yet more
verdant in the still pool (as it were) under it.  Next a corner,
more oaks, and a chestnut in bloom.  Returning to this spot an old
apple tree stands right out in the meadow like an island.  There
seemed just now the tiniest twinkle of movement by the rushes, but
it was lost among the hedge parsley.  Among the grey leaves of the
willow there is another flit of motion; and visible now against the
sky there is a little brown bird, not to be distinguished at the
moment from the many other little brown birds that are known to be
about.  He got up into the willow from the hedge parsley somehow,
without being seen to climb or fly.  Suddenly he crosses to the
tops of the hawthorn and immediately flings himself up into the air
a yard or two, his wings and ruffled crest making a ragged outline;
jerk, jerk, jerk, as if it were with the utmost difficulty he could
keep even at that height.  He scolds, and twitters, and chirps, and
all at once sinks like a stone into the hedge and out of sight as a
stone into a pond.  It is a whitethroat; his nest is deep in the
parsley and nettles.  Presently he will go out to the island apple
tree and back again in a minute or two; the pair of them are so
fond of each other's affectionate company, they cannot remain
apart.

Watching the line of the hedge, about every two minutes, either
near at hand or yonder a bird darts out just at the level of the
grass, hovers a second with labouring wings, and returns as swiftly
to the cover.  Sometimes it is a flycatcher, sometimes a
greenfinch, or chaffinch, now and then a robin, in one place a
shrike, perhaps another is a red-start.  They are flyfishing all of
them, seizing insects from the sorrel tips and grass, as the
kingfisher takes a roach from the water.  A blackbird slips up into
the oak and a dove descends in the corner by the chestnut tree.
But these are not visible together, only one at a time and with
intervals.  The larger part of the life of the hedge is out of
sight.  All the thrush-fledglings, the young blackbirds, and
finches are hidden, most of them on the mound among the ivy, and
parsley, and rough grasses, protected, too, by a roof of brambles.
The nests that still have eggs are not, like the nests of the early
days of April, easily found; they are deep down in the tangled
herbage by the shore of the ditch, or far inside the thorny
thickets which then looked mere bushes, and are now so broad.
Landrails are running in the grass concealed as a man would be in a
wood; they have nests and eggs on the ground for which you may
search in vain till the mowers come.

Up in the corner a fragment of white fur and marks of scratching
show where a doe has been preparing for a litter.  Some well-
trodden runs lead from mound to mound; they are sandy near the
hedge where the particles have been carried out adhering to the
rabbits' feet and fur.  A crow rises lazily from the upper end of
the field, and perches in the chestnut.  His presence, too, was
unsuspected.  He is there by far too frequently.  At this season
the crows are always in the mowing-grass, searching about, stalking
in winding tracks from furrow to furrow, picking up an egg here and
a foolish fledgling that has wandered from the mound yonder.  Very
likely there may be a moorhen or two slipping about under cover of
the long grass; thus hidden, they can leave the shelter of the
flags and wander a distance from the brook.  So that beneath the
surface of the grass and under the screen of the leaves there are
ten times more birds than are seen.

Besides the singing and calling, there is a peculiar sound which is
only heard in summer.  Waiting quietly to discover what birds are
about, I become aware of a sound in the very air.  It is not the
midsummer hum which will soon be heard over the heated hay in the
valley and over the cooler hills alike.  It is not enough to be
called a hum, and does but just tremble at the extreme edge of
hearing.  If the branches wave and rustle they overbear it; the
buzz of a passing bee is so much louder, it overcomes all of it
that is in the whole field.  I cannot define it, except by calling
the hours of winter to mind - they are silent; you hear a branch
crack or creak as it rubs another in the wood, you hear the hoar
frost crunch on the grass beneath your feet, but the air is without
sound in itself.  The sound of summer is everywhere - in the
passing breeze, in the hedge, in the broad-branching trees, in the
grass as it swings; all the myriad particles that together make the
summer are in motion.  The sap moves in the trees, the pollen is
pushed out from grass and flower, and yet again these acres and
acres of leaves and square miles of grass blades - for they would
cover acres and square miles if reckoned edge to edge - are drawing
their strength from the atmosphere.  Exceedingly minute as these
vibrations must be, their numbers perhaps may give them a volume
almost reaching in the aggregate to the power of the ear.  Besides
the quivering leaf, the swinging grass, the fluttering bird's wing,
and the thousand oval membranes which innumerable insects whirl
about, a faint resonance seems to come from the very earth itself.
The fervour of the sunbeams descending in a tidal flood rings on
the strung harp of earth.  It is this exquisite undertone, heard
and yet unheard, which brings the mind into sweet accordance with
the wonderful instrument of nature.

By the apple tree there is a low bank, where the grass is less tall
and admits the heat direct to the ground; here there are blue
flowers - bluer than the wings of my favourite butterflies - with
white centres - the lovely bird's-eyes, or veronica.  The violet
and cowslip, bluebell and rose, are known to thousands; the
veronica is overlooked.  The ploughboys know it, and the wayside
children, the mower and those who linger in fields, but few else.
Brightly blue and surrounded by greenest grass, imbedded in and all
the more blue for the shadow of the grass, these growing
butterflies' wings draw to themselves the sun.  From this island I
look down into the depth of the grasses.  Red sorrel spires - deep
drinkers of reddest sun wine - stand the boldest, and in their
numbers threaten the buttercups.  To these in the distance they
give the gipsy-gold tint - the reflection of fire on plates of the
precious metal.  It will show even on a ring by firelight; blood in
the gold, they say.  Gather the open marguerite daisies, and they
seem large - so wide a disc, such fingers of rays; but in the grass
their size is toned by so much green.  Clover heads of honey lurk
in the bunches and by the hidden footpath.  Like clubs from
Polynesia the tips of the grasses are varied in shape: some tend to
a point - the foxtails - some are hard and cylindrical; others,
avoiding the club shape, put forth the slenderest branches with
fruit of seed at the ends, which tremble as the air goes by.  Their
stalks are ripening and becoming of the colour of hay while yet the
long blades remain green.

Each kind is repeated a hundred times, the foxtails are succeeded
by foxtails, the narrow blades by narrow blades, but never become
monotonous; sorrel stands by sorrel, daisy flowers by daisy.  This
bed of veronica at the foot of the ancient apple has a whole
handful of flowers, and yet they do not weary the eye.  Oak follows
oak and elm ranks with elm, but the woodlands are pleasant; however
many times reduplicated, their beauty only increases.  So, too, the
summer days; the sun rises on the same grasses and green hedges,
there is the same blue sky, but did we ever have enough of them?
No, not in a hundred years!  There seems always a depth, somewhere,
unexplored, a thicket that has not been seen through, a corner full
of ferns, a quaint old hollow tree, which may give us something.
Bees go by me as I stand under the apple, but they pass on for the
most part bound on a long journey, across to the clover fields or
up to the thyme lands; only a few go down into the mowing-grass.
The hive bees are the most impatient of insects; they cannot bear
to entangle their wings beating against grasses or boughs.  Not one
will enter a hedge.  They like an open and level surface, places
cropped by sheep, the sward by the roadside, fields of clover,
where the flower is not deep under grass.




II.


IT is the patient humble-bee that goes down into the forest of the
mowing-grass.  If entangled, the humble-bee climbs up a sorrel stem
and takes wing, without any sign of annoyance.  His broad back with
tawny bar buoyantly glides over the golden buttercups.  He hums to
himself as he goes, so happy is he.  He knows no skep, no cunning
work in glass receives his labour, no artificial saccharine aids
him when the beams of the sun are cold, there is no step to his
house that he may alight in comfort; the way is not made clear for
him that he may start straight for the flowers, nor are any sown
for him.  He has no shelter if the storm descends suddenly; he has
no dome of twisted straw well thatched and tiled to retreat to.
The butcher-bird, with a beak like a crooked iron nail, drives him
to the ground, and leaves him pierced with a thorn but no hail of
shot revenges his tortures.  The grass stiffens at nightfall (in
autumn), and he must creep where he may, if possibly he may escape
the frost.  No one cares for the humble-bee.  But down to the
flowering nettle in the mossy-sided ditch, up into the tall elm,
winding in and out and round the branched buttercups, along the
banks of the brook, far inside the deepest wood, away he wanders
and despises nothing.  His nest is under the rough grasses and the
mosses of the mound, a mere tunnel beneath the fibres and matted
surface.  The hawthorn overhangs it, the fern grows by, red mice
rustle past.

It thunders, and the great oak trembles; the heavy rain drops
through the treble roof of oak and hawthorn and fern.  Under the
arched branches the lightning plays along, swiftly to and fro, or
seems to, like the swish of a whip, a yellowish-red against the
green; a boom! a crackle as if a tree fell from the sky.  The thick
grasses are bowed, the white florets of the wild parsley are beaten
down, the rain hurls itself, and suddenly a fierce blast tears the
green oak leaves and whirls them out into the fields; but the
humble-bee's home, under moss and matted fibres, remains uninjured.
His house at the root of the king of trees, like a cave in the
rock, is safe.  The storm passes and the sun comes out, the air is
the sweeter and the richer for the rain, like verses with a rhyme;
there will be more honey in the flowers.  Humble he is, but wild;
always in the field, the wood; always by the banks and thickets;
always wild and humming to his flowers.  Therefore I like the
humble-bee, being, at heart at least, for ever roaming among the
woodlands and the hills and by the brooks.  In such quick summer
storms the lightning gives the impression of being far more
dangerous than the zigzag paths traced on the autumn sky.  The
electric cloud seems almost level with the ground, and the livid
flame to rush to and fro beneath the boughs as the little bats do
in the evening.

Caught by such a cloud, I have stayed under thick larches at the
edge of plantations.  They are no shelter, but conceal one
perfectly.  The wood pigeons come home to their nest trees; in
larches they seem to have permanent nests, almost like rooks.
Kestrels, too, come home to the wood.  Pheasants crow, but not from
fear - from defiance; in fear they scream.  The boom startles them,
and they instantly defy the sky.  The rabbits quietly feed on out
in the field between the thistles and rushes that so often grow in
woodside pastures, quietly hopping to their favourite places,
utterly heedless how heavy the echoes may be in the hollows of the
wooded hills.  Till the rain comes they take no heed whatever, but
then make for shelter.  Blackbirds often make a good deal of noise;
but the soft turtle-doves coo gently, let the lightning be as
savage as it will.  Nothing has the least fear.  Man alone, more
senseless than a pigeon, put a god in vapour; and to this day,
though the printing press has set a foot on every threshold,
numbers bow the knee when they hear the roar the timid dove does
not heed.  So trustful are the doves, the squirrels, the birds of
the branches, and the creatures of the field.  Under their tuition
let us rid ourselves of mental terrors, and face death itself as
calmly as they do the livid lightning; so trustful and so content
with their fate, resting in themselves and unappalled.  If but by
reason and will I could reach the godlike calm and courage of what
we so thoughtlessly call the timid turtle-dove, I should lead a
nearly perfect life.

The bark of the ancient apple tree under which I have been standing
is shrunken like iron which has been heated and let cool round the
rim of a wheel.  For a hundred years the horses have rubbed against
it while feeding in the aftermath.  The scales of the bark are gone
or smoothed down and level, so that insects have no hiding-place.
There are no crevices for them, the horsehairs that were caught
anywhere have been carried away by birds for their nests.  The
trunk is smooth and columnar, hard as iron.  A hundred times the
mowing-grass has grown up around it, the birds have built their
nests, the butterflies fluttered by, and the acorns dropped from
the oaks.  It is a long, long time, counted by artificial hours or
by the seasons, but it is longer still in another way.  The
greenfinch in the hawthorn yonder has been there since I came out,
and all the time has been happily talking to his love.  He has left
the hawthorn indeed, but only for a minute or two, to fetch a few
seeds, and comes back each time more full of song-talk than ever.
He notes no slow movement of the oak's shadow on the grass; it is
nothing to him and his lady dear that the sun, as seen from his
nest, is crossing from one great bough of the oak to another.  The
dew even in the deepest and most tangled grass has long since been
dried, and some of the flowers that close at noon will shortly fold
their petals.  The morning airs, which breathe so sweetly, come
less and less frequently as the heat increases.  Vanishing from the
sky, the last fragments of cloud have left an untarnished azure.
Many times the bees have returned to their hives, and thus the
index of the day advances.  It is nothing to the greenfinches; all
their thoughts are in their song-talk.  The sunny moment is to them
all in all.  So deeply are they rapt in it that they do not know
whether it is a moment or a year.  There is no clock for feeling,
for joy, for love.

And with all their motions and stepping from bough to bough, they
are not restless; they have so much time, you see.  So, too, the
whitethroat in the wild parsley; so, too, the thrush that just now
peered out and partly fluttered his wings as he stood to look.  A
butterfly comes and stays on a leaf - a leaf much warmed by the sun
- and shuts his wings.  In a minute he opens them, shuts them
again, half wheels round, and by-and-by - just when he chooses, and
not before - floats away.  The flowers open, and remain open for
hours, to the sun.  Hastelessness is the only word one can make up
to describe it; there is much rest, but no haste.  Each moment, as
with the greenfinches, is so full of life that it seems so long and
so sufficient in itself.  Not only the days, but life itself
lengthens in summer.  I would spread abroad my arms and gather more
of it to me, could I do so.

All the procession of living and growing things passes.  The grass
stands up taller and still taller, the sheaths open, and the stalk
arises, the pollen clings till the breeze sweeps it.  The bees rush
past, and the resolute wasps; the humble-bees, whose weight swings
them along.  About the oaks and maples the brown chafers swarm, and
the fern-owls at dusk, and the blackbirds and jays by day, cannot
reduce their legions while they last.  Yellow butterflies, and
white, broad red admirals, and sweet blues; think of the kingdom of
flowers which is theirs!  Heavy moths burring at the edge of the
copse; green, and red, and gold flies: gnats, like smoke, around
the tree-tops; midges so thick over the brook, as if you could haul
a netful; tiny leaping creatures in the grass; bronze beetles
across the path; blue dragonflies pondering on cool leaves of
water-plantain.  Blue jays flitting, a magpie drooping across from
elm to elm; young rooks that have escaped the hostile shot
blundering up into the branches; missel thrushes leading their
fledglings, already strong on the wing, from field to field.  An
egg here on the sward dropped by a starling; a red ladybird
creeping, tortoise-like, up a green fern frond.  Finches undulating
through the air, shooting themselves with closed wings, and linnets
happy with their young.

Golden dandelion discs - gold and orange - of a hue more beautiful,
I think, than the higher and more visible buttercup.  A blackbird,
gleaming, so black is he, splashing in the runlet of water across
the gateway.  A ruddy king-fisher swiftly drawing himself, as you
might draw a stroke with a pencil, over the surface of the yellow
buttercups, and away above the hedge.  Hart's-tongue fern, thick
with green, so green as to be thick with its colour, deep in the
ditch under the shady hazel boughs.  White meadow-sweet lifting its
tiny florets, and black-flowered sedges.  You must push through the
reed grass to find the sword-flags; the stout willow-herbs will not
be trampled down, but resist the foot like underwood.  Pink lychnis
flowers behind the withy stoles, and little black moorhens swim
away, as you gather it, after their mother, who has dived under the
water-grass, and broken the smooth surface of the duckweed.  Yellow
loosestrife is rising, thick comfrey stands at the very edge; the
sandpipers run where the shore is free from bushes.  Back by the
underwood the prickly and repellent brambles will presently present
us with fruit.  For the squirrels the nuts are forming, green
beechmast is there - green wedges under the spray; up in the oaks
the small knots, like bark rolled up in a dot, will be acorns.
Purple vetches along the mounds, yellow lotus where the grass is
shorter, and orchis succeeds to orchis.  As I write them, so these
things come - not set in gradation, but like the broadcast flowers
in the mowing-grass.

Now follows the gorse, and the pink rest-harrow, and the sweet
lady's bedstraw, set as it were in the midst of a little thorn-
bush.  The broad repetition of the yellow clover is not to be
written; acre upon acre, and not one spot of green, as if all the
green had been planed away, leaving only the flowers to which the
bees come by the thousand from far and near.  But one white campion
stands in the midst of the lake of yellow.  The field is scented as
though a hundred hives of honey had been emptied on it.  Along the
mound by it the bluebells are seeding, the hedge has been cut and
the ground is strewn with twigs.  Among those seeding blue-bells
and dry twigs and mosses I think a titlark has his nest, as he
stays all day there and in the oak over.  The pale clear yellow of
charlock, sharp and clear, promises the finches bushels of seed for
their young.  Under the scarlet of the poppies the larks run, and
then for change of colour soar into the blue.  Creamy honeysuckle
on the hedge around the cornfield, buds of wild rose everywhere,
but no sweet petal yet.  Yonder, where the wheat can climb no
higher up the slope, are the purple heath-bells, thyme and flitting
stone-chats.

The lone barn shut off by acres of barley is noisy with sparrows.
It is their city, and there is a nest in every crevice, almost
under every tile.  Sometimes the partridges run between the ricks,
and when the bats come out of the roof, leverets play in the
waggon-track.  At even a fern-owl beats by, passing close to the
eaves whence the moths issue.  On the narrow waggon-track which
descends along a coombe and is worn in chalk, the heat pours down
by day as if an invisible lens in the atmosphere focussed the sun's
rays.  Strong woody knapweed endures it, so does toadflax and pale
blue scabious, and wild mignonette.  The very sun of Spain burns
and burns and ripens the wheat on the edge of the coombe, and will
only let the spring moisten a yard or two around it; but there a
few rushes have sprung, and in the water itself brooklime with blue
flowers grows so thickly that nothing but a bird could find space
to drink.  So down again from this sun of Spain to woody coverts
where the wild hops are blocking every avenue, and green-flowered
bryony would fain climb to the trees; where grey-flecked ivy winds
spirally about the red rugged bark of pines, where burdocks fight
for the footpath, and teazle-heads look over the low hedges.
Brake-fern rises five feet high; in some way woodpeckers are
associated with brake, and there seem more of them where it
flourishes.  If you count the depth and strength of its roots in
the loamy sand, add the thickness of its flattened stem, and the
width of its branching fronds, you may say that it comes near to be
a little tree.  Beneath where the ponds are bushy mare's-tails
grow, and on the moist banks  jointed pewterwort; some of the broad
bronze leaves of water-weeds seem to try and conquer the pond and
cover it so firmly that a wagtail may run on them.  A white
butterfly follows along the waggon-road, the pheasants slip away as
quietly as the butterfly flies, but a jay screeches loudly and
flutters in high rage to see us.  Under an ancient garden wall
among matted bines of trumpet convolvulus, there is a hedge-
sparrow's nest overhung with ivy on which even now the last black
berries cling.

There are minute white flowers on the top of the wall, out of
reach, and lichen grows against it dried by the sun till it looks
ready to crumble.  By the gateway grows a thick bunch of meadow
geranium, soon to flower; over the gate is the dusty highway road,
quiet but dusty, dotted with the innumerable foot-marks of a flock
of sheep that has passed.  The sound of their bleating still comes
back, and the bees driven up by their feet have hardly had time to
settle again on the white clover beginning to flower on the short
roadside sward.  All the hawthorn leaves and briar and bramble, the
honeysuckle, too, is gritty with the dust that has been scattered
upon it.  But see - can it be?  Stretch a hand high, quick, and
reach it down; the first, the sweetest, the dearest rose of June.
Not yet expected, for the time is between the may and the roses,
least of all here in the hot and dusty highway; but it is found -
the first rose of June.

Straight go the white petals to the heart; straight the mind's
glance goes back to how many other pageants of summer in old times!
When perchance the sunny days were even more sunny; when the stilly
oaks were full of mystery, lurking like the Druid's mistletoe in
the midst of their mighty branches.  A glamour in the heart came
back to it again from every flower; as the sunshine was reflected
from them, so the feeling in the heart returned tenfold.  To the
dreamy summer haze, love gave a deep enchantment, the colours were
fairer, the blue more lovely in the lucid sky.  Each leaf finer,
and the gross earth enamelled beneath the feet.  A sweet breath on
the air, a soft warm hand in the touch of the sunshine, a glance in
the gleam of the rippled waters, a whisper in the dance of the
shadows.  The ethereal haze lifted the heavy oaks and they were
buoyant on the mead, the rugged bark was chastened and no longer
rough, each slender flower beneath them again refined.  There was a
presence everywhere, though unseen, on the open hills, and not shut
out under the dark pines.  Dear were the June roses then because
for another gathered.  Yet even dearer now with so many years as it
were upon the petals; all the days that have been before, all the
heart-throbs, all our hopes lie in this opened bud.  Let not the
eyes grow dim, look not back but forward; the soul must uphold
itself like the sun.  Let us labour to make the heart grow larger
as we become older, as the spreading oak gives more shelter.  That
we could but take to the soul some of the greatness and the beauty
of the summer!

Still the pageant moves.  The song-talk of the finches rises and
sinks like the tinkle of a waterfall.  The green-finches have been
by me all the while.  A bullfinch pipes now and then further up the
hedge where the brambles and thorns are thickest.  Boldest of birds
to look at, he is always in hiding.  The shrill tone of a goldfinch
came just now from the ash branches, but he has gone on.  Every
four or five minutes a chaffinch sings close by, and another fills
the interval near the gateway.  There are linnets somewhere, but I
cannot from the old apple tree fix their exact place.  Thrushes
have sung and ceased; they will begin again in ten minutes.  The
blackbirds do not cease; the note uttered by a blackbird in the oak
yonder before it can drop is taken up by a second near the top of
the field, and ere it falls is caught by a third on the left-hand
side.  From one of the topmost boughs of an elm there fell the song
of a willow warbler for a while; one of the least of birds, he
often seeks the highest branches of the highest tree.

A yellowhammer has just flown from a bare branch in the gateway,
where he has been perched and singing a full hour.  Presently he
will commence again, and as the sun declines will sing him to the
horizon, and then again sing till nearly dusk.  The yellowhammer is
almost the longest of all the singers; he sits and sits and has no
inclination to move.  In the spring he sings, in the summer he
sings, and he continues when the last sheaves are being carried
from the wheat field.  The redstart yonder has given forth a few
notes, the whitethroat flings himself into the air at short
intervals and chatters, the shrike calls sharp and determined,
faint but shrill calls descend from the swifts in the air.  These
descend, but the twittering notes of the swallows do not reach so
far - they are too high to-day.  A cuckoo has called by the brook,
and now fainter from a greater distance.  That the titlarks are
singing I know, but not within hearing from here; a dove, though,
is audible, and a chiffchaff has twice passed.  Afar beyond the
oaks at the top of the field dark specks ascend from time to time,
and after moving in wide circles for a while descend again to the
corn.  These must be larks; but their notes are not powerful enough
to reach me, though they would were it not for the song in the
hedges, the hum of innumerable insects, and the ceaseless "crake,
crake" of landrails.  There are at least two landrails in the
mowing-grass; one of them just now seemed coming straight towards
the apple tree, and I expected in a minute to see the grass move,
when the bird turned aside and entered the tufts and wild parsley
by the hedge.  Thence the call has come without a moment's pause,
"crake, crake," till the thick hedge seems filled with it.  Tits
have visited the apple tree over my head, a wren has sung in the
willow, or rather on a dead branch projecting lower down than the
leafy boughs, and a robin across under the elms in the opposite
hedge.  Elms are a favourite tree of robins - not the upper
branches, but those that grow down the trunk, and are the first to
have leaves in spring.

The yellowhammer is the most persistent individually, but I think
the blackbirds when listened to are the masters of the fields.
Before one can finish, another begins, like the summer ripples
succeeding behind each other, so that the melodious sound merely
changes its position.  Now here, now in the corner, then across the
field, again in the distant copse, where it seems about to sink,
when it rises again almost at hand.  Like a great human artist, the
blackbird makes no effort, being fully conscious that his liquid
tone cannot be matched.  He utters a few delicious notes, and
carelessly quits the green stage of the oak till it pleases him to
sing again.  Without the blackbird, in whose throat the sweetness
of the green fields dwells, the days would be only partly summer.
Without the violet, all the bluebells and cowslips could not make a
spring, and without the blackbird, even the nightingale would be
but half welcome.  It is not yet noon, these songs have been
ceaseless since dawn; this evening, after the yellowhammer has sung
the sun down, when the moon rises and the faint stars appear, still
the cuckoo will call, and the grasshopper lark, the landrail's
"crake, crake" will echo from the mound, a warbler or a blackcap
will utter his notes, and even at the darkest of the summer night
the swallows will hardly sleep in their nests.  As the morning sky
grows blue, an hour before the sun, up will rise the larks, singing
and audible now, the cuckoo will recommence, and the swallows will
start again on their tireless journey.  So that the songs of the
summer birds are as ceaseless as the sound of the waterfall which
plays day and night.

I cannot leave it; I must stay under the old tree in the midst of
the long grass, the luxury of the leaves, and the song in the very
air.  I seem as if I could feel all the glowing life the sunshine
gives and the south wind calls to being.  The endless grass, the
endless leaves, the immense strength of the oak expanding, the
unalloyed joy of finch and blackbird; from all of them I receive a
little.  Each gives me something of the pure joy they gather for
themselves.  In the blackbird's melody one note is mine; in the
dance of the leaf shadows the formed maze is for me, though the
motion is theirs; the flowers with a thousand faces have collected
the kisses of the morning.  Feeling with them, I receive some, at
least, of their fulness of life.  Never could I have enough; never
stay long enough - whether here or whether lying on the shorter
sward under the sweeping and graceful birches, or on the thyme-
scented hills.  Hour after hour, and still not enough.  Or walking
the footpath was never long enough, or my strength sufficient to
endure till the mind was weary.  The exceeding beauty of the earth,
in her splendour of life, yields a new thought with every petal.
The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours
when we really live, so that the longer we can stay among these
things so much the more is snatched from inevitable Time.  Let the
shadow advance upon the dial - I can watch it with equanimity while
it is there to be watched.  It is only when the shadow is NOT
there, when the clouds of winter cover it, that the dial is
terrible.  The invisible shadow goes on and steals from us.  But
now, while I can see the shadow of the tree and watch it slowly
gliding along the surface of the grass, it is mine.  These are the
only hours that are not wasted - these hours that absorb the soul
and fill it with beauty.  This is real life, and all else is
illusion, or mere endurance.  Does this reverie of flowers and
waterfall and song form an ideal, a human ideal, in the mind?  It
does; much the same ideal that Phidias sculptured of man and woman
filled with a godlike sense of the violet fields of Greece,
beautiful beyond thought, calm as my turtle-dove before the lurid
lightning of the unknown.  To be beautiful and to be calm, without
mental fear, is the ideal of nature.  If I cannot achieve it, at
least I can think it.




End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Pageant of Summer, by Jefferies