Читать книгу The Complete Works of Algernon Blackwood. Novels, Short Stories, Horror Classics, Occult & Supernatural Tales, Plays онлайн

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But the memory brought him a curious, sharp pain; and turning to that couple who were now his playmates in this Garden of the Earth, he called them with a singing cry and cantered over leagues of flowers, wind, and sunshine before he stopped again. They leaped and danced together, exulting in their spacious Urwelt freedom … want of comprehension no longer possible.

* * * * *

The memory fled away. He shook himself free of it. Then others came in its place, another and another, not all with people, blind, deaf, and unreceptive, yet all of "common," simple scenes of beauty when something vast had surged upon him and broken through the barriers that stand between the heart and Nature. Such curious little scenes they were. In most of them he had evidently been alone. But one and all had touched his soul with a foretaste of this same nameless ecstasy that now he knew complete. In every one the Consciousness of the Earth had "bruised" his own.

Utterly simple they had been, one and all, these partial moments of blinding beauty in that lesser, outer world:—A big, brown, clumsy bee he saw, blundering into the petals of a wild flower on which the dew lay sparkling…. A wisp of colored cloud driving loosely across the hills, dropping a purple shadow…. Deep, waving grass, plunging and shaking in the wind that drew out its underworld of blue and silver over the whole spread surface of a field…. A daisy closed for the night upon the lawn, eyes tightly shut, hands folded…. A south wind whispering through larches…. The pattering of summer rain upon young oak leaves in the dawn…. Fingers of long blue distance upon dreamy woods…. Anemones shaking their pale and starry little faces in the wind…. The columned stillness of a pine-wood in the dusk…. Young birch trees mid the velvet gloom of firs…. The new moon setting in a cloud of stars…. The hush of stars in many a summer night…. Sheep grazing idly down a sun-baked hill…. A path of moonlight on a lake…. A little wind through bare and wintry woods…. Oh! he recalled the wonder, loveliness, and passion of a thousand more!