Читать книгу Neighbourhood: A year's life in and about an English village онлайн

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I skirted the green, and turned in at the churchyard gate. Everywhere between the crowding stones, the grass was white with dew. Glittering water-bells rimmed every leaf, and trembled at the tip of every twig. The old yew dripped solemnly in its shadowed corner. Down the face of each memorial-stone, tiny runnels coursed like tears.

It was strange to see how the dewdrops obliterated all vestige of natural colour in the grass, and yet lent it a thousand alien hues. As I moved slowly along, sparks of vivid green and crimson, orange and blue, flashed incessantly amidst the frosted silver. Turning my back to the sunshine, all these colours vanished, and the glittering quality of the dew was lost. Now it was just a dead-white field, crossed and re-crossed with lines of emerald where the foraging birds had left their tracks. But all round the head of my shadow, that stretched giant-like before me, there was still a shining circle of light. I remembered to have read somewhere of one of the religious painters in the Middle Age, who accounted himself divinely set apart from his fellows, by reason of a halo which, he said, appeared at certain seasons about him as he walked in the fields. Probably he saw then what I saw this morning; but, being an artist, he won inspiration, new freshets of saintly energy, from what, to the ordinary unemotional sinner, would be no more than an interesting, natural fact.