Читать книгу The South Country онлайн

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And every tender eve is the blackbird’s. He sings out at the end of the long bare ash bough. Beneath him the gloomy crystal water stirs the bronze cresses, and on the banks the white anemones float above the dark misty earth and under the hazel leaves yet drooping in their infancy. The dark hollies catch the last light and shine like water. Behind all, the Downs are clear and so near that I feel as well as see the carving on their smooth and already green flanks. The blackbird gathers up all the low-lit beauty into one carol.

The flowers also have days to themselves, as the minute green moschatel when it is first found among the hedgerow roots, or the violets when, white and pale purple, they are smelt and then seen bowed with dew in the weedy sainfoin field which the chain harrow passed over but a few days before. Another notable day is when the junipers are perfectly coloured by their sloe-blue, or palest green, but chiefly grey, small berries. Another, a very great day, belongs to the willows, when their crowded fragrant catkins are yellow against the burning blue and all murmurous with bees. And the briers have their day when their green is a vivid flame in a gloomy air, against a dark immense wood and sepia sky. There is, too, a solitary maimed sycamore in one of the coombes that has a glorious hour when it stands yellow-green in separate masses of half-opened leaf, motionless and languid in the first joy of commerce with the blue air, yet glowing.