Читать книгу The South Country онлайн

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The beam tree is bright on the soft hills all through the days of rain following upon the snow and sun. There are days when earth is absorbed in her delights of growth and multiplication. The rain is a veil which she wraps about her that she may toil and sing low at her myriad divine domesticities untroubled. Delicate snails climb the young stalks of grass and flower, and their houses, pearly, chocolate, tawny, pure or ringed or chequered, slide after them. The leaves, with their indescribable charm of infinitely varied division, of wild clematis, maple, brier, hawthorn, and many more, come forth into the rain which hangs on their drooping points and on the thorns. The lichen enjoys the enduring mist of the woods; the blackthorns are crusted and bearded with lichens of fleshy green-silver and ochre which grow even on the thorns themselves and round the new leaves and flowers. The birch is now an arrested shower of green, but not enough to hide the white limbs of the nymph in the midst of it. The beech trunk is now most exquisitely coloured: it is stained and spotted and blotched with grey and rough silver and yellow-green lichen, palest green mould, all the greens of moss, and an elusive dappling and graining of greys, of neutral tints and almost blacks in the wood itself, still more diversified by the trickling rain and the changing night. The yew bark is plated and scaled and stained with greens and reds and greys, powdered with green mould, and polished in places to the colour of mahogany. Even the long-deserted thistly cornfields are dim purple with ground-ivy flowers and violets. The marsh, the pasture, the wood, the hedge, has each its abundance of bloom and of scent; so, too, has the still water and the running water. But this is the perfect hour of the green of grass, so intense that it has an earthly light of its own in the sunless mist. It is best seen in meadows bounded on two or three sides by the sheer dark edges of woods; for in that contrast the grass seems a new element, neither earth, nor water, nor sky—under our feet like the earth, gleaming and even as water, remote and celestial as the sky. And the voices of the green growing in the rain are innumerable. The very ground has now one voice of its own, the gurgle of its soaking hollow places.