Field and Hedgerow

The bird upon the tree utters the meaning of the wind—a voice of the grass and wild-flower, words of the green leaf; they speak through that slender tone. Sweet­ness of dew and rifts of sunshine, the dark hawthorn touched with breadths of open bud, the odour of the air, the colour of the daffodil—all that is de­licious and beloved of springtime are expressed in his song. Genius is nature and his lay, like the sap in the bough from which he sings, rises without thought. —' Field and Hedgerow': Hours of Spring.



In time past, strong of foot, I walked gaily up the noble hill that leads to Beachy Head from Eastbourne, joying greatly in the sun and the wind. Every step crumbled up numbers of minute grey shells, empty and dry, that crunched under foot like hoar-frost or fragile beads. They were very pretty; it was a shame to crush them—such vases as no king's pottery could make. They lay by millions in the depths of the sward, and I thought as I broke them unwillingly that each of these had once been a house of life. A living creature dwelt in each and felt the joy of existence, and was to itself all in all —as if the great sun over the hill shone for it, and the width of the earth under was for it, and the grass and plants put on purpose for it. They were dead, the whole race of them, and these their skeletons were as dust under my feet. Nature sets no value upon life neither of minute hill-snail nor of human being. — 'Field and Hedgerow': Hours of Spring.

Nature sets no value upon life, neither of mine nor of the larks that sang years ago. The earth is all in all to me, but I am nothing to the earth: it is bitter to know this before you are dead. These de­licious violets are sweet for themselves; they were not shaped and coloured and gifted with the exquisite proportion and adjustment of odour and hue for me. — ‘Field and Hedgerow': Hours of Spring.

There was everything to repel —the cold, the frost, the hard­ness, the snow, dark sky and ground, leaflessness; the very furze chilled and all benumbed. Yet the forest was still beautiful. There was no day that we did not, all of us, glance out at it and admire it, and say some­thing about it. Harder and harder grew the frost, yet still the forest-clad hills possessed a something that drew the mind open to their largeness and grandeur. Earth is always beautiful— always. Without colour, or leaf or sun­shine, or song of bird and flutter of butterfly's wing; without anything sen­suous, without advantage or gilding of summer—the power is ever there. Or shall we not say that the desire of the mind is ever there, and will satisfy itself, in a measure at least, even with the barren wild? The heart from the moment of its first beat instinctively longs for the beautiful; the means we possess to gratify it are limited—we are always trying to find the statue in the rude block. Out of the vast block of the earth the mind endeavours to carve itself loveliness, nobility, and grandeur. We strive for the right and the true; it is circumstance that thrusts wrong upon us.—'Field and Hedgerow': Hours of Spring.

I wonder whether it is a joy to have bright scarlet spots, and to be clad in the purple and gold of life; is the colour felt by the creature that wears it? The rose, restful of a dewy morn before the sunbeams have topped the garden wall, must feel a joy in its own fragrance, and know the exquisite hue of its stained petals. The rose sleeps in its beauty. The fly whirls his scarlet-spotted wings about and splashes himself with sun­light, like the children on the sands. He thinks not of the grass and sun; he does not heed them at all—and that is why he is so happy—any more than the barefoot children ask why the sea is there, or why it does not quite dry up when it ebbs. He is unconscious; he lives without thinking about living; and if the sunshine were a hundred hours long, still it would not be long enough. No, never enough of sun and sliding shadows that come like a hand over the table to lovingly reach our shoulder, never enough of the grass that smells sweet as a flower, not if we could live years and years equal in number to the tides that have ebbed and flowed, counting backwards four years to every day and night, backward still till we found out which came first, the night or the day. The scarlet-dotted fly knows nothing of the names of the grasses that grow here where the sward nears the sea, and thinking of him I have decided not to wilfully seek to learn any more of their names either. My big grass book I have left at home, and the dust is set­tling on the gold of the binding. I have picked a handful this morning of which I know nothing. I will sit here on the turf and the scarlet-dotted flies shall pass over me, as if I too were but a grass. I will not think, I will be uncon­scious, I will live.—'Field and Hedge­row ': The July Grass.

Listen! That was the low sound of a summer wavelet striking the uncovered rock over there beneath in the green sea. All things that are beautiful are found by chance, like everything: that is good. Here by me is a praying-rug, just wide enough to kneel on, of the richest gold in woven with crimson. All the Sultans of the East never had such beauty as that to kneel on. It is, indeed, too beautiful to kneel on, for the life in these golden flowers must not be broken down even for that purpose. They must not be defaced, not a stem bent; it is more reverent not to kneel on them, for this carpet prays itself. I will sit by it and let it pray for me. It is so common, the bird's-foot lotus, it grows everywhere; yet if I purposely searched for days I should not have found a plot like this, so rich, so golden, so glowing with sun­shine. You might pass by it in one stride, yet it is worthy to be thought of for a week and remembered for a year. — ' Field and Hedgerow': The July Grass.

I know nothing to which the wind has not some happy use. Is there a grain of dust so small the wind shall not find it out? ground in the mill-wheel of the centuries, the iron of the distant mountain floats like gossamer, and is drunk up as dew by leaf and living lung.—' Field and Hedge­row': Winds of Heaven.

All things reposed but man, and man is so busy with his vulgar aims that it quite dawns upon many people as a wonder­ful surprise how still nature is on a Sunday morning. Nature is absolutely still every day of the week, and proceeds with the most absolute indifference to days and dates.—' Field and Hedgerow': The Country Sunday.

The beautiful swallows, be ten­der to them, for they symbol all that is best in nature and all that is best in our hearts.—'Field and Hedgerow': Swallow-Time.

The light is never the same on a landscape many minutes to­gether, as all know who have tried, ever so crudely, to fix the fleeting expression of the earth with pencil. It is ever changing, and in the same way as you walk by the hedges day by day there is always some fresh circumstance of nature, the interest of which in a measure blots out the past.—' Field and Hedgerow': Among the Nuts.

Could imperial Rome have only grown sufficient wheat in Italy to have fed her legions, Cassar would still be master of three-fourths of the earth. Rome thought more in her latter days of grapes and oysters and mullets, that change colour as they die, and singing girls and flute-playing, and cynic verse of Horace—anything rather than corn. Rome is no more, and the lords of the world are they who have mastership of wheat.—'Field and Hedge­row'': Walks in the Wheatfields.

Despots grind half the human race, and despots stronger than man—plague, pestilence, and famine—grind the whole; and yet the world increases, and the green wheat of the human heart is not to be trampled out.—' Field and Hedgerow': Walks in the Wheatfields.

The gallows at the cross-roads is gone, but the workhouse stands, and custom, that tyrant of the mind, has inured us (to use an old word) to its existence in our midst. Apart from any physical suffer­ing, let us only consider the slow agony of the poor old reaper when he feels his lusty arm wither, and of the grey bowed wife as they feel themselves drifting like a ship ashore to that stony waiting-room. For it is a waiting-room till the grave receives them. Economically, too, the workhouse is a heavy loss and drag. Could we, then, see the tithe barn filled again with golden wheat for this purpose of help to humanity, it might be a great and wonderful good. With this tenth to feed the starving and clothe the naked; with the tenth to give the little children a midday meal at the school— that would be natural and true. In the course of time, as the land laws lessen their grip, and the people take possession of the earth on which they stand, it is more than probable that something of this kind will really come about. It would be only simple justice after so many centuries—it takes so many hundreds of years to get even that.—' Field and Hedgerow': Walks in the Wheatfields.

He who has got the sense of beauty in his eye can find it in things as they really are, and needs no stagey time of artificial pastorals to furnish him with a sham nature. Idealise to the full, but idealise the real, else the picture is a sham. — 'Field and Hedgerow': Walks in the Wheatfields.

A barnyard chanticleer and his family afford more matter than the best book ever written. His coral red comb, his sil­very scaled legs, his reddened feathers, and his fiery attitudes, his jolly crow, and all his ways—there's an illustrated pamphlet, there’s a picture-book for you in one creature only! Reckon his family, the tender little chicks, the enamelled eggs, the feeding every day, the roosting, the ever-present terror of the red wood-dog (as the gypsies call the fox), here's a Chronicon Nurembergense with a thousand woodcuts; a whole history.—'Field and Hedgerow': Walks in the Wheatfields.

The sweet violets bloom afresh every spring on the mounds, the cowslips come, and the happy note of the cuckoo, the wild rose of midsummer, and the golden wheat of August. It is the same beautiful old country always new. Neither the iron engine nor the wooden plough alter it one iota, and the love of it rises as con­stantly in our hearts as the coming of the leaves. —' Field and Hedgerow': Walks in the Wheatfields.

Such is the wonderful power of plants. To any one who takes a delight in wild-flowers, some or other of the earth is always becoming consecrated.—’Field and Hedgerow’: Locality and Nature.

The experience of the rudest country rustic is not to be de­spised ; an observation is an observation, whoever makes it; there has been an air of too much science in the affected derision of our forefathers' wisdom.—' Field and Hedgerow': Lo­cality and Nature.

English folk don't 'cotton' to their poverty at all; they don't eat humble-pie with a relish; they resent being poor and despised. Foreign folk seem to take to it quite naturally; an Englishman, somehow or other, always feels that he is wronged. He is injured; he has not got his rights. To me it seems the most curious thing possible that well-to-do people should expect the poor to be delighted with their condition. I hope they never will be; an evil day that—if it ever came— for the Anglo-Saxon race.—'Field and Hedgerow': Cottage Ideas.

The well-to-do are educated, they have travelled, if not in their ideas, they are more or less cosmopolitan. In the cottager you get to 'bed-rock' as the Americans say; there's the foundation. Character runs upwards not downwards. It is not the nature of the aristocrat that permeates the cottager, but the nature of the cot­tager that permeates the aristocrat. The best of us are polished cottagers. Scratch deep enough, and you come to that; so that to know a people, go to the cottage, and not to the mansion. — ' Field and Hedgerow': Cottage Ideas.

Nature would go on though under the thumb of the north wind. Poor folk came out of the towns to gather ivy-leaves for sale in the streets to make button-holes. Many people think the ivy-leaf has a pleasant shape; it was used of old time among the Greeks and Romans to decorate the person at joyous festivals. The ivy is frequently mentioned in the classic poets. Not so with the country woman in the villages to-day, ground down in constant dread of that hateful workhouse system of which I can find no words to express my detestation. They tell their daughters never to put ivy-leaves in their hair or brooch, be­cause ' they puts it on the dead paupers in the unions, and the lunatics in the 'sylums.' Such an association took away all the beauty of the ivy-leaf. There is nature in their hearts, you see, although they are under the polar draught of poverty.—' Field and Hedge­row ': The Time of Year.

There are never two works of equal beauty of any kind, just as there are never two moments of equal pleasure: seize the one you have, and make much of it, for such a moment will never return.—' Field and Hedgerow': Nature in the Louvre.

The sun rolls on in the far dome of heaven, and now day, and now night sweeps with alternate bands over the surface of hill, and flower. Old walls, as we saw just now, are not left without a fringe, on the top of the hardest brick wall, on the sapless tiles, on slates, stonecrop takes hold and becomes a cushion of yellow bloom. Nature is a miniature painter and handles a delicate brush, the tip of which touches the tiniest spot and leaves something living. The park has indeed its larger lines, its broad open sweep, and gradual slope, to which the eye, accustomed to small enclosures, requires time to adjust itself. These left to themselves are beautiful; they are the surface of the earth, which is always true to itself and needs no banks nor artificial hollows. The earth is right and the tree is right; trim either and all is wrong: the deer will not fit to them then.—'Field and Hedgerow': An English Deer-Park.

No one else seems to have seen the sparkle on the brook, or heard the music at the hatch, or to have felt back through the cen­turies; and when I try to describe these things to them, they look at me with stolid incredulity. No one seems to understand how I got food from the clouds, nor what there was in the night, nor why it is not so good to look at it out of window. They turn their faces away from me, so that perhaps after all I was mistaken, and there never was any such place nor any such meadows, and I was never there. And perhaps in course of time I shall find out also, when I pass away physically, that as a matter of fact there never was any earth.—' Field and Hedgerow': My Old Village.

If a man's work that he has done all the days of his life could be collected and piled up around him in visible shape, what a vast mound there would be beside some! If each act or stroke was represented, say by a brick, John Brown would have stood the day before his ending by the side of a monument as high as a pyramid. Then if in front of him could be placed the sum and product of his labour, the profit to himself, he could have held it in his clenched hand like a nut, and no one would have seen it. Our modern people think they train their sons to strength by football, and rowing, and jumping, and what are called athletic exercises; all of which it is the fashion now to preach as very noble, and likely to lead to the goodness of the race. Certainly feats are accomplished and records are beaten, but there is no real strength gained, no hardihood built up. Without hardihood it is of little avail to be able to jump an inch farther than somebody else. Hardihood is the true test, hardihood is the ideal, and not these caperings or ten minutes' spurts. Now, the way they made the boy John Brown hardy was to let him roll about on the ground with naked legs and bare head from morn till night, from June till December, from January till June. The rain fell on his head, and he played in wet grass to his knees. Dry bread and a little lard was his chief food. He went to work while he was still a child. At half-past three in the morning he was on his way to the farm stables, there to help feed the cart-horses, which used to be done with great care very early in the morning. The carter's whip used to sting his legs, and sometimes he felt the butt. At fifteen he was no taller than the sons of well-to-do people at eleven; he scarcely seemed to grow at all till he was eighteen or twenty, and even then very slowly, but at last became a tall big man. That slouching walk, with knees always bent, diminished his height to appearance; he really was the full size, and every inch of his frame had been slowly welded together by this ceaseless work, continual life in the open air, and coarse hard food. This is what makes a man hardy. This is what makes a man able to stand almost any­thing, and gives a power of endurance that can never be obtained by any amount of gymnastic training.—'Field and Hedgerow': My Old Village.