The Heart of England/Chapter 23
CHAPTER XXIII
THE PRIDE OF THE MORNING
The sun has been up for an hour without impediment, but the meadows are rough silver under a mist after last night's frost. The greens in cottage gardens are of a bright, cold hue between blue and grey, which is fitter for the armour of heaven, or the landscape of some strong mystic, than for one who loathes to leave his bed. The blackbirds are scattering the frost, and they live in glittering little hazes while they flutter in the grass.
But the sky is of an eager, luminous pale blue that speaks of health and impetuousness and success. Across it, low down, lie pure white clouds, preserving, though motionless, many torn and tumultuous forms; they have sharp edges against the blue and invade it with daggers of the same white; they are as vivid in their place in that eager sky as yews on a pale, bright lawn, or as lightning in blue night. If pure and hale intelligence could be visibly expressed, it would be like that. The eyes of the wayfarer at once either dilate in an effort for a moment at least to be equal in beauty with the white and blue, clear sky, or they grow dim with dejection at the impossibility. The brain also dilates and takes deep breaths of life, and casts out stale thought and coddled emotion. It scorns afterthought as the winds are flouting the penitent half moon.
A squadron of wild fowl races through the crystal air; the mind expands with their speed, and tries to share it, and believes that it succeeds. A heron goes over solemnly, high up, and as if upon some starry business in that profound, bright air; the mind at once attunes itself to that majesty and directness and simplicity—
Of godlike hardship."
A starling sits on the weathercock with ruffled feathers watching the sky with one eye and then with the other, and his form and voice are sharp and pure as they joyfully pierce the air. The weathercock itself shines like Mars. Together, they speak of the cold and vigour and health and beauty which abide somewhere in the sky to-day and not inaccessibly.
High above me, here and there upon the road, stand oast-houses, with their conical roofs ruddy against the sky, and over them the newly painted white cowls point eastward, and in their whiteness seem to have been set as a signal to say that it is the west wind after frost that has made the world what it is; they point out a road which, if I could follow it, would lead to the very court of mind and beauty, yonder, afar off, where the wind and the heron and the wild ducks are going. There I might learn to realise the long, joyous curves in which thought and action and life itself sweep onward to their triumphs…
But I know well that long hopes and wide, vaulting thoughts are not usually nourished by lane and footpath and highway, on and on; and probably I shall stop at "The Black Horse" over the next hill, where a man may always lighten his burden on a Tuesday by hearing the price of beasts.