The Heart of England/Chapter 34
CHAPTER XXXIV
AUTUMN BELLS
From this beechen hill I can see into and across a long pastoral valley at my feet; its gentle sides running east and west are clothed in wood, and at the western end, where the valley leads straight out into the western sky, a stone city lies. Beyond this valley to the south are the misty, wooded ridges that hint at other valleys. The sunset light has made the landscape immense, but with the help of autumn it has made it simple too; and the sound of bells in the city seems to have created it, rounded and mellow in outline and hue. The little rounds of hedge-tops and knolls in the meadows and gorse in the higher slopes harmonise and run into the larger rounds of the single oaks in the middle distance, and the still larger rounds of the hills and their cloudy woods, and the clouds above them. A hawk in the air might seem to be carving the outlines of some perfect palm tree as he flies. The white steam also of a slow train far away bubbles up in the moist and gentle air and hangs there long in delicately changing and merging mounds that mock the clouds and woods. The amber wheat stacks are of the same family of form, lying in a half circle at one side of a hunched farmhouse that lifts up a dome of mossy thatch,—near it a garden of shadowed wallflower, snapdragon, roses, in clouds beyond clouds, with a burning edge of hollyhock, sunflower, red-hot poker and chrysanthemum.
The sound of the city bells continues to overflow in bubbles from the valley, up and up, to the round, golden clouds. As if filled with the sound, the city smoke ascends and takes on the colours of the sunset.
The sun is now low between the final walls of hill, where the valley ends, and it seems to belong to the city below, as if it were the city's god descending there for once in answer to some especially rich altar or noble deed. The towers and their bells are as maidens pensively embroidering, and now and then dropping their embroidery to sing a melody of something far away; and long after the sun has gone and the city has disappeared their song is repeated in the fragrant and noiseless abysses of the far-stretched night.