The Heart of England/Chapter 43
CHAPTER XLIII
CLOUDS OVER THE SEA
The high, partridge-coloured heathland rolls southward, with small ridges as of a sea broken by cross winds, or as if the heather and the hard gorse cushions had grown over ruins which time had not yet smoothed into the right curves of perfect death. A gentle wind changes the grass from silver to green, from green to silver, by depressing or lifting up the blades. In the dry heather and pallid herbage the wind sounds all the stops of despair. The note that each produces is faint, and the combination hardly louder than the sound that fancy makes among the tombs. Nevertheless, the enchantment of that little noise pours into the air and heart a sympathy with the thousand microscopic sorrows and uncertainties of the inanimate world—a feeling that is part of the melancholy importunately intruding on a day of early spring. The larks rise, linking earth and sky with their songs, and the stonechats are restless.
There are no trees. The only house is a little, white, thatched cottage among some shining dark boats, on the distant rosy shore.
The sea makes no sound. It changes with the sky so often and so subtly that its variations are to be described, if at all, in terms not of colour but of thought. All such moods as pass through the mind of a lonely man, during long hours in a place where the outside world does not disturb him and he lives on memory and pure reflection, are symbolised by those changes on the surface of the sea. Now it is one thing and now another; the growth is imperceptible and those moods that have passed are as hard to reconstruct as the links of a long, fluctuating reverie. For the most part it is grey, a grey full of meditation and discontent.
The heathland changes with the sea. Both take their thoughts and fancies from the sky. For this is a world of clouds; earth and sea are made by them what they are. They make the sea, and they make the little pools, blue, silver or grey, among the gorse. The clouds are always there; inhabiting a dome that is about fifty miles from the horizon up and down to the opposite horizon; and yet they are never the same.
Where do the clouds go?
The large white clouds, mountainous and of alabaster and with looks of everlastingness. I see them in the north at midday, making the hills seem level with the plain. I turn away my eyes and when next I look they are gone. They vanish like childish things. One day I made an appointment with another child to play marbles on the next morning; I never went; I forgot; I never saw the boy again, and I remember it now, for I never played marbles after that.
The high white halcyons of summer skies.
The distant, icy ranges of rounded pearl down which, in terrace after terrace, the sun walks like a king to the sea in May. As I watch they grow big like roses in the sun, and they change and vanish and reappear beneath the restless sculptor's hand. If a man loves what is passing away, he loves then.
Those little dove-like clouds that for a moment stain the dusky clouds after an April storm—are they a metamorphosis of the Pleiades? They are gone like music; for sometimes the memory of them equals the reality and sometimes they are not to be recalled.
Those Elysian, white sierras in the east, which, at the end of a day of frowns and humours, stretch far away in still and lucid air, their bases lost in blue, making the world immense, as if it were to be thus for ever and the gods to walk again.
The cliffs that hold the moon imprisoned in their clefts and lure the mind to desire useless things.
The flocks that go down into the sea or behind the mountains, and thrill the heart with adventurousness and yet never move it to an adventure, but rather persuade us to care greatly for nothing except to muse and mesmerise ourselves with that old song—
And yet I love her till I die."
The parcels of aerial gold which at sunset make one canopy as of a golden-foliaged tree planted over the world. The night does not believe that they were ever there.
Those caravans that go down the blue precipices of night intently; those dragons, lean and black, that prepare the dawn and ruin the morning star.
They change, they tarry, they travel far, they pass away, they dissolve, they cannot die. Up there, do they think, or do they watch, or do they simply act? and is it pleasant simply to act? Have all the sunsets and dawns and thunderstorms done nothing for them? I suppose that up there also nothing matters but eternity; that up there also they know nothing of eternity.