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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
In "In Pursuit of Spring," Edward Thomas embarks on a lyrical and meditative journey through the English countryside, capturing the delicate interplay between nature and human emotion. Written in 1914, this work reflects a blend of prose and poetry, where Thomas employs vivid imagery and introspective observations to paint a rich tapestry of the season's awakening. The narrative not only serves as a travelogue but also as a philosophical exploration of existence and change, embodying the themes of renewal and the passage of time that resonate deeply with modernist literature. Edward Thomas, a prominent figure in early twentieth-century literature, was influenced by his own experiences as a poet and a nature enthusiast. His deep understanding of the English landscape and its significance in shaping human experience is rooted in his own tumultuous life and the existential questions he grappled with. Thomas's connection to nature is profoundly personal, often reflecting the struggles and triumphs of his own journey as he confronted the realities of war and identity during his lifetime. For readers seeking a profound connection to both the natural world and the human psyche, "In Pursuit of Spring" is an essential exploration. Thomas's evocative prose invites readers to reflect on the beauty of the changing seasons and the solace found in nature, making this work a timeless experience for those who appreciate the arts and the deeper meanings behind human existence. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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In Pursuit of Spring
Table of Contents
Introduction
A traveler rides west to meet the season as it awakens, testing whether attention, patience, and the steady turn of the pedals can coax spring into full presence across fields, lanes, and towns.
In Pursuit of Spring is a work of travel and nature writing by Edward Thomas, set in the English countryside as winter yields to early spring. First published in 1914, it records a journey undertaken by bicycle from London toward the West Country, tracing minor roads, villages, and open country. The book belongs to a tradition of topographical prose that attends to weather, light, and the layered histories of place. Its publication on the eve of the First World War situates it within a moment of cultural transition, though the narrative itself remains closely focused on the seasonal passage at hand.
The premise is disarmingly simple: a solitary rider moves day by day through southern England, aligning his route with the earliest signs of spring. The experience the book offers is intimate and unhurried, guided by a voice that is observant, companionable, and quietly exacting. Thomas’s prose favors clarity over flourish, building mood through accumulations of detail—roads climbing and falling, hedges breaking into bud, water running fuller or clearer with each mile. Scenes are sketched with restraint, allowing the reader to inhabit pauses and vistas rather than rush past them, and encouraging an attentive, reflective pace.
Themes of renewal and transience govern the journey, yet they are never stated so much as felt through successive encounters with place. Movement and stillness coexist: the bicycle grants mobility, while the gaze lingers on the ordinary—gateways, verges, sky. The book explores how names, paths, and customs carry memory, linking past and present without didactic commentary. It weighs the appeal of the old against the pressures of the new, and suggests that careful looking can reconcile the two by honoring continuity without denying change. Throughout, time is measured not by schedules but by weather and light.
For readers today, the book’s relevance lies in its model of attention. It invites a form of slow travel that listens for nuance and delights in the local, offering a counterpoint to accelerated movement and distracted seeing. Its sensitivity to seasonality resonates amid environmental concern, reminding us how closely human feeling tracks the smallest natural shift. Thomas’s method turns observation into an ethic, proposing that sustained notice—of roads less taken, of modest landmarks, of work and rest—fosters connection. The result is both restorative and alert, a way of traveling that deepens awareness rather than consuming distance.
Formally, the narrative unfolds in episodes that balance description with reflection. Each stage contributes a fresh register—different soils under wheel, different air, different light—yet the tone remains even and composed. Thomas attends to the sound and cadence of language, letting sentences echo the terrain’s contours: measured where the way is level, extended where the horizon opens. Lists and brief sketches lend a cartographer’s precision, while the refusal to hurry confers a poet’s tact. Without resorting to grand claims, the book finds significance in cumulative noticing, showing how the ordinary, attended to, gathers weight.
Approached as a companionable expedition rather than a plotted tale, In Pursuit of Spring offers readers the company of a discerning guide and the promise of renewed sight. Expect moments of weather, glimmering changes in light, and the quiet drama of roads turning from grey to green. The book rewards unhurried reading, inviting pauses and returns, as if one were leaning the bicycle against a gate to look longer. Its lasting appeal lies in how it makes landscape legible without exhausting it, leaving space for the reader’s own journey to begin where Thomas’s pages end.
Synopsis
In Pursuit of Spring is a travel narrative by Edward Thomas describing a bicycle journey undertaken in early spring across southern England, from London to the western hills by the Bristol Channel. The book records the progression of the season as it quickens from city outskirts to open country. Thomas combines day-by-day movement with concise observations of weather, plants, birds, people, roads, and local customs. He notes place-names, traces of older routes, and historical associations alongside practical details of distance and lodging. The narrative follows a continuous route, using minor roads and lanes, and treats the countryside as both a present landscape and a record of past use.
He departs the capital through its southern suburbs, exchanging tramlines and shopfronts for commons, heaths, and the chalk of the North Downs. Early signs of spring appear irregularly: catkins along wet ditches, blackthorn in sporadic bloom, larks rising between showers. Gusty winds, rain, and sudden brightness shape the pace. Preferring byways to turnpikes, he keeps to lanes toward Surrey market towns, noting bridges, milestones, and the imprint of traffic. Encounters with carters, road-menders, and innkeepers provide brief portraits of work and speech. The route’s first stage establishes his method: to proceed attentively, taking what the road offers and recording the changes that attend each mile west.
Crossing into Hampshire, he rides by heaths and hangers to towns such as Farnham and Alton, with detours toward villages linked to earlier naturalists. Chalk streams, water meadows, and beechwoods define the scenery, and hedges reveal the season’s slow advance in primrose, celandine, and swelling bud. He observes fieldwork with horses, coppice cuttings stacked to dry, and carts bound for markets. Parish churches, lychgates, and yews mark successive settlements. Place-names prompt reflections on topography and past land-use. The narrative balances close description with steady progress, keeping the wheel to lanes that avoid the main highway while preserving a general westward bearing.
The road turns toward the great open of Wiltshire. He follows clear rivers through villages en route to Salisbury, where the cathedral spire, close, and meadows create a brief urban interlude. Beyond lie downs and the beginning of Salisbury Plain, with skylarks, barrows, and long straight roads that recall older travel. Weather remains unsettled, and the exposure of the uplands tests rider and machine. Military activity appears at intervals on the horizon without altering the journey’s course. Each day ends at an inn, noted for hearth, fare, and talk, before the narrative resumes with morning’s assessment of wind, cloud, and the day’s intended line.
Keeping to valley roads, he threads the chalk country along quiet streams and through small towns and villages. Mills, canal cuts, and railway embankments register successive eras of movement, against which his bicycle keeps an intermediate pace. He records snatches of dialect and road-song, the naming of gates and crossroads, and the landmarks used by carriers and drovers. Old turnpikes, milestones, and parish bounds structure the pages as surely as the map he consults. With each stage the hedgerows thicken, birdsong lengthens, and fields show a greener nap. The sense of spring’s uneven approach is measured by these comparisons repeated from day to day.
Entering Somerset, he approaches the Mendip uplands and their limestone edge, with abrupt gorges and ridgelines that overlook orchards and lowlands. Wells and its cathedral, stone villages, and lanes edged with banks of primroses mark a further turn west. He notes quarries, cave-mouths, and hill pasture, then descends to pass through cider country and early-blossoming orchards. Birds and flowers accumulate—rooks at rookery, lapwings over plough, the first thin phrases of returning migrants—while showers alternate with clear, mild hours. The narrative keeps its focus on how roads gather history and habit, yet it steadily marks the season’s gain in leaf, light, and ease of travel.
From the flank of the Mendips he crosses low, drained country of rhynes, droves, and isolated hamlets raised above marsh. Church towers visible across the Levels orient the way. Occasional peat smoke, reedbeds, and cattle on the higher ground mark a landscape shaped by water and reclamation. Passing market towns and bridges, he notes both the traces of the Monmouth rising and older field-names. Ahead rise the Quantock Hills, with their combes, heather, and oak hangers. Associated writers and walkers of this district come briefly to mind, but the account remains practical: climbs, vistas, and the effect of wind and light on the day’s advance.
The ascent onto the Quantocks brings open views to sea and moor. Narrow lanes fall into wooded combes and rise again to heaths where the horizon widens toward the Bristol Channel. Farms, packhorse bridges, and green tracks knit the hills. He follows these to the coast, where cliffs, shingle, and tidal flats provide a final stage for the journey. Here the narrative notes one of spring’s decisive signs in bird or bloom and lets the sea mark a natural terminus. The pursuit resolves not in a dramatic incident but in arrival, where the westward pull of the season and the road balances and comes to rest.
The book’s purpose is to register the gradual, uneven arrival of spring across a continuous stretch of English country and to do so by moving at human speed. Its structure is linear and cumulative: a day’s distance, the observations it allows, and the way place connects memory, history, and work. Emphasis falls on roads, inns, and habitations as much as on skylark, thorn, and primrose. Without argument, it shows how old and new means of travel, changing rural economies, and persistent patterns of land-use coexist. The overall message is documentary and seasonal: to follow, and to fix in words, spring’s westward flow.
Historical Context
In Pursuit of Spring is set in early 1913, during the late Edwardian period under King George V and Prime Minister H. H. Asquith. Edward Thomas travels by bicycle from London westward across southern counties to the Quantock Hills in Somerset, observing landscapes between winter’s end and Eastertide. The route moves from suburban edges—where tramlines, hoardings, and new villas mark metropolitan growth—into older market towns, chalk downs, and hedge-bounded lanes. This timing captures a countryside poised between tradition and modernity: petrol traffic is increasing, rural wages remain low, and national debates about land, roads, and preservation shape the very byways Thomas follows toward the West Country.
The long agricultural depression of 1873–1896, caused by cheap grain imports and global competition, reshaped rural England well into the 1910s. Many arable districts shifted to pasture, dairying, and market gardening; West Country counties such as Somerset relied on mixed farming, cider orchards, and smallholdings. Farm laborers’ pay hovered around 15–18 shillings a week before 1914, and rural depopulation sent the young to cities and emigration. Village services contracted, and marginal lanes grew quieter. Thomas’s journey moves through this aftermath: his encounters with aging laborers, abandoned cottages, and quiet parish roads register the demographic thinning and economic reorientation that gave the countryside its subdued pre-war character.
Transport change is central to the book’s backdrop. The late Victorian cycling boom, spurred by the safety bicycle, created touring culture (the Cyclists’ Touring Club was founded in 1878). The Motor Car Act of 1903 introduced registration and a 20 mph limit, while Edgar Hooley’s tar-bound macadam (1902) and the 1909 Development and Road Improvement Funds Act established a Road Board to fund smoother, faster roads for motorists. Railways—especially the Great Western—bound London to the West. Thomas rides at this junction: he notes turnpike milestones and tollhouses, yet feels the challenge of dust, speed, and signage from motor traffic, choosing green lanes and byways that preserve older rhythms of travel.
Preservation politics also shaped the terrain he records. The Commons Preservation Society (1865) and allied campaigners secured footpaths and village greens; Parliament passed the Open Spaces Act (1906) to protect urban and rural amenity. The Ancient Monuments Protection Acts (1882, 1900, 1910) culminated in the 1913 Ancient Monuments Consolidation and Amendment Act, championed by Lord Curzon, which strengthened state guardianship of barrows, earthworks, and prehistoric sites. Thomas’s attention to holloways, parish bounds, and tumuli in Somerset mirrors this rising antiquarian and civic ethos: his pages preserve the experiential map of rights-of-way, stiles, and trackways that reformers sought to defend against enclosure, quarrying, and speculative development.
The domestic political climate, dominated by Liberal reforms, frames village life along his route. The 1909 People’s Budget advanced land valuation and taxation; the Parliament Act of 1911 curtailed the Lords’ veto; the Old Age Pensions Act (1908) and National Insurance Act (1911) extended a nascent welfare state. Industrial unrest crested with the 1911 national railway strike and the 1912 national coal strike, felt even in rural counties via transport disruption and coal prices. Somerset’s coalfield around Radstock and Midsomer Norton stood nearby. In inns and market squares, Thomas hears talk of rates, wages, and prices; his observation of cautious household economies echoes these reforms and disputes entering everyday conversation.
Women’s suffrage militancy reached a peak as Thomas rode. The Women’s Social and Political Union, founded in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst, escalated to window-smashing (1912) and arson against empty properties and pillar boxes (1913). The Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act—“Cat and Mouse”—passed in April 1913 to manage hunger-striking prisoners. That June, Emily Wilding Davison died at the Epsom Derby. Though Thomas’s focus is rural, he passes hoardings, post offices, and railway stations where such campaigns left posters, graffiti, and police notices. The book’s interleaving of quiet lanes with abrupt urban signboards reflects a society where agitation and authority confronted each other in public space.
The work also stands at the threshold of war. Naval rivalry with Germany after HMS Dreadnought (1906), the 1908 Haldane reforms creating the Territorial Force, and army camps on Salisbury Plain (Bulford from 1897, Tidworth expanding) signaled militarization; the Balkan Wars (1912–1913) heightened tension. In August 1914 Britain entered the First World War. Thomas himself enlisted in the Artists Rifles in 1915, was commissioned into the Royal Garrison Artillery in 1916, and was killed by shell blast near Arras on 9 April 1917. Read against these dates, his 1913 westward ride becomes a deliberately exacting survey of a peace soon to be overtaken by mobilization and loss.
Without polemic, the book functions as social critique. Thomas exposes the frictions of modernization: the standardization of roads and inns, the blare of advertising hoardings, and the encroachment of motors onto customary lanes. He notes rural poverty and casual labor, the fragility of smallholdings, and the erosion of rights-of-way under private interests, quietly challenging assumptions that “improvement” benefits all. His preference for parish paths and commons records a democratic geography threatened by enclosure and centralized planning. Attentive to prices, fares, and wages in conversation, he reveals class divides and administrative indifference, using precise topographical witness to question the justice and sustainability of Edwardian social arrangements.
In Pursuit of Spring
IN PURSUIT OF SPRING.
I.IN SEARCH OF SPRING.
This is the record of a journey from London to the Quantock Hills[1]—to Nether Stowey, Kilve, Crowcombe, and West Bagborough, to the high point where the Taunton-Bridgwater road tops the hills and shows all Exmoor behind, all the Mendips before, and upon the left the sea, and Wales very far off. It was a journey on or with a bicycle. The season was Easter, a March Easter. “A North-Easter, probably?” No. Nor did much north-east go to the making of it. I will give its pedigree briefly, going back only a month—that is, to the days when I began to calculate, or guess methodically, what the weather would be like at Easter.
Perhaps it was rather more than a month before Easter that a false Spring visited London. But I will go back first a little earlier, to one of those great and notable days after the turn of the year that win the heart so, without deceiving it.
The wind blew from the north-west with such peace and energy together as to call up the image of a good giant striding along with superb gestures—like those of a sower sowing. The wind blew and the sun shone over London. A myriad roofs laughed together in the light. The smoke and the flags, yellow and blue and white, waved tumultuously, straining for joy to leave the chimneys and the flagstaffs, like hounds sighting their quarry. The ranges of cloud bathing their lower slopes in the brown mist of the horizon had the majesty of great hills, the coolness and sweetness and whiteness of the foam on the crests of the crystal fountains, and they were burning with light. The clouds did honour to the city, which they encircled as with heavenly ramparts. The stone towers and spires were soft, and luminous as old porcelain. There was no substance to be seen that was not made precious by the strong wind and the light divine. All was newly built to a great idea. The flags were waving to salute the festal opening of the gates in those white walls to a people that should presently surge in and onward to take possession. Princely was to be the life that had this amphitheatre of clouds and palaces for its display.
Of human things, only music—if human it can be called—was fit to match this joyousness and this stateliness. What, I thought, if the pomp of river and roof and cloudy mountain walls of the world be made ready, as so often they had been before, only for the joy of the invisible gods? For who has not known a day when some notable festival is manifestly celebrated by a most rare nobleness in the ways of the clouds, the colours of the woods, the glitter of the waters, yet on earth all has been as it was wont to be?
So far, the life of men moving to and fro across the bridges was like the old life that I knew, though, down below, upon the sparkling waters many birds were alighting, or were already seated like wondrous blossoms upon the bulwarks of a barge painted in parrot colours—red and green. When would the entry begin?
In the streets, for the present, the roar continued of the inhuman masses of humanity, amidst which a child’s crying for a toy was an impertinence, a terrible pretty interruption of the violent moving swoon. Between the millions and the one no agreement was visible. The wind summoned the colour in a girl’s cheeks. There, one smiled with inward bliss. Another talked serenely with lovely soft mouth and wide eyes that saw only one other pair as the man next her bent his head nearer. The wind wagged the tails of blue or brown fur about the forms of luxurious tall women, and poured wine into their bodies, so that their complexions glowed under their violet hats. But in one moment the passing loveliness of spirit, or form, or gesture, sank and was drowned in the oceanic multitude. A boy had just met his father at a railway station, and was glad; he held the man’s hand, and was trotting gently, trying to get him to run—he failed: then in delight put his arm to his father’s waist and was carried along thus, half lifted from the ground, for several yards, smiling and chattering like a bird on a waving branch. The two obstructed others, who took a step to left or right in disdain or impatience. Only a child at an alley entrance saw and laughed, wishing she were his sister, and had his father. A moment, and these also were swallowed up.
I came to broader pavements. Here was less haste; and women went in and out of the crowd, not only parallel to the street, but crosswise here and there; and a man could go at any pace, not of necessity the crowd’s. Some of the most beautiful civilized women of the world moved slowly and musically in an intricate pattern, which any one could watch freely; they had a background of lustrous jewellery, metal-work and glass, gorgeous cloths and silks, and many had a foil in the stiff black and white male figures beside them. They moved without fear. Stately, costly, tender, beautiful, nevertheless, though so near, they were seen as in a magic crystal that enshrines the remote and the long dead. They walked as in dream, regardlessly smiling. They cast their proud or kind eyes hither and thither. Once in the intense light of a jeweller’s shop, spangled with pearls, diamonds, and gold, a large red hand, cold and not quite clean, appeared from within, holding in three fearful, careful fingers a brooch of gold and diamonds, which it placed among the others, and then withdrew itself slowly, tremulously, lest it should work harm to those dazzling cressets. The eyes of the women watched the brooch: the red hand need not have been so fearful; it was unseen—the soul was hid. Straight through the women, in the middle of the broad pavement, and very slowly, went an old man. He was short, and his patched overcoat fell in a parallelogram from his shoulders almost to the pavement. From underneath his little cap massive gray curls sprouted and spread over his upturned collar. Just below the fringe of his coat his bare heels glowed red. His hands rested deep in his pockets. His face was almost concealed by curls and collar: all that showed itself was the glazed cold red of his cheeks and large, straight nose, and the glitter of gray eyes that looked neither to left nor to right, but ahead and somewhat down. Not a sound did he make, save the flap of rotten leather against feet which he scarcely raised lest the shoes should fall off. Doubtless the composer of the harmonies of this day could have made use of the old man—doubtless he did; but as it was a feast day of the gods, not of men, I did not understand. Around this figure, clad in complete hue of poverty, the dance of women in violet and black, cinnamon and green, tawny and gray, scarlet and slate, and the browns and golden browns of animals’ fur, wove itself fantastically. The dance heeded him not, nor he the dance. The sun shone bright. The wind blew and waved the smoke and the flags wildly against the sky. The horses curved their stout necks, showing their teeth, trampling, massing head by head in rank and cluster, a frieze as magnificent as the procession of white clouds gilded, rolling along the horizon.
That evening, without thought of Spring, I began to look at my maps. Spring would come, of course—nothing, I supposed, could prevent it—[2q]and I should have to make up my mind how to go westward. Whatever I did, Salisbury Plain was to be crossed, not of necessity but of choice; it was, however, hard to decide whether to go reasonably diagonally in accordance with my western purpose, or to meander up the Avon, now on one side now on the other, by one of the parallel river-side roads, as far as Amesbury. Having got to Amesbury, there would be much provocation to continue up the river among those thatched villages to Upavon and to Stephen Duck’s village, Charlton, and the Pewsey valley, and so, turning again westward, in sight of that very tame White Horse above Alton Priors, to include Urchfont and Devizes.
Or, again, I might follow up the Wylye westward from Salisbury, and have always below me the river and its hamlets and churches, the wall of the Plain always above me on the right. Thus I should come to Warminster and to the grand west wall of the Plain which overhangs the town.
The obvious way was to strike north-west over the Plain from Stapleford up the Winterbourne, through cornland and sheepland, by Shrewton and Tilshead, and down again to other waters at West Lavington. Or at Shrewton I could turn sharp to the west, and so visit solitary Chitterne and solitary Imber.
I could not decide. If I went on foot, I could do as I liked on the Plain. There are green roads leading from everywhere to everywhere. But, on the other hand, it might be necessary at that time of year to keep walking all day, which would mean at least thirty miles a day, which was more than I was inclined for. The false Spring, the weather that really deluded me to think it shameful not to trust it, came a month later, and one of its best days was in London.
Many days in London have no weather. We are aware only that it is hot or cold, dry or wet; that we are in or out of doors; that we are at ease or not. This was not one of them. Rain lashed and wind roared in the night, enveloping my room in a turbulent embrace as if it had been a tiny ship in a great sea, instead of one pigeon-hole in a thousand-fold columbarium deep in London. Dawn awakened me with its tranquillity. The air was sombrely sweet; there was a lucidity under the gloom of the clouds; the air barely heaved with the ebb of storm; and even when the sun was risen it seemed still twilight. The jangle of the traffic made a wall round about the quiet in which I lay embedded. I scarcely heard the sound of it; but I could not forget the wall. Within the circle of quiet a parrot sang the street songs of twenty years ago very clearly, over and over again, almost as sweetly as a blackbird. I had heard him many times before, but now he sang differently—I did not know or consider how or why. The song was different as the air was. Yet I could not directly feel the air, because the windows were tightly shut against the soot of four neighbouring chimney-stacks.
Out of doors the business and pleasure of the day kept me a close though a moving prisoner. All the morning and afternoon I was glad to see only one thing that was not a human face. It was a portico of high fluted columns rising in a cliff above an expanse of gravel walks and turf. The gray columns were blackened with soot splashes. The grass and the stone were touched with the sweetness that was in the early air and in the bird’s song before the rain had dried and the wind quite departed. Both were blessed with the same pure and lovely union of humid coldness, gloom, and lucidity, so that the portico appeared for a moment to be the entrance to halls of unimagined beauty and holiness, as if I should be admitted through them into the cloud-ramparted city of that earlier day. Nevertheless, I found all inside exactly as it had always been; not only the expectation but even the memory of what had fostered it was wiped out without one pause of disappointment. The sunlight, now and then flooding and astonishing the interior, fell through windows that shut out both sky and earth, into an atmosphere incapable of acknowledging the divinity of the rays; they were alien, disturbing, hostile. There was something childish in these displays, so wasteful and passionate, before the spectacled eyes of a number of people reading books in the mummied air of a library.
Once more on this February day, at four in the afternoon, my eyes were unsealed and awakened. The air in the streets of big dark houses was still and hazy, but overhead hung the loftiest sky I had ever seen, and the finest of fine-spun clouds stretched across the pale blue in long white reefs. In a few moments I was again under a roof. This time it was the house of a friend, removed from busy thoroughfares, very silent within. As the old country servant, faintly dingy and sinister, led me up to the usual room, the staircase, and both the shut and the half-seen apartments on either hand, were mysterious and depressing, with something massive and yet temporary, as if in a dream mansion of shadows. Nothing definite was suggested by these doors; anything was possible behind them. Right up to the familiar dark room I always felt the same dull trouble. Then the dim room opened before me: I heard the masterly, kind voice.
It was a high, large room with many corners that I had never explored. The furniture gloomed vaguely above and around the little space that was crossed by our two voices. The long windows were some yards away, and between them and us stood a heavy table, a heavy cabinet, and several chairs. Never had I been to the window and looked out, nor did I today. No lamp was lit. We talked, we were silent, and I was content. Now and then I looked towards the window, which framed only the corner of a house near by, the chimneys of farther houses, and a pallor of sky between and above them. I was aware of the slow stealing away of day. I knew it was slow, and twice I looked at a clock to make sure that I was not being deceived. I was aware also of the beauty of this slow fading. No wind moved, nor was any movement anywhere heard or seen. The stillness and silence were great; the tranquillity was even greater: I dipped into it and shared it while I listened and talked. Several times two or three children passed beneath the window and chattered in loud, shrill voices, but they were unseen. Far from disturbing the tranquillity, the sounds were steeped in it; the silence and stillness of the twilight saturated and embalmed them. But pleasant as in themselves they were entirely, they were far more so by reason of what they suggested.
These voices and this tranquillity spoke of Spring. They told me what an evening it was at home. I knew how the first blackbird was whistling in the broad oak, and, farther away—some very far away—many thrushes were singing in the chill, under the pale light fitly reflected by the faces of earliest primroses. The sound of lambs and of a rookery more distant blended in soft roaring. Underfoot everything was soaked—soaked clay, soaked dead grass; and the land was agleam with silver rain pools and channels. I foresaw tempest of rain and wind on the next day. Perhaps imagination of dark, withered, and sodden land, and the change threatening, helped to perfect that sweetness which was not wholly of earth. The songs of the birds were to cease, and, in their place, blackbirds would be clinking nervously in impenetrable thickets long after sundown, when only a narrowing pane of almost lightless light divided a black mass of cloud from a black horizon. As in the morning streets the essence of the beauty was lucidity in the arms of gloom, so it was now in the clear twilight fields gliding towards black night, tempest, and perhaps a renewal of Winter.... Then a lamp was carried in. The children’s voices had gone. In a little while I rose, and, going out, saw precisely that long pane of light that I should have seen low in the west, had I been standing fifty miles off, looking towards Winchester.
