February in England

How pleasant smelt the wood smoke as it rose in a blue column against the pines! Against the sky its ethereal woof was invisible. For a space the pines, with their wintry noise that never ceases, alternating with grizzled oak trees, lined the roadside. A sudden freshness told us where they ended; then the trees grew farther apart, and ash, beech, and elm made a great silence that was startling, after the companionable murmur of the firs. Their color was that green which, though never old, is never quite youthful. Every other tree was black for miles, discovering those deep - hued cantles of the sky, betwixt the branchwork, that are the peculiar wonder of leafless woods. On every side rose and fell leagues of untenanted lawn, of a cold green, that in the light of a February dawn, so clear, so absolutely clear, looked as the savannas of Eden must have looked on the first day of the world. There were gardens, ingeniously remarked Sir Thomas Browne, before there were men; and these pastoral solitudes seemed not to have been “made with hands.” For aught I knew, no one was abroad in all the world. It was hard to believe otherwise; for there was an extraordinary, virginal purity in the notes of a thrush that sang (as it sang every day) on its particular bough of elm, in the sheen of the first celandines, and in the herbage that waved, encased in dew. Everything was the same as of old, — yet not the same. I seemed to be on the eve of a revelation. I could have wept that my senses were not chastened to celestial keenness, to understand the pipits singing as they flew. In a short time the common look of things returned. The rooks began to pass overhead, and some alighted, their feathers changing to silver as they turned in the sun. A gate was banged far off. The cock crew, and the sound stirred the sleeping air farther and farther round, like a stone falling into a pool. I felt that it was cold. Beside a distant pool the ash trees had still some magic. Some “potent spirit” was surely hidden among their boughs; as we approached them, indeed, we expected to discover their secret. But on passing underneath all had fled except a whimpering of the breeze, and instead of something “mystic, wonderful,” nothing appeared save a robin singing alone,

The afternoon of that same day was in another style. A railway journey had effected just such an inconsequent change as comes in dreams. The air was full of that oppressive silence into which changes the unintelligible clamor of towns. Looking scarce farther or higher than the cathedral tower, the sun vainly competed with the clock face gleaming beside the Thames. Over the gray water rose and fell continually the gray wings of gulls; others screamed with a melancholy “dying fall ” in the gray spaces of heaven, soaring doubtless into silence beyond the mist, in the enjoyment of we knew not what amenities of light and warmth.

Gray roofs, gray ships; indeed, only one immobile ruddy sail of a barge, drifting up, colored the Quakerish raiment of the day. By dipping my pen into the gray Thames ripple I am fain to make gray the reader’s mind as it did mine. But words are frail; even the word “ gray, ” which of all chromatic epithets is most charged with mental and sentimental meaning, has boundaries. The gray changed somewhat; it was night. If the day had seemed a dying thing, the night seemed dead, and “not a funeral note” came through the mist. So a week passed, and, defrauded thus of a sweet tract of life (such as that February dawn had promised), I watched the clockwork movements of the gray - minded men and women pacing the streets. I met hundreds of people in the streets that might have taken rôles in the inferno. And in a more personal and horrible sense than Goethe meant, I felt that here on earth we have veritably to enact hell, as I looked down from a great bridge. A steamer — the ghost of a steamer — passed under. I could hear a voice, perhaps two; I could see a form — the shadow of a form — flit past upon the deck.

But the ship slid softly away under her pyramid of almost motionless smoke. A barge soon afterwards followed: it seemed a league long, and at the stern

— ridiculously small — was what must have been the figure of a man straining at an immense oar, and black, thrice black, in that horrid twilight. He passed: I was powerless to speak, though I felt he was drifting on to hell,

— calmly as at the smoothly swirling outmost circle of a whirlpool. Close to the bridge where I stood were many ships aground, with many men at work, climbing masts, walking dreadfully on rippling planks to land, going and coming, coming and going. Only those nearest were thus visible. Those farther off seemed more grisly or more fantastic in their employments. The sun, lying as it were in blood-red pools upon the mud left by the ebb, unnaturally exaggerated men and trades. There was a sense of continuous, inexorable motion. Surely I could see wheels revolving ? Almost as surely did I see Ixions bound thereon. I saw yokefellows to Pirithous, Salmoneus, and Tityus. Some of the forms were certainly not human, and the scene, under the doubtful conflict of fierce light with utter darkness, seemed

It was almost more horrible still that nothing groaned. The air was left silent with a sense that over all watched some omnipotent assessor who grimly shook the urn. I had no sleepy, honeyed passport for the Cerberus thereof. But quid memorem ? I would not for a great price have ventured there, though close behind rang the noise of hoofs, slightly drowned by the hiss of mud. I felt as some lonely spectator of a tragedy in a great theatre.

The sun was burning like newly minted copper.

From London, I remember, we traveled to the county of —, in South

Wales. February was making the best of his short life, and leaving March a great deal to undo. “Is there no religion for the temperate and frigid zones ? ” asks Thoreau, at the end of his Winter Walk. Round the great open Welsh hearths we found a sufficient creed in the sweet paganisms of a fire worship which in that country insists on a blaze in June; preferring it, since for mental and sentimental warmth the sun is some few millions of miles too distant. Spending such an evening by the fireside, it was pleasant to note a culinary genius which experiments evoked. I know nothing that makes the conversation go more “trippingly on the tongue ” than the discussion of such dainties as hands modestly declared inexperienced will compose out of scant elements.

and with less than old Furnace, the cook in Massinger’s play, we did succeed in keeping melancholy from the door. Through the window we saw a gray beggar feeding a party of sparrows with his crumbs, — a fine economy, charity reduced to its lowest terms. Not, however, that it was a hard season. But the willows were in bud, and for that very reason — there were so many tender things to look cold — the sting was more keen. All day were seen rapid clouds tumbling past a white horizon, firmly stamped with the outlines of trees; the willow undulating all together, like a living wave of foliage and limber boughs ; the river flowing out of silver into blue shadow, and again into silver where the sky bent as if to touch it; leaf and flower of celandine gleaming under the briers; whilst the air was vibrant though windless, — stirred like water in a full vessel when more is still poured in. It was the most perfect of days. The air had all the sparkling purity of winter. It had, too, something of the mettle and gusto of the spring. The scent of young grass, uncontested by any flower or fruit, was sharp though faint, and thus the air was touched with a summer perfume. Now and then a blackbird fluted a stave or two. But the silence was mysteriously great, because the incalculably subtle sound of the ocean was ever there, solemnizing, deepening, and as it were charging with “large utterance” the silence it could not break. The whole countryside of grassy level and rolling copse was like a shell put to the ear. For the shore was never still. A little way out the fisher boats might be curtsying on the tranquil tide; but reaching the shore, the same tide came upon fantastic rocks that were an organ out of which it contrived an awful music. Under the beams of the rocking moon, those tall, cadaverous crags rose up like stripped reapers, gigantic and morose, reaping and amassing the dolorous harvest of wrecks, waist-deep in a surge whose waves seemed not to flow and change, but to turn, turn ceaselessly in the contracted corridors among the rocks, like wheels revolving, and bespattered by the foam that huddled, yellow, coagulate, quaking, in the crevices.

Soon afterward snow fell, apparently making the air meeter for its freight of scent from the first violets, which certainly smelt sweeter than they had ever done before. The strong bells were choked by snow, and tinkled very timidly in the church. Lightly clothed by the same fall, the pillared tower of white stone looked wonderfully radiant in the moonlight, as if fresh from the footsteps of angels or garnished for a day of extraordinary celebration. Then, too, was the bell note sweetest, though always unequaled in pure aerial quality, because

hid as it is in some dim belfry or mossy turret from which one never expects so fine a music.

As we passed upward to the hills, one day, the snow was fading in the sun, and the laurels rose suddenly up as they shook it off in shower after shower. On one hand the ghost of a distant mountain hung lighter than cloud. For a moment another snow shower fell, but settled only on the scattered green of the arable fields: so on that hand lay miles of dark land under a veil of delicatest cirrus. Two miles ahead, on the boldest height of all, was the ruin — the mere dust and ashes — of a castle, pale, continually lost among clouds of which it seemed a part, and as unreal as if it were still in “the region of stories, ” and we were reading of it in the monkish chronicle.

The path followed one side of a steep wooded valley, and at the bottom a mountain river ran fast over great stones, its noise muffled by the trees, as if it talked in its beard. For almost a mile we could hear the sounding smoke of a white cataract which gave the river its speed. The great marsh marigolds had come. Fragments of an ancient wall stood here and there among the trees: the stones were blessed with mosses, in whose miniature forests an autumnal red prevailed, which, however, loaded with dew, turned to perfect silver in the sun.

Reaching the castle on the hill, I came from those creations of the seasons and the hours as if straight upon time itself. The noble masonry preserved the curves of several pointed arches; some of the apartments might still have sheltered a stout physique from the pleasantries of wind and rain; but the building had unmistakably been overtaken by eternity. It had for centuries ceased to live. Now death itself was dead within these stones; it was resolved into its elements again. Approaching the castled crag, it was hard to say where crag ended and castle began. Examining the masonry, it was indistinguishable from the rock on which it lay. In summer the wild thyme and the harebell did their best to conceal what was written in terse hieroglyphics on the stones. But winter had undone these sweet deceits.

By degrees a feeling of horror grew and became less vague. I accidentally loosened a stone, which fell noisily down the almost perpendicular cliff for two hundred feet to the fields below, and by no hard feat of the fancy I felt myself as insignificant as that stone; I too was cast over the abyss. One of the walls rose almost in line with this sheer cliff, and I could not help picturing the dreadful trade when that side was building. Many a slave must have dropped from the rising wall on to the plain. It is said that Roman mortar was made so durable by addition of human blood. That maybe; here, it is certain, every stone owes its place to human blood. I passed several gaps for the crossbowmen, and looked out: nothing nearer than three hundred feet was visible, and that was below. I followed all the grisly windings of the dripping dungeon, and had scarce the heart to trace back my footsteps into the light. How well these builders expressed themselves ! How perfect is their style, the shadow of their personality ! There is no mistaking the superb brutality of their nature. So forcibly was this still expressed that unwillingly I conjured up their subtlest cruelties to my mind. I too, like the prisoner five hundred years ago, was thrust through that deep and narrow window on to the plain below!

I cannot imagine any beings more unlike the builders and owners of this castle than the legendary mediæval knights. What has a Kehydius or a Perceval to do with shrieks which I still could hear amidst this ruin ? Yet tradition connected these walls with Urian.

Then we passed into the little chapel of the castle, still a holy place, where a furze bush flowered, and the ancient turf lay innocent of the footprints even of wind. It was a refuge of eternal peace, — peace entailed and handed down through centuries of pleasant and melodious calm, to the chanting of holy men. Our entering footsteps and voices sounded most unreal. We were the ghosts. Antiquity — the echo, the shadow — was the one thing real. In a short time the ruins were lit by that weird light “sent from beyond the skies,”just after sunset, when far-off things are dim, but near things are strangely near. Those who walked there took deep draughts of eternity.

A lark was scaling the clouds as day fell, and sang, though driven madly backward by the wind. In their motion past the sun the monstrous clouds were transmuted into fiery vapors, “such stuff as dreams are made on,” light and graceful as Aphrodite rising from the sea. And already a valley here and there was full of night, as for a time that noblest of all Arthurian figures vanished, taking his helm and shield, and with words of perfect knightliness “ thanked God of his adventure. ”

Day was almost gone, when again, just as at a certain part of dawn, for a short time spring seemed to be coming down the wind into the land, undeniably the genius of spring, though invisible, inaudible. This promise was nearer a perfume than anything else, — as of remote blossom, driven hither across leagues of drenching Atlantic air, making the nostrils dilate with halfdiffident expectation and surprise. A bat flew round the keep, and his snipping sound could be heard overhead. Hesperus came out, and burned longer than it had done before that year, so that in its tender light the land seemed in that brief half hour to advance a long way toward the season of catkins, through which the first voices from the south — chiff-chaff and wood wren — would presently creep and stir vapors of golden pollen, while in the clear noon there would be no shadow save the fly’s on the great buttercup.

Edward Thomas.