Afoot in England Part 11

Chapter Twenty-Two: The Village and "The Stones"

My experiences at "The Stones" had left me with the idea that but for the distracting company the hours I spent there would have been very sweet and precious in spite of the cloud in the east. Why then, I asked, not go back on another morning, when I would have the whole place to myself? If a cloud did not matter much it would matter still less that it was not the day of the year when the red disc flames on the watcher's sight directly over that outstanding stone and casts first a shadow then a ray of light on the altar. In the end I did not say good-bye to the village on that day, but settled down to listen to the tales of my landlady, or rather to another instalment of her life-story and to further chapters in the domestic history of those five small villages in one. I had already been listening to her every evening, and at odd times during the day, for over a week, at first with interest, then a little impatiently. I was impatient at being kept in, so to speak. Out-of-doors the world was full of light and heat, full of sounds of wild birds and fragrance of flowers and new-mown hay; there were also delightful children and some that were anything but delightful--dirty, ragged little urchins of the slums. For even these small rustic villages have their slums; and it was now the time when the young birds were fluttering out of their nests--their hunger cries could be heard everywhere; and the ragged little barbarians were wild with excitement, chasing and stoning the flutterers to slay them; or when they succeeded in capturing one without first having broken its wings or legs it was to put it in a dirty cage in a squalid cottage to see it perish miserably in a day or two. Perhaps I succeeded in saving two or three threatened lives in the lanes and secret green places by the stream; perhaps I didn't; but in any case it was some satisfaction to have made the attempt.

Now all this made me a somewhat impatient listener to the village tales--the old unhappy things, for they were mostly old and always unhappy; yet in the end I had to listen. It was her eyes that did it.

At times they had an intensity in their gaze which made them almost uncanny, something like the luminous eyes of an animal hungrily fixed on its prey. They held me, though not because they glittered: I could have gone away if I had thought proper, and remained to listen only because the meaning of that singular look in her grey-green eyes, which came into them whenever I grew restive, had dawned on my careless mind.

She was an old woman with snow-white hair, which contrasted rather strangely with her hard red colour; but her skin was smooth, her face well shaped, with fine acquiline features. No doubt it had been a very handsome face though never beautiful, I imagine; it was too strong and firm and resolute; too like the face of some man we see, which, though we have but a momentary sight of it in a pa.s.sing crowd, affects us like a sudden puff of icy-cold air--the revelation of a singular and powerful personality. Yet she was only a poor old broken-down woman in a Wilts.h.i.+re village, held fast in her chair by a hopeless infirmity. With her legs paralysed she was like that prince in the Eastern tale on whom an evil spell had been cast, turning the lower half of his body into marble. But she did not, like the prince, shed incessant tears and lament her miserable destiny with a loud voice. She was patient and cheerful always, resigned to the will of Heaven, and--a strange thing this to record of an old woman in a village!--she would never speak of her ailments. But though powerless in body her mind was vigorous and active teeming with memories of all the vicissitudes of her exceedingly eventful, busy life, from the time when she left her village as a young girl to fight her way in the great world to her return to end her life in it, old and broken, her fight over, her children and grandchildren dead or grown up and scattered about the earth.

Chance having now put me in her way, she concluded after a few preliminary or tentative talks that she had got hold of an ideal listener; but she feared to lose me--she wanted me to go on listening for ever. That was the reason of that painfully intense hungry look in her eyes; it was because she discovered certain signs of la.s.situde or impatience in me, a desire to get up and go away and refresh myself in the sun and wind. Poor old woman, she could not spring upon and hold me fast when I attempted to move off, or pluck me back with her claws; she could only gaze with fiercely pleading eyes and say nothing; and so, without being fascinated, I very often sat on listening still when I would gladly have been out-of-doors.

She was a good fluent talker; moreover, she studied her listener, and finding that my interest in her own interminable story was becoming exhausted she sought for other subjects, chiefly the strange events in the lives of men and women who had lived in the village and who had long been turned to dust. They were all more or less tragical in character, and it astonished me to think that I had stayed in a dozen or twenty, perhaps forty, villages in Wilts.h.i.+re, and had heard stories equally strange and moving in pretty well every one of them.

If each of these small centres possessed a scribe of genius, or at any rate one with a capacity for taking pains, who would collect and print in proper form these remembered events, every village would in time have its own little library of local history, the volumes labelled respectively, "A Village Tragedy", "The Fields of Dulditch", "Life's Little Ironies", "Children's Children", and various others whose t.i.tles every reader will be able to supply.

The effect of a long spell of listening to these unwritten tragedies was sometimes strong enough to cloud my reason, for on going directly forth into the bright suns.h.i.+ne and listening to the glad sounds which filled the air, it would seem that this earth was a paradise and that all creation rejoiced in everlasting happiness excepting man alone who--mysterious being!--was born to trouble and disaster as the sparks fly upwards. A pure delusion, due to our universal and ineradicable pa.s.sion for romance and tragedy. Tell a man of a hundred humdrum lives which run their quiet contented course in this village, and the monotonous unmoving story, or hundred stories, will go in at one ear and out at the other. Therefore such stories are not told and not remembered. But that which stirs our pity and terror--the frustrate life, the glorious promise which was not fulfilled, the broken hearts and broken fortunes, and pa.s.sion, crime, remorse, retribution--all this prints itself on the mind, and every such life is remembered for ever and pa.s.sed on from generation to generation. But it would really form only one brief chapter in the long, long history of the village life with its thousand chapters.

The truth is, if we live in fairly natural healthy condition, we are just as happy as the lower animals. Some philosopher has said that the chief pleasure in a man's life, as in that of a cow, consists in the processes of mastication, deglut.i.tion, and digestion, and I am very much inclined to agree with him. The thought of death troubles us very little--we do not believe in it. A familiar instance is that of the consumptive, whose doctor and friends have given him up and wait but to see the end, while he, deluded man, still sees life, an illimitable, green, sunlit prospect, stretching away to an infinite distance before him.

Death is a reality only when it is very near, so close on us that we can actually hear its swift stoaty feet rustling over the dead leaves, and for a brief bitter s.p.a.ce we actually know that his sharp teeth will presently be in our throat.

Out in the blessed suns.h.i.+ne I listen to a blackcap warbling very beautifully in a thorn bush near the cottage; then to the great shout of excited joy of the children just released from school, as they rush pell-mell forth and scatter about the village, and it strikes me that the bird in the thorn is not more blithe-hearted than they. An old rook--I fancy he is old, a many-wintered crow--is loudly caw-cawing from the elm tree top; he has been abroad all day in the fields and has seen his young able to feed themselves; and his own crop full, and now he is calling to the others to come and sit there to enjoy the suns.h.i.+ne with him. I doubt if he is happier than the human inhabitants of the village, the field labourers and shepherds who have been out toiling since the early hours, and are now busy in their own gardens and allotments or placidly smoking their pipes at their cottage doors.

But I could not stay longer in that village of old unhappy memories and of quiet, happy, uninteresting lives that leave no memory, so after waiting two more days I forced myself to say good-bye to my poor old landlady. Or rather to say "Good night," as I had to start at one o'clock in the morning so as to have a couple, of hours before sunrise at "The Stones" on my way to Salisbury. Her latest effort to detain me a day longer had been made and there was no more to say.

"Do you know," she said in a low mysterious voice, "that it is not safe to be alone at midnight on this long lonely road--the loneliest place in all Salisbury Plain?" "The safest," I said. "Safe as the Tower of London--the protectors of all England are there." "Ah, there's where the danger is!" she returned. "If you meet some desperate man, a deserter with his rifle in his hand perhaps, do you think he would hesitate about knocking you over to save himself and at the same time get a little money to help him on his way?"

I smiled at her simulated anxiety for my safety, and set forth when it was very dark but under a fine starry sky. The silence, too, was very profound: there was no good-bye from crowing c.o.c.k or hooting owl on this occasion, nor did any cyclist pa.s.s me on the road with a flash of light from his lamp and a tinkle from his bell. The long straight road on the high down was a dim grey band visible but a few yards before me, lying across the intense blackness of the earth. By day I prefer as a rule walking on the turf, but this road had a rare and peculiar charm at this time. It was now the season when the bird's-foot-trefoil, one of the commonest plants of the downland country, was in its fullest bloom, so that in many places the green or grey-green turf as far as one could see on every side was sprinkled and splashed with orange-yellow. Now this creeping, spreading plant, like most plants that grow on the close-cropped sheep-walks, whose safety lies in their power to root themselves and live very close to the surface, yet must ever strive to lift its flowers into the un.o.bstructed light and air and to overtop or get away from its crowding neighbours. On one side of the road, where the turf had been cut by the spade in a sharp line, the plant had found a rare opportunity to get s.p.a.ce and light and had thrust out such a mult.i.tude of bowering sprays, projecting them beyond the turf, as to form a close band or rope of orange-yellow, which divided the white road from the green turf, and at one spot extended unbroken for upwards of a mile. The effect was so singular and pretty that I had haunted this road for days for the pleasure of seeing that flower border made by nature.

Now all colour was extinguished: beneath and around me there was a dimness which at a few yards' distance deepened to blackness, and above me the pale dim blue sky sprinkled with stars; but as I walked I had the image of that brilliant band of yellow colour in my mind.

By and by the late moon rose, and a little later the east began to grow lighter and the dark down to change imperceptibly to dim h.o.a.ry green.

Then the exquisite colours of the dawn once more, and the larks rising in the dim distance--a beautiful unearthly sound--and so in the end I came to "The Stones," rejoicing, in spite of a cloud which now appeared on the eastern horizon to prevent the coming sun from being seen, that I had the place to myself. The rejoicing came a little too soon; a very few minutes later other visitors on foot and on bicycles began to come in, and we all looked at each other a little blankly. Then a motorcar arrived, and two gentlemen stepped out and stared at us, and one suddenly burst out laughing.

"I see nothing to laugh at!" said his companion a little severely.

The other in a low voice made some apology or explanation which I failed to catch. It was, of course, not right; it was indecent to laugh on such an occasion, for we were not of the ebullient sort who go to "The Stones" at three o'clock in the morning "for a lark"; but it was very natural in the circ.u.mstances, and mentally I laughed myself at the absurdity of the situation. However, the laugher had been rebuked for his levity, and this incident over, there was nothing further to disturb me or any one in our solemn little gathering.

It was a very sweet experience, and I cannot say that my early morning outing would have been equally good at any other lonely spot on Salisbury Plain or anywhere else with a wide starry sky above me, the flush of dawn in the east, and the larks rising heavenward out of the dim misty earth. Those rudely fas.h.i.+oned immemorial stones standing dark and large against the pale clear moonlit sky imparted something to the feeling. I sat among them alone and had them all to myself, as the others, fearing to tear their clothes on the barbed wire, had not ventured to follow me when I got through the fence. Outside the enclosure they were some distance from me, and as they talked in subdued tones, their voices reached me as a low murmur--a sound not out of harmony with the silent solitary spirit of the place; and there was now no other sound except that of a few larks singing fitfully a long way off.

Just what the element was in that morning's feeling which Stonehenge contributed I cannot say. It was too vague and uncertain, too closely interwoven with the more common feeling for nature. No doubt it was partly due to many untraceable a.s.sociations, and partly to a thought, scarcely definite enough to be called a thought, of man's life in this land from the time this h.o.a.ry temple was raised down to the beginning of history. A vast span, a period of ten or more, probably of twenty centuries, during which great things occurred and great tragedies were enacted, which seem all the darker and more tremendous to the mind because unwritten and unknown. But with the mighty dead of these blank ages I could not commune. Doubtless they loved and hated and rose and fell, and there were broken hearts and broken lives; but as beings of flesh and blood we cannot visualize them, and are in doubt even as to their race. And of their minds, or their philosophy of life, we know absolutely nothing. We are able, as Clifford has said in his Cosmic Emotion, to shake hands with the ancient Greeks across the great desert of centuries which divides our day from theirs; but there is no shaking hands with these ancients of Britain--or Albion, seeing that we are on the chalk. To our souls they are as strange as the builders of Tiuhuanaco, or Mitla and Itzana, and the cyclopean ruins of Zimbabwe and the Carolines.

It is thought by some of our modern investigators of psychic phenomena that apparitions result from the coming out of impressions left in the surrounding matter, or perhaps in the ether pervading it, especially in moments of supreme agitation or agony. The apparition is but a restored picture, and pictures of this sort are about us in millions; but for our peace they are rarely visible, as the ability to see them is the faculty of but a few persons in certain moods and certain circ.u.mstances. Here, then, if anywhere in England, we, or the persons who are endowed with this unpleasant gift, might look for visions of the time when Stonehenge was the spiritual capital, the Mecca of the faithful (when all were that), the meeting-place of all the intellect, the h.o.a.ry experience, the power and majesty of the land.

But no visions have been recorded. It is true that certain stories of alleged visions have been circulated during the last few years. One, very pretty and touching, is of a child from the London slums who saw things invisible to others. This was one of the children of the very poor, who are taken in summer and planted all about England in cottages to have a week or a fortnight of country air and suns.h.i.+ne. Taken to Stonehenge, she had a vision of a great gathering of people, and so real did they seem that she believed in the reality of it all, and so beautiful did they appear to her that she was reluctant to leave, and begged to be taken back to see it all again. Unfortunately it is not true. A full and careful inquiry has been made into the story, of which there are several versions, and its origin traced to a little story-telling Wilts.h.i.+re boy who had read or heard of the white-robed priests of the ancient days at "The Stones," and who just to astonish other little boys naughtily pretended that he had seen it all himself!

Chapter Twenty-Three: Following a River

The stream invites us to follow: the impulse is so common that it might be set down as an instinct; and certainly there is no more fascinating pastime than to keep company with a river from its source to the sea.

Unfortunately this is not easy in a country where running waters have been enclosed, which should be as free as the rain and suns.h.i.+ne to all, and were once free, when England was England still, before landowners annexed them, even as they annexed or stole the commons and shut up the footpaths and made it an offence for a man to go aside from the road to feel G.o.d's gra.s.s under his feet. Well, they have also got the road now, and cover and blind and choke us with its dust and insolently hoot-hoot at us. Out of the way, miserable crawlers, if you don't want to be smashed!

Sometimes the way is cut off by huge th.o.r.n.y hedges and fences of barbed wire--man's devilish improvement on the bramble--brought down to the water's edge. The river-follower must force his way through these obstacles, in most cases greatly to the detriment of his clothes and temper; or, should they prove impa.s.sable, he must undress and go into the water. Worst of all is the thought that he is a trespa.s.ser. The pheasants crow loudly lest he should forget it. Occasionally, too, in these private places he encounters men in velveteens with guns under their arms, and other men in tweeds and knickerbockers, with or without guns, and they all stare at him with amazement in their eyes, like disturbed cattle in a pasture; and sometimes they challenge him. But I must say that, although I have been sharply spoken to on several occasions, always, after a few words, I have been permitted to keep on my way. And on that way I intend to keep until I have no more strength to climb over fences and force my way through hedges, but like a blind and worn-out old badger must take to my earth and die.

I found the Exe easy to follow at first. Further on exceedingly difficult in places; but I was determined to keep near it, to have it behind me and before me and at my side, following, leading, a beautiful silvery serpent that was my friend and companion. For I was following not the Exe only, but a dream as well, and a memory. Before I knew it the Exe was a beloved stream. Many rivers had I seen in my wanderings, but never one to compare with this visionary river, which yet existed, and would be found and followed at last. My forefathers had dwelt for generations beside it, listening all their lives long to its music, and when they left it they still loved it in exile, and died at last with its music in their ears. Nor did the connection end there; their children and children's children doubtless had some inherited memory of it; or how came I to have this feeling, which made it sacred, and drew me to it? We inherit not from our ancestors only, but, through them, something, too, from the earth and place that knew them.

I sought for and found it where it takes its rise on open Exmoor; a simple moorland stream, not wild and foaming and leaping over rocks, but flowing gently between low peaty banks, where the little lambs leap over it from side to side in play. Following the stream down, I come at length to Exford. Here the aspect of the country begins to change; it is not all brown desolate heath; there are green flowery meadows by the river, and some wood. A little further down and the Exe will be a woodland stream; but of all the rest of my long walk I shall only say that to see the real beauty of this stream one must go to Somerset. From Exford to Dulverton it runs, singing aloud, foam-flecked, between high hills clothed to their summits in oak woods: after its union with the Barle it enters Devons.h.i.+re as a majestic stream, and flows calmly through a rich green country; its wild romantic charm has been left behind.

The uninformed traveller, whose principle it is never to look at a guide-book, is surprised to find that the small village of Exford contains no fewer than half a dozen inns. He asks how they are kept going; and the natives, astonished at his ignorance, proceed to enlighten him. Exford is the headquarters of the stag-hunt: thither the hunters flock in August, and spend so much money during thir brief season that the innkeepers grow rich and fat, and for the rest of the year can afford to doze peacefully behind their bars. Here are the kennels, and when I visited them they contained forty or fifty couples of stag-hounds. These are gigantic foxhounds, selected for their great size from packs all over the country. When out exercising these big vari-coloured dogs make a fine show. It is curious to find that, although these individual variations are continually appearing--very large dogs born of dogs of medium size--others cannot be bred from them; the variety cannot be fixed.

The village is not picturesque. Its one perennial charm is the swift river that flows through it, making music on its wide sandy and pebbly floor. Hither and thither flit the wagtails, finding little half-uncovered stones in the current to perch upon. Both the pied and grey species are there; and, seeing them together, one naturally wishes to resettle for himself the old question as to which is the prettiest and most graceful. Now this one looks best and now that; but the delicately coloured grey and yellow bird has the longest tail and can use it more prettily. Her tail is as much to her, both as ornament and to express emotions, as a fan to any flirtatious Spanish senora. One always thinks of these dainty feathered creatures as females. It would seem quite natural to call the wagtail "lady-bird," if that name had not been registered by a diminutive podgy tortoise-shaped black and red beetle.

So shallow is the wide stream in the village that a little girl of about seven came down from a cottage, and to cool her feet waded out into the middle, and there she stood for some minutes on a low flat stone, looking down on her own wavering image broken by a hundred hurrying wavelets and ripples. This small maidie, holding up her short, shabby frock with her wee hands, her bright brown hair falling over her face as she bent her head down and laughed to see her bare little legs and their flickering reflection beneath, made a pretty picture. Like the wagtails, she looked in harmony with her surroundings.

So many are the villages, towns, and places of interest seen, so many the adventures met with in this walk, starting with the baby streamlet beyond Simonsbath, and following it down to Exeter and Exmouth, that it would take half a volume to describe them, however briefly. Yet at the end I found that Exford had left the most vivid and lasting impression, and was remembered with most pleasure. It was more to me than Winsford, that fragrant, cool, grey and green village, the home of immemorial peace, second to no English village in beauty; with its h.o.a.ry church tower, its great trees, its old stone, thatched cottages draped in ivy and vine, its soothing sound of running waters. Exeter itself did not impress me so strongly, in spite of its cathedral. The village of Exford printed itself thus sharply on my mind because I had there been filled with wonder and delight at the sight of a face exceeding in loveliness all the faces seen in that West Country--a rarest human gem, which had the power of imparting to its setting something of its own wonderful l.u.s.tre. The type was a common Somerset one, but with marked differences in some respects, else it could not have been so perfect.

The type I speak of is a very distinct one: in a crowd in a London street you can easily spot a Somerset man who has this mark on his countenance, but it shows more clearly in the woman. There are more types than one, but the variety is less than in other places; the women are more like each other, and differ more from those that are outside their borders than is the case in other English counties. A woman of this prevalent type, to be met with anywhere from Bath and Bedminster to the wilds of Exmoor, is of a good height, and has a pleasant, often a pretty face; regular features, the nose straight, rather long, with thin nostrils; eyes grey-blue; hair brown, neither dark nor light, in many cases with a sandy or sunburnt tint. Black, golden, reds, chestnuts are rarely seen. There is always colour in the skin, but not deep; as a rule it is a light tender brown with a rosy or reddish tinge. Altogether it is a winning face, with smiling eyes; there is more in it of that something we can call "refinement" than is seen in women of the same cla.s.s in other counties. The expression is somewhat infantile; a young woman, even a middle-aged woman, will frequently remind you of a little girl of seven or eight summers. The innocent eyes and mobile mouth are singularly childlike. This peculiarity is the more striking when we consider the figure. This is not fully developed according to the accepted standards the hips are too small, the chest too narrow and flat, the arms too thin. True or false, the idea is formed of a woman of a childlike, affectionate nature, but lacking in pa.s.sion, one to be chosen for a sister rather than a wife. Something in us--instinct or tradition--will have it that the well-developed woman is richest in the purely womanly qualities--the wifely and maternal feelings. The luxuriant types that abound most in Devons.h.i.+re are not common here.

It will be understood that the women described are those that live in cottages. Here, as elsewhere, as you go higher in the social scale--further from the soil as it were--the type becomes less and less distinct. Those of the "higher cla.s.s," or "better cla.s.s," are few, and always in a sense foreigners.

Chapter Twenty-Four: Troston

I doubt if the name of this small Suffolk village, remote from towns and railroads, will have any literary a.s.sociations for the reader, unless he be a person of exceptionally good memory, who has taken a special interest in the minor poets of the last century; or that it would help him if I add the names of Honington and Sapiston, two other small villages a couple of miles from Troston, with the slow sedgy Little Ouse, or a branch of it, flowing between them. Yet Honington was the birthplace of Robert Bloomfield, known as "the Suffolk poet" in the early part of the last century (although Crabbe was living then and was great, as he is becoming again after many years); while at Sapiston, the rustic village on the other side of the old stone bridge, he acquired that love of nature and intimate knowledge of farm life and work which came out later in his Farmer's Boy. Finally, Troston, the little village in which I write, was the home of Capel Lofft, a person of importance in his day, who discovered Bloomfield, found a publisher for his poems, and boomed it with amazing success.

I dare say it will only provoke a smile of amus.e.m.e.nt in readers of literary taste when I confess that Bloomfield's memory is dear to me; that only because of this feeling for the forgotten rustic who wrote rhymes I am now here, strolling about in the shade of the venerable trees in Troston Park-the selfsame trees which the somewhat fantastic Capel knew in his day as "Homer," "Sophocles," "Virgil," "Milton," and by other names, calling each old oak, elm, ash, and chestnut after one of the immortals.

I can even imagine that the literary man, if he chanced to be a personal friend, would try to save me from myself by begging me not to put anything of this sort into print. He would warn me that it matters nothing that Bloomfield's verse was exceedingly popular for a time, that twenty-five or thirty editions of his Farmer's Boy were issued within three years of its publication in 1800 that it continued to be read for half a century afterwards. There are other better tests. Is it alive to-day? What do judges of literature say of it now? Nothing! They smile and that's all. The absurdity of his popularity was felt in his own day.

Byron laughed at it; Crabbe growled and Charles Lamb said he had looked at the Farmer's Boy and it made him sick. Well, n.o.body wants to look at it now.

Much more might be said very easily on this side; nevertheless, I think I shall go on with my plea for the small verse-maker who has long fallen out; and though I may be unable to make a case out, the kindly critic may find some circ.u.mstance to extenuate my folly--to say, in the end, that this appears to be one of the little foolishnesses which might be forgiven.

I must confess at starting that the regard I have for one of his poems, the Farmer's Boy, is not wholly a matter of literary taste or the critical faculty; it is also, to some extent, a matter of a.s.sociation,--and as the story of how this comes about is rather curious, I will venture to give it.

In the distant days of my boyhood and early youth my chief delight was in nature, and when I opened a book it was to find something about nature in it, especially some expression of the feeling produced in us by nature, which was, in my case, inseparable from seeing and hearing, and was, to me, the most important thing in life. For who could look on earth, water, sky, on living or growing or inanimate things, without experiencing that mysterious uplifting gladness in him! In due time I discovered that the thing I sought for in printed books was to be found chiefly in poetry, that half a dozen lines charged with poetic feeling about nature often gave me more satisfaction than a whole volume of prose on such subjects. Unfortunately this kind of literature was not obtainable in my early home on the then semi-wild pampas. There were a couple of hundred volumes on the shelves--theology, history, biography, philosophy, science, travels, essays, and some old forgotten fiction; but no verse was there, except Shenstone, in a small, shabby, coverless volume. This I read and re-read until I grew sick of bright Roxana tripping o'er the green, or of gentle Delia when a tear bedews her eye to think yon playful kid must die. To my uncultivated mind--for I had never been at school, and lived in the open air with the birds and beasts--this seemed intolerably artificial; for I was like a hungry person who has nothing but kickshaws put before him, and eats because he is hungry until he loathes a food which in its taste confounds the appet.i.te. Never since those distant days have I looked at a Shenstone or even seen his name in print or heard it spoken, without a slight return of that old sensation of nausea. If Shenstone alone had come to me, the desire for poetry would doubtless have been outlived early in life; but there were many pa.s.sages, some very long, from the poets in various books on the shelves, and these kept my appet.i.te alive. There was Brown's Philosophy, for example; and Brown loved to ill.u.s.trate his point with endless poetic quotations, the only drawback in my case being that they were almost exclusively drawn from Akenside, who was not "rural."

But there were other books in which other poets were quoted, and of all these the pa.s.sages which invariably pleased me most were the descriptions of rural sights and sounds.

One day, during a visit to the city of Buenos Ayres, I discovered in a mean street, in the southern part of the town, a second-hand bookshop, kept by an old snuffy spectacled German in a long shabby black coat. I remember him well because he was a very important person to me. It was the first shop of the kind I had seen--I doubt if there was another in the town; and to be allowed to rummage by the hour among this ma.s.s of old books on the dusty shelves and heaped on the brick floor was a novel and delightful experience. The books were mostly in Spanish, French, and German, but there were some in English, and among them I came upon Thomson's Seasons. I remember the thrill of joy I experienced when I s.n.a.t.c.hed up the small thin octavo in its smooth calf binding. It was the first book in English I ever bought, and to this day when I see a copy of the Seasons on a bookstall, which is often enough, I cannot keep my fingers off it and find it hard to resist the temptation to throw a couple of s.h.i.+llings away and take it home. If s.h.i.+llings had not been wanted for bread and cheese I should have had a roomful of copies by now.

Few books have given me more pleasure, and as I still return to it from time to time I do not suppose I shall ever outgrow the feeling, in spite of its having been borne in on me, when I first conversed with readers of poetry in England, that Thomson is no longer read--that he is unreadable.