52 chapters
5 hour read
Selected Chapters
52 chapters
THE HEART OF ENGLAND
THE HEART OF ENGLAND
THE HEART OF ENGLAND SERIES This Series opens with a new work by Mr. Edward Thomas , that curious and enthusiastic explorer of the English Countryside, whose prose style gives him a claim to be regarded as the successor, as he is the biographer, of Richard Jefferies. The Series includes a new edition of Mr. Thomas’s other work, “The Heart of England,” and Mr. Hilaire Belloc’s “The Historic Thames.” These two volumes were originally issued in limited editions at one Guinea net per volume. THE SOU
1 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER I LEAVING TOWN
CHAPTER I LEAVING TOWN
Sunday afternoon had perfected the silence of the suburban street. Every one had gone into his house to tea; none had yet started for church or promenade; the street was empty, except for a white pigeon that pecked idly in the middle of the road and once leaned upon one wing, raised the other so as to expose her tender side and took the rain deliciously; so calm and unmolested was the hour. The houses were in unbroken rows and arranged in pairs, of which one had a bay window on the ground floor
22 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER II FAUNUS
CHAPTER II FAUNUS
How nobly the ploughman and the plough and three horses, two chestnuts and a white leader, glide over the broad swelling field in the early morning! Under the dewy, dark-green woodside they wheel, pause and go out into the strong light again, and they seem one and glorious, as if the all-breeding earth had just sent them up out of her womb—mighty, splendid and something grim, with darkness and primitive forces clinging about them, and the night in the horses’ manes. The ship, the chariot, the pl
6 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER III NOT HERE, O APOLLO!
CHAPTER III NOT HERE, O APOLLO!
It was a clay country of small fields that rose and fell slightly, not in curves, but in stiff lines which ended abruptly in the low, dividing hedges. Here and there we passed small woods of oak, hardly more than overgrown hedges, where keepers shot the jays. There were few streams—and those polluted. North and south the land rose up in some pomp to steep hills planted with oak and beech and fir, and between these, broad meadows and hop gardens, which now and then caught the faint light on their
2 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER IV WALKING WITH GOOD COMPANY
CHAPTER IV WALKING WITH GOOD COMPANY
The lightning grows upon the sky like a tumultuous thorn tree of fire. The thunder grumbles with interrupted cadences, and then, joyful as a poet, hits the long, grave, reverberating period at last, repeats it triumphantly, and muttering dies away. The pheasants in the woods have got over their alarm and have ceased to crow, and for a time the heavy perpendicular rain submerges the meadow and farmhouse and mid-field oak and the steep downs with their cloudy woods; the birds are still. Then the r
3 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER V NO MAN’S GARDEN
CHAPTER V NO MAN’S GARDEN
For a mile, alongside a bright high-road, runs a twelve-foot strip of grass and clover and buttercups, with cinquefoil’s golden embroidery in the turf at the edge. Little circular heaps of silver wood ash mark the cold fires of tramps, here and there. Here also they sleep in the sun, in summer and autumn, and in winter lean in the dense hedge that keeps the north wind away. The hedge is rich and high, of thorn overgrown by traveller’s joy and bryony; and at its feet, stitchwort, campions, vetchl
7 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER VI MARCH DOUBTS
CHAPTER VI MARCH DOUBTS
All day the winter seemed to have gone. The horses’ hoofs on the moist, firm road made a clear “cuck-oo” as they rose and fell; and far off, for the first time in the year, a ploughboy, who remembered spring and knew that it would come again, shouted “Cuckoo! cuckoo!” A warm wind swept over the humid pastures and red sand-pits on the hills and they gleamed in a lightly muffled sun. Once more in the valleys the ruddy farmhouses and farm-buildings seemed new and fair again, and the oast-house cone
4 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER VII A DECORATED CHURCH
CHAPTER VII A DECORATED CHURCH
Out of the midst of pale wheat lands and tussocky meadow, intersected by streams which butter bur and marigold announce, and soared over by pewit and lark and the first swallows with their delicate laughter, rises the grim, decorated church, of the same colour as the oak trees round about. White and grey headstones, some of great age, bow to it in the churchyard, and seem mutely to crave for the shelter from the north-east wind. There is much room within. All the headstones and those whom they c
3 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER VIII GARLAND DAY
CHAPTER VIII GARLAND DAY
The sun had not risen though it had long been proclaimed, when the old road led us into a moist wood that grew on the hillside, and here and there overhung a perpendicular chalk cliff. The soil was black and crisp with old beech mast, and out of it grew the clear, grave, green leaves of anemone and dog’s mercury and spurge and hyacinth and primroses, in places so dense that the dim earth below them seemed to be some deep lake’s water. All the anemones were bowed and rosy. The blue bells were pla
5 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER IX AN OLD WOOD
CHAPTER IX AN OLD WOOD
The chestnut blossom is raining steadily and noiselessly down upon a path whose naked pebbles receive mosaic of emerald light from the interlacing boughs. At intervals, once or twice an hour, the wings of a lonely swallow pass that way, when alone the shower stirs from its perpendicular fall. Cool and moist, the perfumed air flows, without lifting the most nervous leaf or letting fall a suspended bead of the night’s rain from a honeysuckle bud. In an indefinite sky of grey, through which one pon
3 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER X IN A FARMYARD
CHAPTER X IN A FARMYARD
We waited to let the forty cows go past, each of them pausing to lick the forehead of the strawberry cow that leaned over the gate of her stall and lowed continually concerning her newly-born white calf. But so slow they were in their wanton, obedient movement to the milking-shed that we turned and found another path, and thus surprised a pond lying deep among tansy flowers, grey nettles and billows of conquering bramble and brier. The farmyard was always dusty, or deep with ridgy mire, from the
3 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XI MEADOWLAND
CHAPTER XI MEADOWLAND
This is one of the tracts of country which are discovered by few except such as study the railway maps of England in order to know what to avoid. On those maps it is one of several large triangular sections which railways bound, but have not entered. All day long the engines scream along their boundaries, and at night wave fiery arms to the sky, as if to defend a forbidden place or a sanctuary. Within there is peace, and a long ancient lane explores it, with many windings and turnings back, as i
10 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XII AN OLD FARM
CHAPTER XII AN OLD FARM
The sun rose two hours ago, but he is not to be found in the sky. Rather he seems to have disembodied himself and to be lazily concealed in the sweet mist that lies white and luminous over the half-mile of level meadows at the foot of this hill. Those meadows are brown with yet untouched grasses, grey and silken with the placid ruffled waves of yesterday’s new swathes, and liquid emerald where the hay has already been carted; and now the brown, now the grey, now the emerald warms and becomes vis
6 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XIII POPPIES
CHAPTER XIII POPPIES
The earliest mower had not risen yet; the only sign of human life was the light that burned all night in a cottage bedroom, here and there; and from garden to garden went the white owl with that indolent flight which seems ever about to cease, and he seemed to be the disembodied soul of a sleeper, vague, homeless, wandering, softly taking a dim joy in all the misty, dense forget-me-not, pansy, cornflower, Jacob’s ladder, wallflower, love-in-a-mist and rose of the borders, before the day of work
4 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XIV AUGUST
CHAPTER XIV AUGUST
I have found only two satisfying places in the world in August—the Bodleian Library and a little reedy, willowy pond, where you may enjoy the month perfectly, sitting and being friendly with moorhen and kingfisher and snake, except in the slowly recurring intervals when you catch a tench and cast only mildly envious eyes upon its cool, olive sides. Through the willows I see the hot air quiver in crystal ripples like the points of swords, and sometimes I see a crimson cyclist on a gate. Thus is “
4 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XV OLD-FASHIONED TIMES
CHAPTER XV OLD-FASHIONED TIMES
The road curves gently but goes almost east and west; on the north side is a bank surmounted by dense thorns; on the south is a low hedge, over which can be seen two broad meadows, with oaks here and there, running up in shining bays among tall woods, and above and beyond those woods several wooded ridges, hunched and blue, on the last of them a windmill like a stag’s antlered head that somehow hints at the sea beyond. His back thrust into the northern hedge, an old man leans all the year throug
8 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XVI ONE GREEN FIELD
CHAPTER XVI ONE GREEN FIELD
Happiness is not to be pursued, though pleasure may be; but I have long thought that I should recognise happiness could I ever achieve it. It would be health, or at least unthwarted intensity of sensual and mental life, in the midst of beautiful or astonishing things which should give that life full play and banish expectation and recollection. I never achieved it, and am fated to be almost happy in many different circumstances, and on account of my forethought to be contemptuous or even disgust
6 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XVII THE BROOK
CHAPTER XVII THE BROOK
The brook rises in a clear, grey, trembling basin at the foot of a chalk hill, among flowers of lotus and thyme and eyebright and rest-harrow. Here the stone curlew drinks, and above is the gently rounded encampment, ancient, and yet still young compared with the dusky spring which has something gnomish and earthy about it, though it takes the sun. It drops in thin, bright links over the chalk, and then for a time loses its way in playing with cresses and marsh marigolds, spreading out so finely
5 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XVIII AN AUTUMN GARDEN
CHAPTER XVIII AN AUTUMN GARDEN
The cottage gardens are ceremonious and bright with phlox and sunflower and hollyhock; the orchards are yellow with apple, and of all sunburnt hues with plum; in the descending lane you wade in a world of ragwort, knapweed and Canterbury-bell, with your head in the world of honeysuckle; and, parting the hazel branches to seek their branching clusters, you see now and then in the valley a farmhouse on whose walls and roofs the hues of fruit and flower all meet harmoniously. They meet as the colou
4 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XIX THE WALNUT TREE
CHAPTER XIX THE WALNUT TREE
The immense, solitary, half-veiled autumn land is hissing with the kisses of rain in elms and hedgerows and grass, and underfoot the tunnelled soil gurgles and croaks. Secret and content, as if enjoying a blessed interval of life, are the small reedy pools where the moorhens hoot and nod in the grey water; beautiful the hundred pewits rising in ordered flight as they bereave the grey field and, wheeling over the leagues that seem all their own, presently make another field all a-flower by their
2 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XX A GOLDEN AGE
CHAPTER XX A GOLDEN AGE
Almost at the end of a long walk, and as a small silver sun was leaving a pale and frosty sky, we began to ascend a broad, heaving meadow which was bordered on our right, on its eastern side, by a long, narrow copse of ash trees. At the top of the meadow, hardly a quarter of a mile away, was a little red farmhouse—yet not so little but that it rose with a maternal dignity among and above the sheds and stables, its children, and, like it, of antique red. The home and dependencies gave out a sense
2 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XXI THE VILLAGE
CHAPTER XXI THE VILLAGE
The village stands round a triangular, flat green that has delicate sycamores here and there at one side; beneath them spotted cows, or horses, or a family of tramps; and among them the swallows waver. On two sides the houses are close together. The third, beyond the sycamores, is filled by a green hedge, and beyond it an apple orchard on a gentle hill, and in the midst of that a farmhouse and farm-buildings so happily arranged that they look like a tribe of quiet monsters that have crawled out
17 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XXII ST. MARTIN’S SUMMER
CHAPTER XXII ST. MARTIN’S SUMMER
In November I returned for a day to a lonely cottage which I had known in the summer; and all its poppies were gone. Here and there, in the garden, could be found a violet, a primrose, a wood sorrel, flowering; the forget-me-nots and columbines had multiplied and their leaves were dense in the borders; the broad row of cabbages gleamed blue in a brief angry light after rain; the black currant leaves were of pure, translucent amber at the ends of the branches. In the little copses the oaks made g
3 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XXIII THE PRIDE OF THE MORNING
CHAPTER XXIII THE PRIDE OF THE MORNING
The sun has been up for an hour without impediment, but the meadows are rough silver under a mist after last night’s frost. The greens in cottage gardens are of a bright, cold hue between blue and grey, which is fitter for the armour of heaven, or the landscape of some strong mystic, than for one who loathes to leave his bed. The blackbirds are scattering the frost, and they live in glittering little hazes while they flutter in the grass. But the sky is of an eager, luminous pale blue that speak
2 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XXIV THE METAMORPHOSIS
CHAPTER XXIV THE METAMORPHOSIS
As the sun rose I watched a proud ash tree shedding its leaves after a night of frost. It let them go by threes and tens and twenties; very rarely, with little intervals, only one at a time; once or twice a hundred in one flight. Leaflet—for they fall by leaflets—and stalk twirled through the windless air as if they would have liked to fall not quite so rapidly as their companions to that brown and shining and oblivious carpet below. A gentle wind arose from the north and the leaves all went slo
1 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XXV EARTH CHILDREN
CHAPTER XXV EARTH CHILDREN
Their house is a small russet cave of three dim compartments—part of a farmhouse, the rest having fallen to ruin, and from human hands to the starlings, the sparrows, and the rats. No one will live in it again. Inside, it is held together by the solid poetry of their lives, by gay-coloured, cheerful, tradesmen’s pictures of well-dressed children and blooming horsewomen, and the dogs of gentlemen, memorial cards of the dead, a few photographs, some picture post-cards pasted over flaws in the wall
14 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XXVI NOVEMBER RAIN
CHAPTER XXVI NOVEMBER RAIN
Close, perpendicular, quiet rain came upon me when I was ten miles from last night’s shelter and ten miles from my end. Shelter was not near, nor indeed to be thought of in an untrodden lane which had been, for some time, and seemed to go on for ever, winding through the delicious, vacant country of a late autumn Sunday, while it was yet early in the day and yet not so early but that the milking was over, and the milk carts gone, and the cattle satisfied and slow after their first questing in th
2 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XXVII JANUARY SUNSHINE
CHAPTER XXVII JANUARY SUNSHINE
It is a quiet valley in which moist fields of meadow, mowing grass, mangold, and stubble are bounded from one another by deep ditches and good hedges of maple, thorn and hazel, with here and there an oak, or by oak woods that rise above an undergrowth of grey ash. Every half mile there is a tiled farmhouse with low-pitched roof and low, square windows, their frames painted white, and between them rose trees climbing; in the gardens of most, two plots of lawn are surrounded by rich dark borders a
2 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XXVIII THE BARGE
CHAPTER XXVIII THE BARGE
Spring and summer and autumn had come—flowing into one another with that secrecy which, as in the periods of our life, spares us the pain of the irretraceable step—and still a golden tree stood here and there in the hollowed lawns.... Snow fell on singing thrushes and golden trees, and when it was over a half moon of untouched grass under a dense hawthorn was as a green shadow on the white land.... Then the year paused; there was a swallow still here and there; but again there was snow.... The w
2 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XXIX A WINTER MORNING
CHAPTER XXIX A WINTER MORNING
Night was soon to pass into a winter day as I looked out of the window to see what kind of a world it was that had been, since I began to read, shutting me off effectually from everything but my book. The words were still fresh in my brain. But, outside, the trees and barns and shed were quiet and dim, and as much submerged and hidden from the air in which I had been living as the green streets of motionless lily and weed at the bottom of some lonely pool where carp and tench go slowly. The road
4 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XXX CHERRY BLOSSOM
CHAPTER XXX CHERRY BLOSSOM
In front, a tall beechen hill closes up the gulf that runs out of the valley into the heart of the chalk down. The hill fills nearly half the sky, and just above it stands the white full moon, as one who looks over his lands. It warms the low, pale, curdled sky, but does not disturb the darkness of the beeches. All its light seems to fall and settle, as if it would dwell there for ever in the cherry trees on either hand. All are blossoming, and in their branches the nightingales sing out of the
2 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XXXI THE FOX HUNT
CHAPTER XXXI THE FOX HUNT
We had driven ten miles through a country that rose and fell with large, stormy lines of hillock and hill. A March sun was bright, but a sharpness lingered in the air from last night’s frost, like a cold spring in a warm lake. Over the hazy, genial oak woods on the hills sailed slow white gulls all crying, “wheel whill” with a shrillness that suited the high blue sky. Sowers went across the long red fields, casting dark seeds that flew in curved clouds before them at each second step and vanishe
13 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XXXII APPLE BLOSSOM
CHAPTER XXXII APPLE BLOSSOM
The stream going helpless and fast between high banks is gloomy until it is turned to bright, airy foam and hanging crystal by the mill; over the restless pool below hangs a hawthorn all white and fragrant and murmurous with bloom. Above the mill, to the north, the land rises in long, lustrous, melodiously swelling lawns of perfect green to the dark borders of a beech wood, where the sweet, thick air fills the hollows among the virginal foliage with blue. In one place the beeches have parted and
5 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XXXIII A LITTLE BEFORE HARVEST
CHAPTER XXXIII A LITTLE BEFORE HARVEST
Summer is perfect now. The wheat says so, when in the dawn it drips with half-an-hour’s rain and gleams like copper under the fresh, dim sky; it cries aloud the same when it crackles in the midday sun, and the golden sea of it washes murmurously to the feet of the hills. In the hedges and fields the agrimony wands and mullein staves, the climbing vetch, the cushioned bird’s-foot lotus, the myriads of ragwort and sow thistle, are golden too. The meadowsweet and honeysuckle flowers and the wild ca
4 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XXXIV AUTUMN BELLS
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, r
1 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XXXV SUNDAY
CHAPTER XXXV SUNDAY
The morning air of autumn smelt like the musky, wild white rose. The south wind had carried hither all the golden and brown savours from Devon and Wiltshire and Surrey; and the strong sweetness made the walker snuff deeply at it, with uplifted upper lip. Church bells two miles away, deep among the woods that lay around narrow gulfs of meadow on every side, called and called, as if they had wedded this perfume and all the gold and brown of the wide land. Not the last willow wren in the oak, nor t
5 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XXXVI THE FIRST DAFFODILS
CHAPTER XXXVI THE FIRST DAFFODILS
It was one of those early March days in a mountainous country when a warmly clothed man, in good health and walking rapidly, can just foretaste the spring. The icy dark water in stony brooklets shone golden whenever it could find the sun. This gold seemed a brand upon the winter that marked it for death. There was gold also on the turf between the walls and the roadways, for there were hundreds of celandine flowers: it was to be found also in the miniature forests of the moss that made detached
12 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XXXVII THE MIRROR
CHAPTER XXXVII THE MIRROR
There are a hundred little landscapes on the walls by the roadside—of grey or silver or golden stone, embossed and fretted and chequered by green and gold-pointed mosses, frosty lichens, pale round penny-wort leaves and the orange foliage of cranesbill. At their feet are the young leaves of the larger celandine and the lustrous blossoms of the lesser, still swaddled in dead leaves where mice and squirrels are questing. On top, thorns and ash trees trail horizontally in many dragon shapes, and pu
9 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XXXVIII UNDER THE MOOR
CHAPTER XXXVIII UNDER THE MOOR
It was June, but it had been like March for many miles upon the rough moor until, with the dawn, I came to a lowland where there were mossy fields with clear rain pools among the flowering gorse; and meadows cut into two planes by small, perpendicular cliffs of stone, so that on one the cattle were already feeding in the early light and on the other still lying down; and wheat fields that had islands of stone in their midst; and then at last an immense meadow sloping down towards fresh oak woods
4 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XXXIX A HARVEST MOON
CHAPTER XXXIX A HARVEST MOON
The first steep cornfield under the edge of the red moor lay all rough and warm with stubble in the evening light. The corn sheaves themselves were of a shining gold and leaned together in shocks that made long, low tents and invited the wayfarer to shelter and sleep. We had come over the moor for hours and this field was the beginning of a deep valley that stretched to the sea. Yonder was the sea, ten miles away, with a row of lights running out upon a nose of land far into it. The valley held
2 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XL THE INN
CHAPTER XL THE INN
The night was dark and solid rain tumultuously invested the inn. As I stood in a dim passage I could see through the bar into the cloudy parlour, square and white, surrounded by settles, each curving about a round table made of one piece of elm on three legs. A reproduction of “Rent Day” and a coloured picture of a bold Spanish beauty hung on the wall, which, for the rest, was sufficiently adorned by the sharp shadows of men’s figures and furniture that mingled grotesquely. All the men but one l
4 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XLI A MARCH HAUL
CHAPTER XLI A MARCH HAUL
The white houses on the hill are whiter than ever before in the early light and the south wind from over the sea. The soft, wheat-coloured sand is inscribed far from the water by the black scrawl of the overpast storm. But now the sea is broken by sliding ripples so small that they seem only the last, discontented efforts of the wind to make the surface one perfect floor of glass. The curving, foamy lines waver and swirl and are about to disappear and leave the desired level when others are born
3 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XLII FISHING BOATS
CHAPTER XLII FISHING BOATS
The tide moves the river northward, towards me, under the bridge on which I stand. On both sides it is lined for a little way by houses: on the east in a flat, straight front, on the west in irregular rocky masses. Those on the east are coldly stained with light from the western sky; those opposite are vaguely shadowed and have an airiness and gloom—not a light yet appearing—as of the other side of Lethe. The river is of noble breadth. Against the eastern houses rise up the masses of seven fishi
1 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XLIII CLOUDS OVER THE SEA
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 combina
3 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XLIV THE MARSH
CHAPTER XLIV THE MARSH
The sun has gone down. Except on one hand, the immense empty marshland expands to the sea, and where it mingles with the grey water would be uncertain, but for the clamour of the wading birds and the gleam, now and then, of a white wing. The low bent thorns, inland, now take on a strange humanity, as of men who have ventured out into the solitude and pitched their tents there and none has followed them; they are bent in alarmed and hurrying attitudes away from the sea, but cannot leave it. The s
2 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XLV ONE SAIL AT SEA
CHAPTER XLV ONE SAIL AT SEA
This is a simple world. On either hand the shore sweeps out in a long curve and ends in a perpendicular, ash-coloured cliff, carving the misty air as with a hatchet-stroke. The shore is of tawny, terraced sand, like hammered metal from the prints of the retreating waves; and here and there a group of wildly carved and tragic stones— unde homines nati, durum genus —such as must have been those stones from which Deucalion made the stony race of men to arise. Up over the sand, and among these stone
1 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHAPTER XLVI THE CASTLE OF CARBONEK
CHAPTER XLVI THE CASTLE OF CARBONEK
The castle stands high among vast, sharp-edged waves of sand at the edge of a cliff, and looks at the sea and a long, empty shore. At its feet a little river can be seen running in a narrow valley. A few miles off it rises in the red moorland, then it falls with many a cascade down ladders of crag, broadens among willows where long leaves are all horizontal in the wind, and here by the castle it has reached an elvish, merry old age already, as it moves clear over the brown stones and out among t
10 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
THE HOLM BANK HUNTING SONG
THE HOLM BANK HUNTING SONG
[ midi ] [ lilypond ]...
22 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
MARY, COME INTO THE FIELD
MARY, COME INTO THE FIELD
[ midi ] [ lilypond ]...
22 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter