O Joy To
Look Again On It, To Add Yet One More Enduring Image Of It To
The Number I Had Long Treasured!
For the others were not
exactly like this one; the building was not looked at from the
same point of view at the same season and late hour, with the
green hills lit by the departing sun and the clear pale winter
sky beyond.
Coming in by the moated palace I stood once more on the Green
before that west front, beautiful beyond all others, in spite
of the strange defeatures Time has written on it. I watched
the daws, numerous as ever, still at their old mad games, now
springing into the air to scatter abroad with ringing cries,
only to return the next minute and fling themselves back on
their old perches on a hundred weather-stained broken statues
in the niches. And while I stood watching them from the
palace trees close by came the loud laugh of the green
woodpecker. The same wild, beautiful sound, uttered perhaps
by the same bird, which I had often heard at that spot ten
years ago! "You will not hear that woodland sound in any
other city in the kingdom," I wrote in a book of sketches
entitled "Birds and Man", published in 1901.
But of my soul's adventures in Wells on the two or three
following days I will say very little. That laugh of the
woodpecker was an assurance that Nature had suffered no
change, and the town too, like the hills and rocks and running
waters, seemed unchanged; but how different and how sad when I
looked for those I once knew, whose hands I had hoped to grasp
again!
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