These thoughts came into my mind in the winter afternoon at the edge of a
level corn-field, with the copper-sheathed spire of the village church on
my right, the sun going down on the left.
The copper did not gleam, it
was dull and brown, no better than discoloured wood, patched with pieces
of later date and another shade of dulness. I wish they would glitter,
some of these steeples or some of our roofs, and so light up the reddish
brown of the elms and the grey lichened oaks. The very rooks are black,
and the starlings and the wintry fieldfares and redwings have no colour
at a distance. They say the metal roofs and domes gleam in Russia, and
even in France, and why not in our rare sunshine? Once now and then you
see a gilded weathercock shine like a day-star as the sun goes down three
miles away, over the dark brown field, where the plough has been going to
and fro through the slow hours. I can see the plough and the horses very
well at three miles, and know what they are doing.
I wish the trees, the elms, would grow tall enough and thick enough to
hide the steeples and towers which stand up so stiff and stark, and bare
and cold, some of them blunted and squab, some of them sharp enough to
impale, with no more shape than a walking-stick, ferrule upwards - every
one of them out of proportion and jarring to the eye.
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