Not All Of These, Of Course, At Once, But They Followed
So Quickly In The Summer Days That They Seemed To Be One And The Same
Pictures, And Had You Painted Them Altogether On The Same Canvas,
Together With Ripe Wheat, They Would Not Have Seemed Out Of Place.
Never
was such brilliant colour; it was chalk there, and on chalk the colours
are always clearer, the poppies deeper, the yellow mustard and charlock a
keener yellow; the air, too, is pellucid.
Waggons going along the tracks;
men and women hoeing; ricks of last year still among clumps of trees,
where the chimneys and gables of farmhouses are partly visible; red-tiled
barns away yonder; a shepherd moving his hurdles; away again the black
funnel of an idle engine, and the fly-wheel above hawthorn bushes - all so
distinct and close under that you might almost fear to breathe for fear
of dimming the mirror. The few white clouds sailing over seemed to belong
to the fields on which their shadows were now foreshortened, now
lengthened, as if they were really part of the fields, like the crops,
and the azure sky so low down as to be the roof of the house and not at
all a separate thing. And the sun a lamp that you might almost have
pushed along his course faster with your hand; a loving and interesting
sun that wanted the wheat to ripen, and stayed there in the slow-drawn
arc of the summer day to lend a hand.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 152 of 394
Words from 40969 to 41223
of 105669
