They Were Very
Pretty; It Was A Shame To Crush Them - Such Vases As No King's Pottery
Could Make.
They lay by millions in the depths of the sward, and I
thought as I broke them unwillingly that each of these had once been a
house of life.
A living creature dwelt in each and felt the joy of
existence, and was to itself all in all - as if the great sun over the
hill shone for it, and the width of the earth under was for it, and the
grass and plants put on purpose for it. They were dead, the whole race of
them, and these their skeletons were as dust under my feet. Nature sets
no value upon life neither of minute hill-snail nor of human being.
I thought myself so much to the earliest leaf and the first meadow
orchis - so important that I should note the first zee-zee of the
titlark - that I should pronounce it summer, because now the oaks were
green; I must not miss a day nor an hour in the fields lest something
should escape me. How beautiful the droop of the great brome-grass by the
wood! But to-day I have to listen to the lark's song - not out of doors
with him, but through the window-pane, and the bullfinch carries the
rootlet fibre to his nest without me. They manage without me very well;
they know their times and seasons - not only the civilised rooks, with
their libraries of knowledge in their old nests of reference, but the
stray things of the hedge and the chiffchaff from over sea in the ash
wood.
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