Any Man Can See And Understand A Picture; It
Is Reserved For The Few To Separate Anything Out Of The Confusion
Of Nature, And See That Distinctly And With Intelligence.
The sun came out before I had been long on my way; and as I had got
by that
Time to the top of the ascent, and was now treading a
labyrinth of confined by-roads, my whole view brightened
considerably in colour, for it was the distance only that was grey
and cold, and the distance I could see no longer. Overhead there
was a wonderful carolling of larks which seemed to follow me as I
went. Indeed, during all the time I was in that country the larks
did not desert me. The air was alive with them from High Wycombe
to Tring; and as, day after day, their 'shrill delight' fell upon
me out of the vacant sky, they began to take such a prominence over
other conditions, and form so integral a part of my conception of
the country, that I could have baptized it 'The Country of Larks.'
This, of course, might just as well have been in early spring; but
everything else was deeply imbued with the sentiment of the later
year. There was no stir of insects in the grass. The sunshine was
more golden, and gave less heat than summer sunshine; and the
shadows under the hedge were somewhat blue and misty. It was only
in autumn that you could have seen the mingled green and yellow of
the elm foliage, and the fallen leaves that lay about the road, and
covered the surface of wayside pools so thickly that the sun was
reflected only here and there from little joints and pinholes in
that brown coat of proof; or that your ear would have been
troubled, as you went forward, by the occasional report of fowling-
pieces from all directions and all degrees of distance.
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