rough simple use and not
through large theory that one can best practise joy.

XX

WORK

I came out of the low-arched door with a sense of relief and passed
into the sunshine; the meeting had broken up, and we went our ways. We
had sate there an hour or two in the old panelled room, a dozen
full-blooded friendly men discussing a small matter with wonderful
ingenuity and zest; and I had spoken neither least nor most mildly,
and had found it all pleasant enough. Then I mounted my bicycle and
rode out into the fragrant country alone, with all its nearer green
and further blue; there in that little belt of space, between the thin
air above and the dense-dark earth beneath, was the pageant of
conscious life enacting itself so visibly and eagerly. In the sunlit
sky the winds raced gaily enough, with the void silence of moveless
space above it; below my feet what depths of cold stone, with the
secret springs; below that perhaps a core of molten heat and
imprisoned fire!

What was it all about? What were we all doing there? What was the
significance of the little business that had been engaging our minds
and tongues? What part did it play in the mighty universe?

The thorn-tree thick with bloom, pouring out its homely spicy
smell--it was doing too, beautifully enough, what we had been doing
clumsily. It was living, intent on its own conscious life, the sap
hurrying, the scent flowing, the bud waxing. The yellow-hammer poising
and darting along the hedge, the sparrow twittering round the rick,
the cock picking and crowing, were all intent on life, proclaiming
that they were alive and busy. Something vivid, alert, impassioned was
going forward everywhere, something being effected, something
uttered--and yet the cause how utterly hidden from me and from every
living thing!

The memory of old poetry began to flicker in my mind like summer
lightning. In the orchard, crammed with bloom, two unseen children
were calling to each other; a sunburned, careless, graceful boy,
whose rough clothes could not conceal his shapely limbs and easy
movements, came driving some cows along the lane. He asked me the time
in Dorian speech. The shepherds piping together on the Sicilian
headland could not have made a fairer picture; and yet the boy and I
could hardly have had a thought in common!

All the poets that ever sang in the pleasant springtime can hardly
have felt the joyful onrush of the season more sweetly than I felt it
tha