has not yet dried off the bramble leaves. A feather of
a moon floats across the sky; the distance sends forth homely murmurs;
the sun warms my cheeks. And all of this is pure joy. No hawk of dread
and horror keeps swooping down and bearing off the little birds of
happiness. No accusing conscience starts forth and beckons me away from
pleasure. Everywhere is supreme and flawless beauty. Whether one looks
at this tiny snail shell, marvellously chased and marked, a very elf's
horn whose open mouth is coloured rose; or gazes down at the flat land
between here and the sea, wandering under the smile of the afternoon
sunlight, seeming almost to be alive, hedgeless, with its many watching
trees, and silver gulls hovering above the mushroom-coloured 'ploughs,'
and fields green in manifold hues; whether one muses on this little pink
daisy born so out of time, or watches that valley of brown-rose-grey
woods, under the drifting shadows of low-hanging chalky clouds--all is
perfect, as only Nature can be perfect on a lovely day, when the mind of
him who looks on her is at rest.

On this green hill I am nearer than I have been yet to realisation of
the difference between war and peace. In our civilian lives hardly
anything has been changed--we do not get more butter or more petrol, the
garb and machinery of war still shroud us, journals still drip hate; but
in our spirits there is all the difference between gradual dying and
gradual recovery from sickness.

At the beginning of the war a certain artist, so one heard, shut himself
away in his house and garden, taking in no newspaper, receiving no
visitors, listening to no breath of the war, seeing no sight of it. So
he lived, buried in his work and his flowers--I know not for how long.
Was he wise, or did he suffer even more than the rest of us who shut
nothing away? Can man, indeed, shut out the very quality of his
firmament, or bar himself away from the general misery of his species?

This gradual recovery of the world--this slow reopening of the great
flower, Life--is beautiful to feel and see. I press my hand flat and
hard down on those blades of grass, then take it away, and watch them
very slowly raise themselves and shake off the bruise. So it is, and
will be, with us for a long time to come. The cramp of war was deep in
us, as an iron frost in the earth. Of all the countless millions who
have fought and nursed and written and spoken and dug and sewn and
worked in a thousand o