owers traced in fire in the
phantasmal garden of a witch. A bright blue sky is necessarily the
high light of the picture; and its brightness kills all the bright blue
flowers. But on a grey day the larkspur looks like fallen heaven; the
red daisies are really the red lost eyes of day; and the sunflower is
the vice-regent of the sun.

Lastly, there is this value about the colour that men call colourless;
that it suggests in some way the mixed and troubled average of
existence, especially in its quality of strife and expectation and
promise. Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to
some other colour; of brightening into blue or blanching into white or
bursting into green and gold. So we may be perpetually reminded of the
indefinite hope that is in doubt itself; and when there is grey weather
in our hills or grey hairs in our heads, perhaps they may still remind
us of the morning.

The Anarchist

I have now lived for about two months in the country, and have gathered
the last rich autumnal fruit of a rural life, which is a strong desire
to see London. Artists living in my neighbourhood talk rapturously of
the rolling liberty of the landscape, the living peace of woods. But
I say to them (with a slight Buckinghamshire accent), "Ah, that is how
Cockneys feel. For us real old country people the country is reality; it
is the town that is romance. Nature is as plain as one of her pigs,
as commonplace, as comic, and as healthy. But civilization is full of
poetry, even if it be sometimes an evil poetry. The streets of London
are paved with gold; that is, with the very poetry of avarice." With
these typically bucolic words I touch my hat and go ambling away on a
stick, with a stiffness of gait proper to the Oldest Inhabitant; while
in my more animated moments I am taken for the Village Idiot. Exchanging
heavy but courteous salutations with other gaffers, I reach the station,
where I ask for a ticket for London where the king lives. Such a
journey, mingled of provincial fascination and fear, did I successfully
perform only a few days ago; and alone and helpless in the capital,
found myself in the tangle of roads around the Marble Arch.

A faint prejudice may possess the mind that I have slightly exaggerated
my rusticity and remoteness. And yet it is true as I came to that corner
of the Park that, for some unreasonable reason of mood, I saw all London
as a strange city and the civilization itself as one