ens. You
cannot see any red at all.

I can see, as in a sort of vision, the successful artist standing in the
midst of that frightful city, hung on all sides with the scarlet of his
shame. And then, when everything is red, he will long for a red rose
in a green hedge and long in vain; he will dream of a red leaf and be
unable even to imagine it. He has desecrated the divine colour, and he
can no longer see it, though it is all around. I see him, a single black
figure against the red-hot hell that he has kindled, where spires and
turrets stand up like immobile flames: he is stiffened in a sort of
agony of prayer. Then the mercy of Heaven is loosened, and I see one or
two flakes of snow very slowly begin to fall.

The Furrows

As I see the corn grow green all about my neighbourhood, there rushes on
me for no reason in particular a memory of the winter. I say "rushes,"
for that is the very word for the old sweeping lines of the ploughed
fields. From some accidental turn of a train-journey or a walking tour,
I saw suddenly the fierce rush of the furrows. The furrows are like
arrows; they fly along an arc of sky. They are like leaping animals;
they vault an inviolable hill and roll down the other side. They are
like battering battalions; they rush over a hill with flying squadrons
and carry it with a cavalry charge. They have all the air of Arabs
sweeping a desert, of rockets sweeping the sky, of torrents sweeping a
watercourse. Nothing ever seemed so living as those brown lines as they
shot sheer from the height of a ridge down to their still whirl of the
valley. They were swifter than arrows, fiercer than Arabs, more riotous
and rejoicing than rockets. And yet they were only thin straight lines
drawn with difficulty, like a diagram, by painful and patient men. The
men that ploughed tried to plough straight; they had no notion of giving
great sweeps and swirls to the eye. Those cataracts of cloven earth;
they were done by the grace of God. I had always rejoiced in them; but I
had never found any reason for my joy. There are some very clever people
who cannot enjoy the joy unless they understand it. There are other and
even cleverer people who say that they lose the joy the moment they do
understand it. Thank God I was never clever, and I could always enjoy
things when I understood them and when I didn't. I can enjoy the
orthodox Tory, though I could never understand him. I can also enjoy the
orthodox Liberal, thoug