f
the fields.

It is only in the country that one enjoys the poetry of natural sounds. A
dog barking in a suburban street is merely a disturber of the peace, and I
know of nothing more forlorn than the singing of a caged bird in, let us
say, Tottenham Court Road. Wordsworth's Poor Susan found a note of
enchantment in the song of the thrush that sang at the corner of Wood
Street, off Cheapside. But it was only an enchantment that passed into
deeper sadness as the vision of the green pastures which it summoned up
faded into the drab reality:

... they fade,
The mist and the river, the hill and the shade:
The stream will not flow and the hill will not rise,
And the colours have passed away from her eyes.

There is something in the life of towns which seems to make the voices of
the country alien and sorrowful. They are lost in the tumult, and, if
heard, sound only like a reproach against a fretful world, an echo from
some Eden from which we have been exiled.

In the large silence of the countryside sounds have a significance and
intimacy that they cannot have where life is crowded with activities and
interests. In a certain sense life here is richer because of its
poverty--because of its freedom from the thousand distractions that exhaust
its emotion and scatter its energies. Because we have little we discover
much in that little.

Take the sound of church bells. In the city it is hardly more pleasing than
the song of the bird in Tottenham Court Road. It does not raise my spirits,
it only depresses them. But when I heard the sound of the bells come up
from the valley last evening, it seemed like the bringer of a personal
message of good tidings. It had in it the rapture of a thousand
memories--memories of summer eves and snowy landscapes, of vanished faces
and forgotten scenes. It was at once stimulating and calming, and spoke
somehow the language of enduring and incommunicable things.

It is, I suppose, the associations of sounds rather than their actual
quality which make them pleasant or unpleasant. The twitter of sparrows is,
in itself, as prosaic a sound as there is in nature, but I never hear it on
waking without a feeling of inward peace. It seems to link me with some
incredibly remote and golden morning, and with a child in a cradle waking
for the first time to light and sound and consciousness.

And so with that engaging ruffian of the feathered world, the rook. It has
no more