thing and
that on every side of me, with slow stretchings and bendings,
with twitterings, with a little start and stir. . . .

I came slowly, stepping very carefully because of these drugged,
feebly awakening things, through the barley to the hedge. It was a
very glorious hedge, so that it held my eyes. It flowed along and
interlaced like splendid music. It was rich with lupin, honeysuckle,
campions, and ragged robin; bed straw, hops, and wild clematis
twined and hung among its branches, and all along its ditch border
the starry stitchwort lifted its childish faces, and chorused in
lines and masses. Never had I seen such a symphony of note-like
flowers and tendrils and leaves. And suddenly in its depths, I
heard a chirrup and the whirr of startled wings.

Nothing was dead, but everything had changed to beauty! And I
stood for a time with clean and happy eyes looking at the intricate
delicacy before me and marveling how richly God has made
his worlds. . . . .

"Tweedle-Tweezle," a lark had shot the stillness with his shining
thread of song; one lark, and then presently another, invisibly in
the air, making out of that blue quiet a woven cloth of gold. . . .

The earth recreated--only by the reiteration of such phrases
may I hope to give the intense freshness of that dawn. For a time
I was altogether taken up with the beautiful details of being, as
regardless of my old life of jealous passion and impatient sorrow
as though I was Adam new made. I could tell you now with infinite
particularity of the shut flowers that opened as I looked, of tendrils
and grass blades, of a blue-tit I picked up very tenderly--never
before had I remarked the great delicacy of feathers--that presently
disclosed its bright black eye and judged me, and perched, swaying
fearlessly, upon my finger, and spread unhurried wings and flew
away, and of a great ebullition of tadpoles in the ditch; like all
the things that lived beneath the water, they had passed unaltered
through the Change. Amid such incidents, I lived those first great
moments, losing for a time in the wonder of each little part the
mighty wonder of the whole.

A little path ran between hedge and barley, and along this, leisurely
and content and glad, looking at this beautiful thing and that,
moving a step and stopping, then moving on again, I came presently
to a stile, and deep below it, and overgrown, was a lane.

And on the worn oak of the stile was a round label, and on the