and
heather and bracken; he could think of nothing better than to sit
there and stare into the face of Nature, not like a poet whom love
makes lyrical, but like a quite ordinary person whom it makes dumb.
And Nature never turned to a poet a lovelier and more appealing face.
It had rained in the night. From the enfolding blue, sky blue and sea
blue, blue of the aerial hills, the earth flung out her colours, new
washed, radiantly, immaculately pure. Bared to the sea, she flamed
from rose pink to rose red. Only the greater hills and the dark flank
of Muttersmoor waited for their hour, the hour of the ling and the
heather; the valleys and the lower slopes were glad with green. There
was an art in Nature's way; for, lest a joyousness so brimming and so
tender should melt and overflow into mere pathos, it was bounded and
restrained by that solemn and tragic line of Muttersmoor drawn
straight against the sky.

It was the same scene that had troubled him when he first looked at
it, and it troubled him still; not with that thrill of prescient
delight and terror, but with a feeling more mysterious and baffling,
an exquisite and indefinable reproach. He stared, as if he could hope
by staring to capture the meaning of the beautiful tender face; but
beyond that inscrutable reproach it had no meaning for him and no
expression. He had come to a land prophetic of inspiration, where, if
anywhere, he might have hoped to hear the lyric soul of things; and
the lyric soul of things absolutely refused to sing to him. It had
sung loud enough in the streets last Wednesday; it had hymned the
procession of his dreams and the loud tumultuous orgy of his passions;
and why could he not hear it now? For here his senses were satisfied
to the full. Never had Nature's material loveliness been more vividly,
piercingly present to him. The warm air was like a touch, palpable yet
divine. He lay face downwards on the earth and pressed it with his
hands; he smelt the good smell of the grass and young bracken, and the
sweet almond-scented blossom of the furze. And he suffered all the
torment of the lover who possesses the lips and body of his mistress,
and knows that her heart is far from him and that her soul is not for
him.

He felt himself to be severed from the sources of his inspiration;
estranged, profoundly and eternally, from the beauty he desired. And
that conviction, melancholy in itself, was followed by an overpowering
sense of intellectual diss