g disturbed him, and he stood pausing, pressed against her, then
moved out toward where I generally sit, but was not sitting that night.

She saw him stand there, as if considering; then at some sound or laugh,
she became self-conscious, and slowly, very slowly, he was no longer
there. Had he some message, some counsel to give, something he would
say, that last night of the last year of all those he had watched over
us? Will he come back again?

No stone stands over where he lies. It is on our hearts that his life is
engraved.
1912.

FELICITY

When God is so good to the fields, of what use are words--those poor
husks of sentiment! There is no painting Felicity on the wing! No way
of bringing on to the canvas the flying glory of things! A single
buttercup of the twenty million in one field is worth all these dry
symbols--that can never body forth the very spirit of that froth of May
breaking over the hedges, the choir of birds and bees, the
lost-travelling down of the wind flowers, the white-throated swallows in
their Odysseys. Just here there are no skylarks, but what joy of song
and leaf; of lanes lighted with bright trees, the few oaks still golden
brown, and the ashes still spiritual! Only the blackbirds and thrushes
can sing-up this day, and cuckoos over the hill. The year has flown so
fast that the apple-trees have dropped nearly all their bloom, and in
"long meadow" the "daggers" are out early, beside the narrow bright
streams. Orpheus sits there on a stone, when nobody is by, and pipes to
the ponies; and Pan can often be seen dancing with his nymphs in the
raised beech-grove where it is always twilight, if you lie still enough
against the far bank.

Who can believe in growing old, so long as we are wrapped in this cloak
of colour and wings and song; so long as this unimaginable vision is here
for us to gaze at--the soft-faced sheep about us, and the wool-bags
drying out along the fence, and great numbers of tiny ducks, so trustful
that the crows have taken several.

Blue is the colour of youth, and all the blue flowers have a "fey" look.
Everything seems young too young to work. There is but one thing busy, a
starling, fetching grubs for its little family, above my head--it must
take that flight at least two hundred times a day. The children should be
very fat.

When the sky is so happy, and the flowers so luminous, it does not seem
possible that the bright angels of this day shall pass