The Silent Isle by Arthur Christopher Benson
page 6 of 308 (01%)
page 6 of 308 (01%)
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great levels than anywhere in the world. The morning comes up more
sedately; the orange-skirted twilight is more lingeringly withdrawn. The sun burns lower, down to the very verge of the world, dropping behind no black-stemmed wood or high-standing ridge; and how softly the colour fades westward out of the sky, among the rose-flushed cloud-isles and green spaces of air! And out of all this spacious tracklessness comes a sense of endless remoteness. While the roads converge like the rays of a wheel upon the inland town, each a stream of hurrying life, here the world flows to you more rarely and deliberately. Indeed, there seems no influx of life at all, nothing but a quiet interchange of voyagers. Promotion arrives from no point of the compass; nothing but a little tide of homely life ebbs and flows in these elm-girt villages above the fen. Of course, the anxious and expectant heart carries its own restlessness everywhere; but to read of the rush and stress of life in these grassy solitudes seems like the telling of an idle tale. And then the silence of the place! The sounds of life have a value and a distinctness here that I have never known elsewhere. I have lived much of my life in towns; and there, even if one is not conscious of distinct sound, there is a blurred sense of movement in the air, which dulls the ear. But here the sharp song of the yellow-hammer from the hedge, or the cry of the owl from the spinney, come pure and keen through the thin air, purged of all uncertain murmurs. I can hear, it seems, a mile away, the rumble of the long procession of red mud-stained field-carts, or the humming of the threshing-gear; or the chatter of children on the farm-road beyond my shrubberies breaks clear and jocund on the ear. I become conscious here of how noisily and hurriedly I have lived my life; happily enough, I will confess; but the thought of it all--the class-room, the street, the playing-field--bright and vivacious as it all was, seems now like a boisterous prelude of blaring brass and tingling string, which lapses |
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