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Essays by Alice Christiana Thompson Meynell
page 138 of 206 (66%)
and the aspen do not darken--or hardly--and the deepest summer will not
find a day in which they do not keep awake. No waters are so vigilant,
even where a lake is bare to the wind.

When Keats said of his Dian that she fastened up her hair "with fingers
cool as aspen leaves," he knew the coolest thing in the world. It is a
coolness of colour, as well as of a leaf which the breeze takes on both
sides--the greenish and the greyish. The poplar green has no glows, no
gold; it is an austere colour, as little rich as the colour of willows,
and less silvery than theirs. The sun can hardly gild it; but he can
shine between. Poplars and aspens let the sun through with the wind. You
may have the sky sprinkled through them in high midsummer, when all the
woods are close.

Sending your fancy poplar-gathering, then, you ensnare wild trees,
beating with life. No fisher's net ever took such glancing fishes, nor
did the net of a constellation's shape ever enclose more vibrating
Pleiades.




CLOUD


During a part of the year London does not see the clouds. Not to see the
clear sky might seem her chief loss, but that is shared by the rest of
England, and is, besides, but a slight privation. Not to see the clear
sky is, elsewhere, to see the cloud. But not so in London. You may go
for a week or two at a time, even though you hold your head up as you
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