white in a whorl of rays--light that had started radiating from a centre
and become fixed--shining among the flowerless green. The slender stem
had grown so fast it had drawn its own root partly out of the ground, and
when I tried to gather it, flower, stem and root came away together. The
wheat was springing, the soft air full of the growth and moisture,
blackbirds whistling, wood-pigeons nesting, young oak-leaves out; a sense
of swelling, sunny fulness in the atmosphere. The plain road was made
beautiful by the advanced boughs that overhung and cast their shadows on
the dust--boughs of ash-green, shadows that lay still, listening to the
nightingale. A place of enchantment in the mornings where was felt the
power of some subtle influence working behind bough and grass and
bird-song. The orange-golden dandelion in the sward was deeply laden with
colour brought to it anew again and again by the ships of the flowers,
the humble-bees--to their quays they come, unlading priceless essences of
sweet odours brought from the East over the green seas of wheat, unlading
priceless colours on the broad dandelion disks, bartering these things
for honey and pollen. Slowly tacking aslant, the pollen ship hums in the
south wind. The little brown wren finds her way through the great thicket
of hawthorn. How does she know her path, hidden by a thousand thousand
leaves? Tangled and crushed together by their own growth, a crown of
thorns hangs over the thrush's nest; thorns for the mother, hope for the
young. Is there a crown of thorns over your heart? A spike has gone deep
enough into mine. The stile looks farther away because boughs have pushed
forward and made it smaller. The willow scarce holds the sap that
tightens the bark and would burst it if it did not enlarge to the
pressure.

Two things can go through the solid oak; the lightning of the clouds that
rends the iron timber, the lightning of the spring--the electricity of
the sunbeams forcing him to stretch forth and lengthen his arms with joy.