afterwards was I able to see why I went the same round and did not care
for change. I do not want change: I want the same old and loved things,
the same wild-flowers, the same trees and soft ash-green; the
turtle-doves, the blackbirds, the coloured yellowhammer sing, sing,
singing so long as there is light to cast a shadow on the dial, for such
is the measure of his song, and I want them in the same place. Let me
find them morning after morning, the starry-white petals radiating,
striving upwards to their ideal. Let me see the idle shadows resting on
the white dust; let me hear the humble-bees, and stay to look down on the
rich dandelion disk. Let me see the very thistles opening their great
crowns--I should miss the thistles; the reed-grasses hiding the moorhen;
the bryony bine, at first crudely ambitious and lifted by force of
youthful sap straight above the hedgerow to sink of its own weight
presently and progress with crafty tendrils; swifts shot through the air
with outstretched wings like crescent-headed shaftless arrows darted from
the clouds; the chaffinch with a feather in her bill; all the living
staircase of the spring, step by step, upwards to the great gallery of
the summer--let me watch the same succession year by year.

Why, I knew the very dates of them all--the reddening elm, the arum, the
hawthorn leaf, the celandine, the may; the yellow iris of the waters, the
heath of the hillside. The time of the nightingale--the place to hear
the first note; onwards to the drooping fern and the time of the
redwing--the place of his first note, so welcome to the sportsman as the
acorn ripens and the pheasant, come to the age of manhood, feeds himself;
onwards to the shadowless days--the long shadowless winter, for in winter
it is the shadows we miss as much as the light. They lie over the summer
sward, design upon design, dark lace on green and gold; they glorify the
sunlight: they repose on the distant hills like gods upon Olympus;
without shadow, what even is the sun? At the foot of the great cliffs by