the sea you may know this, it is dry glare; mighty ocean is dearer as the
shadows of the clouds sweep over as they sweep over the green corn. Past
the shadowless winter, when it is all shade, and therefore no shadow;
onwards to the first coltsfoot and on to the seed-time again; I knew the
dates of all of them. I did not want change; I wanted the same flowers to
return on the same day, the titlark to rise soaring from the same oak to
fetch down love with a song from heaven to his mate on the nest beneath.
No change, no new thing; if I found a fresh wild-flower in a fresh place,
still it wove at once into the old garland. In vain, the very next year
was different even in the same place--_that_ had been a year of rain,
and the flag flowers were wonderful to see; _this_ was a dry year, and
the flags not half the height, the gold of the flower not so deep; next
year the fatal billhook came and swept away a slow-grown hedge that had
given me crab-blossom in cuckoo-time and hazelnuts in harvest. Never
again the same, even in the same place.

A little feather droops downwards to the ground--a swallow's feather
fuller of miracle than the Pentateuch--how shall that feather be placed
again in the breast where it grew? Nothing twice. Time changes the places
that knew us, and if we go back in after years, still even then it is not
the old spot; the gate swings differently, new thatch has been put on the
old gables, the road has been widened, and the sward the driven sheep
lingered on is gone. Who dares to think then? For faces fade as flowers,
and there is no consolation. So now I am sure I was right in always
walking the same way by the starry flowers striving upwards on a slender
ancestry of stem; I would follow the plain old road to-day if I could.
Let change be far from me; that irresistible change must come is bitter
indeed. Give me the old road, the same flowers--they were only
stitchwort--the old succession of days and garland, ever weaving into it
fresh wild-flowers from far and near. Fetch them from distant mountains,