It rolls the wavelets carelessly as marbles to the shore; the red cattle
redden the pool and stand in their own colour. The green caterpillar
swings as he spins his thread and lengthens his cable to the tide of air,
descending from the tree; before he can slip it the whitethroat takes
him. With a thrust the wind hurls the swift fifty miles faster on his
way; it ruffles back the black velvet of the mole peeping forth from his
burrow. Apple bloom and crab-apple bloom have been blown long since
athwart the furrows over the orchard wall; May petals and June roses
scattered; the pollen and the seeds of the meadow-grasses thrown on the
threshing-floor of earth in basketfuls. Thistle down and dandelion down,
the brown down of the goat's-beard; by-and-by the keys of the sycamores
twirling aslant--the wind carries them all on its back, gossamer web and
great heron's vanes--the same weight to the wind; the drops of the
waterfall blown aside sprinkle the bright green ferns. The voice of the
cuckoo in his season travels on the zephyr, and the note comes to the
most distant hill, and deep into the deepest wood.

The light and fire of summer are made beautiful by the air, without whose
breath the glorious summer were all spoiled. Thick are the hawthorn
leaves, many deep on the spray; and beneath them there is a twisted and
intertangled winding in and out of boughs, such as no curious ironwork of
ancient artist could equal; through the leaves and metal-work of boughs
the soft west wind wanders at its ease. Wild wasp and tutored bee sing
sideways on their course as the breeze fills their vanes; with broad
coloured sails boomed out, the butterfly drifts alee. Beside a brown
coated stone in the shadowed stream a brown trout watches for the puffs
that slay the May-flies. Their ephemeral wings were made for a more
exquisite life; they endure but one sun; they bear not the touch of the
water; they die like a dream dropping into the river. To the amethyst in
the deep ditch the wind comes; no petal so hidden under green it cannot