had been there was there still. The lawns under the trees were mournful
with old pain, or with vanished joys more pathetic than pain in their
fleeting mimicry of immortality.

It was only at midsummer that the windows were coloured by dawn and
sunset; then they had a sanguinary aspect, staring into the delicate
skyey dramas like blind, bloodshot eyes. Secretly, under the heavy
rhododendron leaves and in the furtive sunlight beneath the yew-trees,
gnats danced. Their faint motions made the garden stiller; their
smallness made it oppressive; their momentary life made it infinitely
old. Then Undern Pool was full of leaf shadows like multitudinous
lolling tongues, and the smell of the mud tainted the air--half sickly,
half sweet. The clipped bushes and the twisted chimneys made inky
shadows like steeples on the grass, and great trees of roses, beautiful
in desolation, dripped with red and white and elbowed the guelder roses
and the elders set with white patens. Cherries fell in the orchard with
the same rich monotony, the same fatality, as drops of blood. They lay
under the fungus-riven trees till the hens ate them, pecking gingerly
and enjoyably at their lustrous beauty as the world does at a poet's
heart. In the kitchen-garden also the hens took their ease, banqueting
sparely beneath the straggling black boughs of a red-currant grove. In
the sandstone walls of this garden hornets built undisturbed, and the
thyme and lavender borders had grown into forests and obliterated the
path. The cattle drowsed in the meadows, birds in the heavy trees; the
golden day-lilies drooped like the daughters of pleasure; the very
principle of life seemed to slumber. It was then, when the scent of
elder blossom, decaying fruit, mud and hot yew brooded there, that the
place attained one of its most individual moods--narcotic, aphrodisiac.

In winter the yews and firs were like waving funeral plumes and