little pen, be good and flow with ink (which you do not always do) so that i may tell you what came to me once in a high summer and the happiness i had of it.
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one summer morning as i was wandering from one house to another among the houses of men, i lifted up a bank from a river to a village and good houses, and there i was well entertained. i wish i could recite the names of those chance companions, but i cannot, for they did not tell me their names. june was just beginning in the middle lands where there are vines, but not many, and where the look of the stonework is still northern. the place was not very far from the western sea.
the bank on which the village stood above that river had behind it a solemn slope of [pg 163]woodland leading up gently to where, two miles or more away, yet not three hundred feet above me, the new green of the tree-tops made a line along the sky. clouds of a little, happy, hurrying sort ran across the gentle blue of that heaven, and i thought, as i went onward into the forest upland, that i had come to very good things: but indeed i had come to things of a graver kind.
a path went on athwart the woods and upwards. this path was first regular, and then grew less and less marked, though it still preserved a clear-way through the undergrowth. the new leaves were opened all about me, and there was a little breeze: yet the birds piped singly and the height was lonely when i reached it, as though it were engaged in a sort of contemplation. at the summit was first one small clearing and then another, in which coarse grass grew high within the walls of trees; men had not often come that way, and those men only the few of the countryside.
just where the slope began to go downwards[pg 164] again upon the further side, these little clearings ceased and the woods closed in again. the path, or what was left of it, wholly failed, and i had now to push my way through many twigs and interlacing brambles, till in a little while that forest ceased abruptly upon the edge of a falling sward, and i saw before me the valley.
its floor must have lain higher than that river which i had crossed and left the same morning, for my ascent had been one of two miles or so, and my pushing downward on the further slope far less than one; moreover, that descent had been gentle.
the valley opened to the right at my issue from the wood. to my left hand was a circle of the same trees as those through which i had passed, but to the right and so away northward, the pleasant empty dale.
let me describe it.
upon the further bank (for it was not steep enough to call a wall), the western bank which shut that valley in, grew a thick growth of low chestnuts with here and there a tall silver birch[pg 165] standing up among them. all this further slope was so held, and the chestnuts made a dark belt from which the tall graces of the birches lifted. the sunlight was behind that long afternoon of hills.
opposite, the higher eastern slope stood full though gentle to the glorious light, and it was all a rise of pasture land. its crest, which followed up and away northward for some miles, showed here and there a brown rock, aged and strong but low and half covered in the grass. these rocks were warm and mellow. the height of this eastern boundary was enough to protect the hollow below, but not so high as to carry any sense of savagery. it warned rather than forbade the approach of human kind. between it and its opposing wooded fellow the narrowing floor of that eden lay; winding, closing slowly, until it ended in a little cuplike pass, an easy saddle of grass where the two sides of the valley converged upon its northern conclusion. this pass was perhaps four miles away from me as i gazed, or perhaps a little less.[pg 166] the sun as i have said was shining upon all this: it made upon the little cuplike place a gentle shadow and a gentle light, both curved as the light might fall low and aslant upon a wooden bowl clothed in a soft green cloth. this was a lovely sight, and it invited me to go forward.
therefore i went down the sward that fell from the abrupt edge of the wood, and set out to follow northward along the lower grasses of this single and most unexpected vale.
so strange was the place, even at this first sight, that i thought to myself: "i have happened upon one of those holidays god gives us." for we cannot give ourselves holidays: nor, if we are slaves, can our masters give us holidays, but god only: until at last we lay down the business and leave our work for good and all. and so much for holidays. anyhow, the valley was a wonder to me there.
it was not as are common and earthly things. there was a peace about it which was not a mere repose, but rather something active which[pg 167] invited and intrigued. the meadows had a summons in them; and all was completely still. i heard no birds from the moment when i left the woodland, but a little brook, not shallow, ran past me for a companion as i went on. it made no murmur, but it slid full and at once mysterious and prosperous, brimming up to the rich field upon either side. i thought there must be chalk beneath it from its way of going. the pasture was not mown yet it was short, but if it had been fed there was no trace of herds anywhere; and indeed the grass was rather more in height than the grass of fed land, though it was not in flower. no wind moved it.
there were no divisions in this little kingdom; there were no walls or fences or hedges: it was all one field, with the woods upon the western slope to my left, and the tilted green of the eastern ridge to my right on which the sunlight softly and continually lay. never have i found a place so much its own master and so contentedly alone.
[pg 168]
if any man owned that valley, blessed be that man, but if no man owned it, and only god, then i could better understand the benediction which it imposed upon me, a chance wanderer, for something little less than an hour. here was a place in which thought settled upon itself, and was not concerned with unanswerable things; and here was a place in which memory did not trouble one with the incompletion of recent trial, but rather stretched back to things so very old that all sense of evil had been well purged out of them. the ultimate age of the world which is also its youth, was here securely preserved. i was not so foolish as to attempt a prolongation of this blessedness: these things are not for possession: they are an earnest only of things which we may perhaps possess, but not while the business is on.
i went along at a good sober pace of travelling, taking care to hurt no blossom with my staff and to destroy no living thing, whether of leaves or of those that have movement.
so i went until i came to the low pass at[pg 169] the head of the place, and when i had surmounted it i looked down a steep great fall into quite another land. i had come to a line where met two provinces, two different kinds of men, and this second valley was the end of one.
the moor (for so i would call it) upon the further side fell away and away distantly, till at its foot it struck a plain whereon i could see, further and further off to a very distant horizon, cities and fields and the anxious life of men.
