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They hate plains, limes, and willows, as being idle and barren, and yielding nothing useful but their shade. There are hops, pears, plums, and apples, in the hedge-rows, as there is in all Ivronia; from whence the Lombards, and some counties in the west of England, have learned their improvements.
Though the great houses love us not, we must allow at least that the great houses have cared for the trees in the hedge-rows, and for the timber in the meadows, as well as for the covert that sheltered their pheasants, their foxes, and their gamekeepers. But almost as much of England's charm is due to individual small owners or occupiers.
It was a bright July morning four months after that fatal fight in the Spanish barranca. A blue heaven stretched above, a green rolling plain undulated below, intersected with hedge-rows and flecked with grazing sheep.
The true poet is a real clairvoyant. He may not give you the shape, or colour, or size of objects; he may not tell how tall the mountains, or how long the hedge-rows, or how broad the fields; but by some wonderful art he can convey to your mind what is present to his own. On this principle it was, perhaps, that the landscape, with all its scenery, was familiar to me.
There used to be meadows full of rocks, in each crevice of which nodded a scarlet columbine, surrounded by grassy borders where wild strawberries grew thickly, with hedge-rows running riot with blackberry, sumach, and alder, all reckless of utility and given over to lovely waste, that were vocal on June mornings with bobolinks, but where in these times one might wait the whole day through and not hear a single note of the old refrain.
Besides these, I gather whatever else of beautiful chances to be growing in the moist soil by the river-side, an amphibious tribe, yet with more richness and grace than the wild-flowers of the deep and dry woodlands and hedge-rows, sometimes the white arrow-head, always the blue spires and broad green leaves of the pickerel-flower, which contrast and harmonize so well with the white lilies.
Whereupon Cottard, at once conforming in his mind to the literal interpretation of what Swann was saying, decided that invitations from M. Grevy were very little sought after, were sent out, in fact, into the highways and hedge-rows.
They had had neither hay nor oats for two days, and had cropped the scanty grass from off the plain, shorn the hedge-rows of leaves and twigs, gnawed the bark from the trees, and when they felt the pangs of hunger pricking at their vitals like a keen spur, they started all together at a mad gallop and charged across the deserted, silent fields, crushing the dead out of all human shape, extinguishing the last spark of life in the wounded.
Beneath them the ground was strewn with flowers, violets, and king-cups, poppies, red campions, and blue iris, while tall spikes of rose-colored foxgloves rose from among ranks of massed ferns, brake, hart's-tongue, and maiden's-hair, with here and there a splendid growth of Osmund Royal. To sight and smell, the hedge-rows were equally delightful.
The country through which I passed seemed tolerably well cultivated, the hedge-rows were very high, seeming to spring out of low stone walls. I met two or three gangs of reapers proceeding to their work with scythes in their hands. In about half-an-hour I passed by a farm-house partly surrounded with walnut trees.
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