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On the windowsill there was a musk-plant; and, upon the table by the staircase, there was a rude cage, containing three young throstles. The place was tidy; and there was a kind-looking old couple inside. The old man stood at the table in the middle of the floor, washing the pots, and the old woman was wiping them, and putting them away.
Yet a little further, and it grew lighter still, and he heard the throstles singing a little way off, and knew that they were on the edge of the pine-wood, and still her swift feet sped on till they came to a little grassy wood-lawn, with nought anear it on the side away from the wood save maples and thorn-bushes: it was broad daylight there, though the sun had not yet arisen.
That was his most perfect idea of heaven's happiness: mine was rocking in a rustling green tree, with a west wind blowing, and bright white clouds flitting rapidly above; and not only larks, but throstles, and blackbirds, and linnets, and cuckoos pouring out music on every side, and the moors seen at a distance, broken into cool dusky dells; but close by great swells of long grass undulating in waves to the breeze; and woods and sounding water, and the whole world awake and wild with joy.
The Fricker girls were all safely married, but Charles and Mary could not think of going they needs must hide in a big city. "I hate your damned throstles and larks and bobolinks," said C.L., in feigned contempt. "I sing the praises of the 'Salutation and the Cat' and a snug fourth-floor back." They could not leave London, for over them ever hung that black cloud of a mind diseased.
They were birk-trees, an' their boles were that breet they fair glistened i' t' sunleet. An' underneath t' birks were bluebells, yakkers an' yakkers o' bluebells, an' I thowt they were bluer an' breeter nor ony I'd seen afore. There were all maks o' birds i' t' trees spinks an' throstles an' blackbirds an' t' air aboon my head were fair wick wi' larks an' pipits singin' as canty as could be.
But when at last the very spring was come, and the grass began to grow after the showers had washed the plain of the waterborne mud, and the snowdrop had thrust up and blossomed, and the celandine had come, and then when the blackthorn bloomed and the Lent-lilies hid the grass betwixt the great chestnut-boles, when the sun shone betwixt the showers and the west wind blew, and the throstles and blackbirds ceased not their song betwixt dawn and dusk, then began Ralph to say to himself, that even if the Well at the World's End were not, and all that the Sage had told them was but a tale of Swevenham, yet were all better than well if Ursula were but to him a woman beloved rather than a friend.
One misses the climbing roses of the ideal merry England, and the soft turf and spreading yews and the flowering hedgerows where throstles and linnets play hide-and-seek the livelong day. It is all cold gray stone, lichen-covered, and the houses do not invite you to enter, and the gardens bid no welcome, and only the great purple wastes of moorland greet you as a friend and brother.
Now awoke Goldilind when the morning was young and fresh, and she drew the mantle up over her shoulders; and as she did so, but half awake, she deemed she heard other sounds than the singing of the black-birds and throstles about the edge of the thicket, and she turned her eyes toward the oak trees and the hazel-thicket, and saw at once three of mankind coming on foot over the greensward toward her.
Then on the first of March, the kind-hearted month that nurses April's violets, I would leave town for my country place and, as the poets have it watch the changing skies and the hazel blooms peep through the swelling buds and hear the trees begin to whisper and the throstles break into song. One loses these things by remaining among bricks and mortar till the end of April.
And the birds, the robins and the throstles, the blackbirds and the black-caps, the linnets and the little Jenny Wrens, knowing the value of silence, are hoarding it like misers; but like prodigals, they 're squandering sound.
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