John Presland

“ Or enchanted silent fountains of a Persian Paradise.
There are beech and birch and elm-tree—evening-still or
morning-tossed—
And the splendid generous chestnuts with their flame-like
blooms embossed,
There are oak and ash and elder, till the very sun is lost
In the green, delicious gloaming that's the light of Paradise.
Deeper, wider, steadier this beauty ever grows,
And from field-side up to tree-top the endless colour flows,
Till road and house and wayside, in the first days of the rose,
Are fathoms deep in waves of green, submerged in Paradise. ”

“ And the stumbling flight of a beetle, and the dust
on a butterfly's wings.
The snails are out in the sunshine after the morning rain,
And the wasps are whirring and buzzing round the mulberry tree again,
And the ants are busy of course, working with might and main.
While the crickets leap, and rustle, and play at being blades of grass,
And humble-bumble the bees go, lurching as they pass,
And the flies are stupidly walking up the window-glass.
The sun is bright on the hedges, on thistle and bramble and briar,
The columbine leaves are heart-shaped, and shine as bright as fire
—And oh! ”

“ There are no trees, save for a few writhen and stunted alders, covered with lichen till they are the colour of stone, and look like petrified remains of an earlier age; they are grown all to one side under the stress of the prevailing wind. The only signs of life are the scattered sheep, their grey backs scarcely visible among the heather and close furze, a great buzzard hawk poised far up in the blue, and, when his shadow has passed, sailing slowly over the shadeless ground, the sweet, monotonous song of mounting larks. ”

“ What can death render us commensurate
With what it takes away; the voice of birds
On sweet spring mornings, and the face of spring;
And lush long grass around the browsing herds;
And shadows on the distant hills the flying rain-clouds fling?
What is there brighter in the world to come
Than white-winged sea-gulls, flashing in the sun
Above the blue Atlantic; what more free,
Yet what more stable, than those white wings, strung
All motionless, against a wind that whips the racing sea? ”

“ Lonely and dark is the place
That the white wings lightened, and death
Will cover your glowing face.
O thief that is night, O thieves!
Cold years that devour us all;
The lilies blossom and wilt,
The apples ripen and fall,
The apples, the apples of Love!
—Lo, where we have spilled the wine,
This quenchless earth is agape,
O Love, for your body and mine.
OF ENGLAND White is for purity, blue for heaven's grace,
Purple is for Emperors, sitting in their place,
Yellow is for happiness, rose for Love's embrace,
But green—oh green, the green of England—that's for Paradise! ”

“ In the winter rain and wind beat round its solid grey walls, in spring the daffodils bloom in the churchyard, and on summer days the bees are busy among the clover and daisies over the graves. There are thousands of such small, sober, beautiful churches in England; they are the monument on which a fragment of the history of the race is inscribed; they are the nucleus of the village life; the beginning and the end of its activities have their sanction within its walls; they are rich with the continued service of men's lives, generation from generation taking up the duty and its privilege ”

“ Birds abound on Exmoor; snipe and woodcock, partridge and black-game, plover and wild-duck. Nothing could more exactly express the loneliness and wildness of this great open country than, when you are walking solitary, to hear the harsh, melancholy cry of the bittern from the reedy, desolate bogs, or in the falling daylight of a cloudy February afternoon to see the plover rise from the tussocks of brown grass at your feet, and go flying and wailing above you, in that broken-winged, broken-hearted way of theirs, or to watch the duck flying home across the sunset, with their strange honk-honk! ”

“ And they say you are laid at Lemnos among the English dead.
Soul that is gone—is gone—
Whether into the dark,
Or into knowledge complete and the blinding light;
Soul that was swift and free,
Passionate, eager, bright,
Armed with a weapon for shams,
And set with wings for flight;
Soul that was questioning, restless, and all at odds with life,
Greedy for it, yet satiate, and sick with the shows of things
—And all laid down at Lemnos, the hunger, the love, the strife,
And the youthful grace of body, and the body's ministerings.
Darkness, darkness, or light! ”

“ How did these peoples of the Celtic speech build a work of such engineering magnitude, without the tools and appliances of the Roman civilization, with implements of flint, or at best of bronze, a work of such strategical foresight, of such nicety of proportion, and of such enduring strength, that now after the lapse of probably twenty-five centuries its bold proportions can be traced by the most casual glance of the passer-by of the road that runs past, now that the sheep clamber and feed in its deep fosses, and daisies sprinkle the grass of its ramparts? ”

“ When Life seems all the truth,
And Death a mumbled far old fairy-tale;
When just the splendid days
Suffice our eager gaze,
The wondrous present that will never fail.
Then one day, with a fierce
Clamour of heart, we pierce
The light and see the shadows all behind,
And then, and not till then,
By the brief graves of men
The utter loveliness of flowers we find.
So little stretch of days,
And earth, with all her ways
Lovely enough, I think, for Paradise;
And body, mind, and heart,
Each separate complex part,
Wondrously made, and never quite made twice. ”

“ Nowhere, perhaps, save in the west of England (I do not speak only of Devon, for I know of little valleys in Cornwall which are as fertile as the Garden of Eden, held in the rocky jaws of some bleak cliff) , but in what we call "the West," is there such peculiar beauty of contrast, bold outlines of cliff and cove, great stretches of moor lying open to the sky, and wooded combe and valley or small green sheltered hollow of such blossoming fertility. ”

“ The little village of Culbone, near Porlock—if one may call half a dozen cottages a village—is not an anomaly; indeed, it is a kind of geographical whim. The cleft in which it lies faces towards the north, and it is so deep and so deeply wooded that for four of the winter months there is no direct ray of sunlight in the gorge, only the sky or the light high up on the summits to remind the score of folk who live there that they are not shut in a green prison. Even at midsummer their sunrise is several hours later than for the rest of the world. ”

“ And the seagull sweeps and soars on magnificent wings.
Love that is like a flame,
Held in the hollow hand,
So dear and precious a thing
As a light in a stranger land,
As a flickering candle to him who wanders by night.
Love that is wide as the dawn
To the eyes of night-bound men;
And the evil ghosts and the goblins it puts to flight,
And stealthy creatures of dark that rustle and creep,
And elfins and witches and all such devil's game
That cannot live in the light,
They squeak and gibber and cheep,
And vanish like shadows before the splendour of day. ”

“ The air of Exmoor has always this sharp sweetness, however much the sun may blaze, as John Ridd knew; and looking over the wide-stretching countryside, one sees many a farm that might have been his, a sturdy, whitewashed affair, flanked generously with out-buildings, and standing high, but sheltered, in a hollow of the ground, cut off from its neighbours by the rising hills, and even more isolated in winter by the deep ruts of the roads, muddy and impassable, that wind from valley to valley. ”

“ In the heart of man, as a treasure is hid in a shrine.
Love is splendid and fierce, as the summer sun
Drenches the sea and the sky with its blaze and shine,
Till every pebble is hot to the touch of the hand,
And the air is a-shimmer with heat o'er the hazy land—
Yet Love is not any of these things, Love is of one
With the strange, half-guessed at, vast, creative plan
We cannot see with our eyes nor understand—
Yet is Love pitiful too, for Love is of man. ”

“ Stand upon one of the terraces of Lynton on a still summer evening, looking east to Countisbury Foreland, and see the water of the bay still and gleaming in the evening light, the great headlands ruddy and golden above it. The steep sides of the gorge of the East Lyn are warm and sunlit, they glow richly with purple and russet; over the rocks of the valley a faint flicker of grey mist begins to hang above the stream. From the trees around and below comes a great cawing of rooks, drowning the rush of the water below ”

“ The birch-leaves o'er the silver of the bark;
Pale gold the poplars, like a lady's hair,
And thunderous gold along the hollows dark
The sunlit brackens flare.
THE LOVERS
There are ghosts we walk with, lady of mine,
Arm in arm, and side by side,
Pallid ghosts, though the sun may shine,
Ghosts that are cold in the warmth of day,
And neither of us may fend them away,
But step by step they go with us, stride by stride.
There are doors in your heart that are shut to me,
And behind them dwellers I cannot know ”

“ It is the beauty of space, I suppose, and the great open arch of the sky; it is the clouds and cloud shadows, the changing light from dawn to evening through the blazing colourless hours of midsummer noon to the tender light of the falling day, when the land lies in long, suave, misty curves; it is the swirl of mist down its hillsides, and the solemn banking of great heavy rain-clouds, purple and black, above it, that gives it so rich and varied a beauty: for it is like a great open canvas, on which an artist's hand makes wonderful pictures of a myriad changes of sun and shadow. ”

“ From Barnstaple to Dunster, and from Tiverton to Lynton, this beautiful piece of country is peculiarly rich in literary associations. Nor is this to be wondered at when we consider the variety and the loveliness of the scenery, the great open, heathery wastes of Exmoor, the wind-swept cliffs and highlands, the fair and luxuriant valleys where the pure bright waters of these hill-fed streams flow through a green tunnel of overarching trees, making a fertile paradise of flower and fern in their course. ”

“ From Porlock to the little port of Porlock Weir is a walk of two miles along a narrow lane between high green hedges. The road leads nowhere else but there and back; it is a kind of enchanted road which goes to an enchanted village, a village at the world's end, beyond the circle of mere reality. Every cottage in Porlock Weir is just such a little cottage as J. M. Barrie's fairies might build, low-browed under a steep thatch, with great tall chimneys, in which are cut just such little windows as would frame a fairy's head, looking out and laughing and nodding at you ”

“ Wherever flowers could bloom they bloomed, in the gardens, in the hedges, by the roadside, in the crannies of the walls.
Porlock village itself is a quiet, charming spot which, in spite of the temptation of visitors who come here in considerable numbers in the autumn, when stag-hunting on Exmoor is in season, keeps most of its old-world simplicity, and has not much "modernized" itself. It is rambling, calm, and whitewashed; the bank itself is a long, low, cream building with a thatched roof, and a lovely note of colour from a climbing japonica. ”