V. Sackville-West

“ To thy light revels through the sombre deep
Wood's shadows to a space among the trees,
Where the breeze
Makes music through the branches for thy dance,
And the large-eyed and silent deer stand round
Peeping through tree-trunks, and each forest sound
—The trickling stream's
Murmur in its dreams,
The shepherd's pipe, far-echoing by chance,—
Melt all for thee
To one soft harmony,
While for the lighting of thy mossy slope
The moon thy lover sheds an opal glow,
Pale silver-green, the colour of the leaves
Of olive-trees,
The limelight on the stage for Youth and Joy and
Hope? ”

“ Smiling false smiles with the little sharp word in between.
But those in the by-paths of vagrancy, star-gazers, they,
Ragged and feckless and young, with no thought but their singing,
Derisive of gain, and light as the bird in its winging,
Stopping to kiss or to frolic, the simple and gay,
God’s fools,—the belovèd of God who made them and the wind,
Gipsies and wastrels of life, the heedless of warning,
Chasing the butterfly now on the breeze of the morning,
Laugh at the passing procession that leaves them behind.
DISSONANCE
CLAMOUR has riven us, clamour and din. ”

“ Since the strenuousness of life’s work was over,—the early winter rising, the trudges after a lost ewe across snow-swept Downs, the unearthing of mangolds from the frosted ridge, the hours of scything swathe by swathe under burning midday,—what could remain better to do than to sit upon a bench in the sun, with companions who in colour and outlook were the very spit of oneself, to grumble against new-fangled notions, and to wet one’s gizzard with a long pull of ale, which, at all events, however ignominious to admit it, had not deteriorated in quality since one’s youth? ”

“ Chase made a movement to rise; he wanted to fly the room, to escape an ordeal that appalled his soul, but his shyness held him down: he could not create a sensation before so many people. Enraged as he was by the absurd weakness that caught him thus, and prevented him from saving himself while there was still time, he yet submitted, pinned to his chair, enduring such misery as made all his previous grief sink to the level of mere discomfort. ”

“ Thy wreath of vine-leaves twisted in thy hair,
Through all the changing seasons of the year,
And tread, to Autumn's gorgeous hymn of praise,
And to the happy Spring's light lilt of pleasure,
And to the dirgeful chant of Winter's days,
And ever varying, ever suited measure;
And in the Summer, when the reeking earth
Swings a vast censer, as it is most meet,
Praise thou for lavish gifts, new hopes, new birth,
Praise with the dancing of thy tireless feet!
I woke to daylight, and to find
A wreath of fading vine-leaves, rough entwined,
Lying, as dropped in hasty flight, upon my floor. ”

“ How trivial, how easily ignored are facts, when one’s quarrel is with the enigma of force at the heart of things! It isn’t often in this civilised life of ours that one comes into contact with it; one’s business lies mostly with men and women whose whole system of philosophy is inimical to natural, inconvenient impulse. It obeys us as a rule, like a tame lion doing its tricks for the lion-tamer. A terrifying thought truly, that we are shut up for life in a cage with a wild beast that may at any moment throw off its docility to leap upon us! ”

“ Did you ever consider what blindness meant? To be dependent on others’ charity, to be a burden, a maimed thing? above all to have to submit to pity, when you were born with a spirit that wanted the envy of other men?”
“Silas, Silas, all that’s just words, and meantime you’re draining the life out of me.”
“You’re not Nan,” he said, “not Nancy Dene; you’re just the victim of my curse. What does it matter that you never knew Lady Malleson? Blind, you call me? why, I think we’re all blind—blind instruments, not more blind one than the other.” ”

“ Anyhow, that first day I wasn't much troubled by the noise of the bell, as the buoy rocked very slightly on an oily swell; I was more troubled by the dazzle of the sun on the water, not daring to shut my eyes for long lest I should miss a possible ship, and also I was divided between the gnawing of my thoughts and the boredom of those interminable hours from sunrise to sunset. I don't suppose it is given to many men to have nothing better to do than watch the sun travel across the heavens from the moment it emerges above one horizon to the moment it dips below the rim of the other. ”

“ You have on Gainsborough’s canvas the beautiful, sensitive face of the gay and fickle duke, spoilt, feared, and propitiated by the women of London and Paris, the reputed lover of Marie Antoinette. You have his son, too fair and pretty a boy, the friend of Byron, killed in the hunting-field at the age of twenty-one, the last direct male of a race too prodigal, too amorous, too weak, too indolent, and too melancholy. ”

“ Often he would be the only man to leave the village of a morning, passing out on his way to the uplands while a few isolated figures trudged up the draughty street against the blizzard with sacks thrown round their shoulders, going to their cowsheds or to clear a space for their poultry; but Lovel passed them, leaving them to such domestic occupations, and sought the high lands, where wind and sleet swept across like aerial cavalry, and the driven snow was banked deep in drifts against the scars and scoops of the hillsides. ”

“ Tamers of splendour! those familiar names
Troubled you not, less kingly, more remote
Than gain and ease, your god, your man-made grail.
Not nature’s giants, not cosmic menace smote
Your souls with awe, or thrust you down the scale.
No, nor the thoughts your thoughts could not embrace,
A God’s intention, void, sublime, or strange,
The birth or death of time, the bourn of space,
Nor unimaginable colours’ range,
Nor the continuous eastward roll of earth,
Half, in the energy of day aware;
Half, where the sweeping shadow curves its girth,
Within night’s darkened temple cowled in prayer. ”

“ The greyhound bounded out and ran about in the moonlight, a wraith of a dog in the ghostly garden. Ghostly.... Chase wandered out, up the walk to the top of the garden, where he turned to look down upon the house, folded black in the hollow, the moonlight gleaming along the moat and winking on a window. Not a breath ruffled that milky stillness; the great cloths of light lay spread out over the grass, the blocks of shadow were profound; above the low-lying park trailed a faint white mist, and in a vaporous sky the moon rode calm and sovereign. ”

“ Another picture swam up out of the mist to dim my vision, a babbling music filled my ears like the sound of waves in a shell, and the faintest scent quivered under my nostrils; gradually as these ghosts emerged from the confusion I defined the Italian hill-side, the rushing stream, and the dry, aromatic scent of the ground. Was this, then, the setting in which Ruth walked and spoke for me? I was startled at the vividness of the impression, and at the incredibly subtle complexity of the ordinary brain. ”

“ Open country, open country; no higher peaks to climb; miles of open rolling country on every side. The clean and airy liberty of open country under a blue-and-white heaven. Clare stood in the circle of the dew-pond holding her skirts picked up above her knees. She was laughing; she had seen first the ears of Lovel’s horse prick up over the rim of the hill, then she had seen Lovel himself, not looking to find her, then the shoulders of his horse, breasting the sharp climb, then the complete slim silhouette of horse and rider and two dogs at heel. ”

“ II On the higher ground beyond the marshes the air was clear from fog. Here were knolls surmounted by clumps of beech-wood, the ground beneath the trees rusty with last year’s leaves, and the trunks of the beeches themselves bare, lofty, and processional, their clubbed heads shaven against the winter sky. From these knolls one looked down over the brown mirror of the floods, that surrounded the block of the village with the factory and the ancient abbey, and that were crossed until the eye lost it in distance by the great dyke carrying the road and the perspective of stark telegraph poles. ”

“ Backed up by her family, she would have felt herself backed up by the whole of the English middle-class, cushioned, solid in the consciousness of its homogeneity and resources, an enormous family of Jennings, swarming in every town and with its place of assembly in every town-hall, inimical to the exotic, mistrustful of the new, tenacious of the conventions that were as cement to its masonry; a class sagacious and shrewd, nicely knowing safety from danger, and knowing, above all, its own mind, since nothing was ever admitted to that mind to which it could not immediately affix a label. ”

“ I had in mind that Knole was no mere excrescence, no alien fabrication, no startling stranger seen between the beeches and the oaks. No other country but England could have produced it, and into no other country would it settle with such harmony and such quiet. The very trees have not been banished from the courtyards, but spread their green against the stone. From the top of a tower one looks down upon the acreage of roofs, and the effect is less that of a palace than of a jumbled village upon the hillside. ”

“ And men with wine and laughter flushed were sleeping all around the fire,
Till one alone sat on erect, his ready gun across his knees,
The sentry of the night elect, guardian of sleeping destinies.
The water-bullocks lay as dead; the dogs drew near with noiseless tread,
And huddled in a loose-limbed heap beside the fire, and through their sleep
They twitched at some remembered hunt; the merchant in his sheepskin rolled
Within the tent saw dreams of gold; the camels with uneasy grunt
And quake of their distorted backs slept on with loathing by their packs. ”

“ I was not jealous of Dymock on account of Ruth; no, not exactly; but jealous only as one must be jealous of two young happy things when one remembers that, much as one values one’s independence, one is not the vital life-spark of any other human being on this earth. There must be moments when the most liberty-loving among us envy the yoke they fly from. ”

“ Yet it seemed to her that she had, indeed, a silence at the core of her being, still and inviolate against his ineffectual clamour, like the stillness in the heart of a cyclone, where birds poise and sing. At this core, this kernel, this patch of peace, she dwelt apart; Lovel was there, and so was Olver, Olver with the urgent hands and fanatical eyes, passing from Lovel to her and from her to Lovel, almost crushing them up against one another by the force of his urgency, Olver’s determination was like a menace, becoming almost malevolent by virtue of its very violence. ”