Algernon Blackwood

“ Imagination is a wicked phagocyte, whose poison works apace beneath dull skies. Leaden days suggest pictures of blue seas and golden sunsets to the heart. The trees turned red and yellow, the smoke of burning leaves hung over the lawn, the shortening days and slanting sunlight laid the melancholy of autumn over the quiet place. ”

“ She watched his face. “We should see a bit of sky, I mean.”
“Something quite informal,” she offered, “a mere track?”
“Oh, dear me, yes,” he agreed; “the merest little tiny glade that would let the light through, you know.”
They did it themselves; no workmen helped; they chopped the trees, uprooted the holly, made great bonfires that crackled and clothed the garden with a sweet blue gipsy smoke. Bit by bit light sprinkled and peeped in⁠ ⁠... and at last the great day came, a wild February morning with glad lengthening hours, when the sky was visible, the horizon beyond shone through. ”

“ No one can look through at us. It’s so protective.” Wild horses could not have dragged them from this bit of rural England that was “so private⁠ ⁠... so protected by our belt of woods,⁠ ⁠...” whose effect, indeed, pervaded even one’s outlook upon life⁠—the great life outside, beyond. ”