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The Ground-Ash By: Mary Russell Mitford (1787-1855) |
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By Mary Russell Mitford
Amongst the many pleasant circumstances attendant on a love of
flowers that sort of love which leads us into the woods for the
earliest primrose, or to the river side for the latest forget me not,
and carries us to the parching heath or the watery mere to procure for
the cultivated, or, if I may use the expression, the tame beauties of
the parterre, the soil that they love; amongst the many gratifications
which such pursuits bring with them, such as seeing in the seasons in
which it shows best, the prettiest, coyest, most unhackneyed scenery,
and taking, with just motive enough for stimulus and for reward, drives
and walks which approach to fatigue, without being fatiguing; amongst
all the delights consequent on a love of flowers, I know none greater
than the half unconscious and wholly unintended manner in which such
expeditions make us acquainted with the peasant children of remote and
out of the way regions, the inhabitants of the wild woodlands and still
wilder commons of the hilly part of the north of Hampshire, which forms
so strong a contrast with this sunny and populous county of Berks, whose
very fields are gay and neat as gardens, and whose roads are as level
and even as a gravel walk. Two of the most interesting of these flower formed acquaintances, were
my little friends Harry and Bessy Leigh. Every year I go to the Everley woods to gather wild lilies of the
valley. It is one of the delights that May the charming, ay, and the
merry month of May, which I love as fondly as ever that bright and
joyous season was loved by our older poets regularly brings in her
train; one of those rational pleasures in which (and it is the great
point of superiority over pleasures that are artificial and worldly)
there is no disappointment About four years ago, I made such a visit.
The day was glorious, and we had driven through lanes perfumed by the
fresh green birch, with its bark silvery and many tinted, and over
commons where the very air was loaded with the heavy fragrance of the
furze, an odour resembling in richness its golden blossoms, just as
the scent of the birch is cool, refreshing, and penetrating, like the
exquisite colour of its young leaves, until we reached the top of the
hill, where, on one side, the enclosed wood, where the lilies grow, sank
gradually, in an amphitheatre of natural terraces, to a piece of water
at the bottom; whilst on the other, the wild open heath formed a sort of
promontory overhanging a steep ravine, through which a slow and sluggish
stream crept along amongst stunted alders, until it was lost in the deep
recesses of Lidhurst Forest, over the tall trees of which we literally
looked down. We had come without a servant; and on arriving at the gate
of the wood with neither human figure nor human habitation in sight, and
a high blooded and high spirited horse in the phaeton, we began to feel
all the awkwardness of our situation. My companion, however, at length
espied a thin wreath of smoke issuing from a small clay built hut
thatched with furze, built against the steepest part of the hill, of
which it seemed a mere excrescence, about half way down the declivity;
and, on calling aloud, two children, who had been picking up dry stumps
of heath and gorse, and collecting them in a heap for fuel at the door
of their hovel, first carefully deposited their little load, and then
came running to know what we wanted. If we had wondered to see human beings living in a habitation, which,
both for space and appearance, would have been despised by a pig of any
pretension, as too small and too mean for his accommodation, so we were
again surprised at the strange union of poverty and content evinced
by the apparel and countenances of its young inmates. The children,
bareheaded and barefooted, and with little more clothing than one
shabby looking garment, were yet as fine, sturdy, hardy, ruddy, sunburnt
urchins, as one should see on a summer day. They were clean, too: the
stunted bit of raiment was patched, but not ragged; and when the girl,
(for, although it was rather difficult to distinguish between the
brother and sister, the pair were of different sexes,) when the
bright eyed, square made, upright little damsel clasped her two brown
hands together, on the top of her head, pressed down her thick curls,
looking at us and listening to us with an air of the most intelligent
attention that returned our curiosity with interest; and when the boy,
in answer to our inquiry if he could hold a horse, clutched the reins
with his small fingers, and planted himself beside our high mettled
steed with an air of firm determination, that seemed to say, "I'm
your master! Run awry if you dare!" we both of us felt that they were
subjects for a picture, and that, though Sir Joshua might not have
painted them, Gainsborough and our own Collins would... Continue reading book >>
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