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Prose Idylls, New and Old By: Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) |
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Contents:
A Charm of Birds
Chalk Stream Studies
The Fens
My Winter Garden
From Ocean to Sea
North Devon I. 'A CHARM OF BIRDS.' {1} Is it merely a fancy that we English, the educated people among us at
least, are losing that love for spring which among our old
forefathers rose almost to worship? That the perpetual miracle of
the budding leaves and the returning song birds awakes no longer in
us the astonishment which it awoke yearly among the dwellers in the
old world, when the sun was a god who was sick to death each winter,
and returned in spring to life and health, and glory; when the death
of Adonis, at the autumnal equinox, was wept over by the Syrian
women, and the death of Baldur, in the colder north, by all living
things, even to the dripping trees, and the rocks furrowed by the
autumn rains; when Freya, the goddess of youth and love, went forth
over the earth each spring, while the flowers broke forth under her
tread over the brown moors, and the birds welcomed her with song;
when, according to Olaus Magnus, the Goths and South Swedes had, on
the return of spring, a mock battle between summer and winter, and
welcomed the returning splendour of the sun with dancing and mutual
feasting, rejoicing that a better season for fishing and hunting was
approaching? To those simpler children of a simpler age, in more
direct contact with the daily and yearly facts of Nature, and more
dependent on them for their bodily food and life, winter and spring
were the two great facts of existence; the symbols, the one of death,
the other of life; and the battle between the two the battle of the
sun with darkness, of winter with spring, of death with life, of
bereavement with love lay at the root of all their myths and all
their creeds. Surely a change has come over our fancies. The
seasons are little to us now. We are nearly as comfortable in winter
as in summer, or in spring. Nay, we have begun, of late, to grumble
at the two latter as much as at the former, and talk (and not without
excuse at times) of 'the treacherous month of May,' and of 'summer
having set in with its usual severity.' We work for the most part in
cities and towns, and the seasons pass by us unheeded. May and June
are spent by most educated people anywhere rather than among birds
and flowers. They do not escape into the country till the elm hedges
are growing black, and the song birds silent, and the hay cut, and
all the virgin bloom of the country has passed into a sober and
matronly ripeness if not into the sere and yellow leaf. Our very
landscape painters, till Creswick arose and recalled to their minds
the fact that trees were sometimes green, were wont to paint few but
brown autumnal scenes. As for the song of birds, of which in the
middle age no poet could say enough, our modern poets seem to be
forgetting that birds ever sing. It was not so of old. The climate, perhaps, was more severe than
now; the transition from winter to spring more sudden, like that of
Scandinavia now. Clearage of forests and drainage of land have
equalized our seasons, or rather made them more uncertain. More
broken winters are followed by more broken springs; and May day is no
longer a marked point to be kept as a festival by all childlike
hearts. The merry month of May is merry only in stage songs. The
May garlands and dances are all but gone: the borrowed plate, and
the milkmaids who borrowed it, gone utterly. No more does Mrs. Pepys
go to 'lie at Woolwich, in order to a little ayre and to gather May
dew' for her complexion, by Mrs. Turner's advice. The Maypole is
gone likewise; and never more shall the puritan soul of a Stubbs be
aroused in indignation at seeing 'against Maie, every parish, towne,
and village assemble themselves together, both men, women, and
children, olde and young, all indifferently, and goe into the woodes
and groves, hilles and mountaines, where they spend the night in
pastyme, and in the morning they returne, bringing with them birch
bowes and braunches of trees to deck their assembly withal... Continue reading book >>
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