WINTER OVER THE WEALD.
THERE is an hour after rain when a steady wind empties the wood of mists and the sky of clouds, clean down to the sharp edges of a horizon of trees. Perhaps two or three times in a month those who live on the bill get that clear view, twenty miles and more of English woodland and fields north and south and on either hand. Those who live at the foot of the hill, or many miles away from it, count themselves lucky if they can have such a view once in ten full journeys to the top; and since they work for it, while to those who are on the hill already it is a secured possession, perhaps those who live below the hill love it best. "On a clear day,"—the old county historians begin their descriptions of the view with that easy phrase, and forget to define what "a clear day" means. For there are differences of clearness. There is a clear- ness of summer sunshine which lies over the first half-dozen miles before you of such woodland as you may see from some height above the Surrey weald. Those July suns light the minutest detail of leaf and flower with radiant colour, but the very heat of them lays a haze over the far distance that blurs the meeting of trees and sky. There is a clearness, too, which shifts as the wind shifts, and here and there lightens a white gap of air followed by pencilled rain. And there is a superb cold clearness apart from either of these : a clearness apart from every impermanence of form or outline, which sets an illumined edge on a million still twigs of mile-long hill coverts, like the plumage of a bird, and as easily and nearly seen. It can belong to summer, especially to a cold summer ; but it belongs most, because of the pure nakedness of it, to the wind- beaten, leafless December of the weald.
In August there settles down over all that wide stretch of woods and fields an unvarying smoothness, almost a glaze of deep bottle-green. Barley-fields and wheat-fields break the sheer monotony of it; here and there a square of lucerne or clover, or a strip of turnips, patches the valley like a quilt. But there is nothing of earth or flowers to be seen under the oaks and beeches of the woods; and, indeed, at noon, when the light falls straightest, it is even difficult from above to distinguish the forms of separate trees, which stand up from the meadows with dark circles under them like the painted wooden stands of the trees of a toy Dutch farm. December brings the full change. Rain and wind and frost, and wind again, have torn smoothness into roughness, and bristled the branches of the elms and poplars, hair on end like scared giants. North-westers singing up the valley have driven down all the April and August curtains, and laid them ripped and seared and shredded under sodden boughs. Of all those December carpets, not one is so wonderful as the great red- amber carpet rolled out under the, beeches of a sloping
hill- side; lopped and pollarded beech-boles set like huge chessmen
about the open wood spaces, with here and there round, -rain- washed pine-stems towering above their branching crowns, and over the floor the most magic of all the carpets of the changing year, gold-leaf and copper-leaf heaped in gullies,
drifted against banks, spread broadcast over moss and -fir- cones, and stirred here and there by unfelt winds, lightest
footfalls Of Moth and Cobweb and Oberon. They Might so ,easily come trooping over the brow of the hill round the rim of one of those beech-boles; blue and gauzy in that still *inter sunshine :—
" 0 hark, 0 hear ! how thin and clear, And thinner, clearer, farther going! 0 sweet and far from cliff and scar
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!"
But the driving down of the leafy summer curtains reveals more than the floor beneath the beeches. A tree is most a tree when in full leaf ; but there are trees on whose stems the light never falls so radiantly as when there is not a spot of shadow thrown on them, even by the smallest and youngest leaves dancing between their bare bark and the sun. Birch-trees have never quite the same grace in June as when they stand slight and delicate against the thin harebell-blue of a mid- winter sky, with their upper stems wrapped tight in their own smooth white paper, and splashed and starred on their lower stems with great inverted " V's " and diamonds of black and dark green, like the diamonds on a harlequin, or the neck of a snake. Oaks, too, especially old oaks, get a fresh grandeur without their leaves; the vast weight of their branches is more easily guessed when the contours are no longer hidden. Poplars, more almost than any other tree except the birch, gain by losing their foliage. In the level green of the valley, looked at from above, poplars can be missed in the general . leafiness. Separate, slender, and leafless, they have a towering nakedness that is their distinction among all woodland trees. Other trees build into halls and arcades in the forest, but the poplar in winter is a church-spire.
The anthologies are full of the poetiy and colour of woods in April; but of the roof of the woods in December bow many stanzas have been written ? Yet there is nothing on the , countryside that marks December more distinctly than the glowing light which plays over wooded hills on a midwinter afternoon,—a glow which is strong enough to shine through falling mist or driving cloud, but which is purest and serenest • in the slanting rays of a sun not yet grown "broader toward his death." Gauzes of deep maroon, veils of transparent
• mauve and purple, textures of clear amber and palest rose, laces indigo-edged and scalloped with crimson,—that is the December clothing of wooded English valleys, and perhaps it is not less lucent nor less rich than that of midsummer. "Black boughs" in winter ? There is no such bough on a living tree. If you want to determine what it is, in all that long valley, that sets those deep and glowing red-browns and purples on the roof of the woods, break off a dozen twigs from different woodland trees, and look for the colour in them. There may be points and specks of brilliant orange and red which mix in the general glow of the hillside; tangled skeins of wild- rose branches, perhaps, on the edge of the ploughlancl, or clusters of holly-berries, or a clump of hawthorn, than which there is no deeper red in the wood. But the real mass and volume of colour comes from the boughs and buds. Tree-
• branches are not the same colour above and beneath. The upper surface of the branch, like the upper side of a leaf, or a flatfish, or any surface on which light descends, is darker than the under surface, especially in the smaller branches of trees which send their boughs out at right angles to the trunk. So with the buds of most of the trees. The ash thrusts up bunched black buds on a green stem, • little like the foot of some clumsy bird; but most of the tree-buds are red or brown above, and green below. Birch-buds are clear green underneath, and borne on a purple stem; birches, indeed, are trebly coloured, for they hang their new jade-tinted catkins side by side. with the old bronze catkins seeding birch- nuts down the wind. Limes are "ruby-budded," but there is
- emerald under the ruby ; beeches are dark and light madder- brown, elms and oaks shade through minor thirds of browns and pinks ; chestnuts have given their name to a colour, and their sticky shining buds are as bright as their nuts, and almost as big; on a chestnut branch, too, in December, there are heart- shaped 'patches along the new wood, dotted like tiny-nailed horseshoes, marking with huff the place where the old leaf-stem broke off to fall. Those are a few—and how few !—of the permanent dyes of winter woodland clothing, most easily distinguished on a still day ; but the chief grace , and glow of them belong to a day of shifting winds, when the light greens and olives of the under-bud and branch may be lifted suddenly in place of the darker upper reds and browns. That sets moving the unequalled play of colour over the "black boughs" of winter.
If there is an impermanent light which yet belongs wholly to midwinter over the weald, it is the broad light of flood- water. That is a deeper and greater change even than a fall of snow. A child will forget the first fall of snow, so easy is it and gentle and natural ; but be never forgets the first sight of flood-water. They are magic casements, indeed, that open for the first time on the "perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn," of a heavy flood. There is nothing to tell the depth of that grey, mysterious water; a lake too dreary for any boat, too lonely for any bird, unless a stray snipe should rise crying from its edge, or a chance, uncanny gull, strange and white, should come soaring out of black clouds over it, suddenly tossed like torn paper down the wind. It is a stormy light, and midwinter must be stormy often. But the real meaning of midwinter over the weald is something beyond the storms, quiet and waiting; above all, in a deep sense of change, of which no change is deeper than vanished leaves and sunlight on folded buds.
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