WINTER SUNLIGHT.
DECEMBER, holds a day of lustrous quiet which belongs to deep and mild winter alone. From dawn to dusk no ray of open sunshine falls on any space of ploughland or lawn. No wind stirs the lightest leaf; no moving air dries yesterday's dew from the broader, greyer blades of the hedge- row grass. Over all, high and withdrawn like the roof of a Lent, lies a curtain of cloud, and through the cloud filters a diffused luminousness• which lights the garden and the wood as though you saw them in sunshine through dark glass. The caverned shadows in the yews and cypresses take the softness of hollows among unplucked grapes; ,there is a bloom set on the cedars beyond the lawn like the flush on fruit; beyond the cedars the slighter undergrowth mesges into the greyness of cobwebs. The air has no warmth of sun in it, • but its mellow temper sets the gnats dancing above the wet grass ; you may walk into the little swarm of drab-winged ephemerals, and the whole cotillon flits up twenty feet to dance down again as you pass and return. It is the most tranquil afternoon of simple waiting ; the light. on the countryside is:the quiet of the eyes of deer. The after; noon waits for the evening, and in the evening the grey veil lifts. A rough, cool air leaps "up from the south-west, tears a rent of thrush-egg blue in the grey, and drive* the chisaney- smoke across the rent. The 'whole sky lights and clears like
a dawn ; in the far west a belt of tawny vapour tarnishes to dark again, and across the higher starlight a cloud rides . up on a'new wind.
On such a day the sun ends the quiet afternoon with a • sky suddenly driven bare of veils, emptied with the proper cold of mid-winter wind. But the sunlight of a December day belongs more often to a morning than to an hour near nightfall, and far more often to a short glimpse an hour or two after dawn than to a whole stretch of hours, unbroken from dawn to sunset. The glimpse begins always and ends always with the same sense of fleeting chance. In June, in August on the downs above the sea, you may look for sunshine as a right, a due of the season paid in full from the first raising of brightness in the east to the ending of the are of light in the west. But in December the sun- - shine plays tricks and spoils all the chances. It may spread. a great road of light the length of a valley when it is an hour above the rim of bills, and will ask you to cast work to the winds and walk up the road; and then will drive down a sheet of mist and rain and blot out the path for the day. You are lucky if the light lasts till noon; more often the grey spreads over again before ten, but at two *o'clock or near it the cloud almost certainly 'wings up like the crow in "Through the Looking-Glass." And nowhere, perhaps, is there a better' contrast of chances of sunlight and shadow in winter than in London itself. The time and the 'place are ten, o'clock in the morning and one of the great bridges that span the river. Only from a bridge do you get the right sense of spaciousness that should belong to Sunlight on a city. The • northern bank of the river sets a stretch of stone and lofty" brick lit with the most magical vagueness. Only the higher stories are struck by the slanted. rays; there are no solid. foundations of walls and towers in that bank of mist ; it is . the fabric of a vision, the city of a mirage. No bridge of solid stone stretches from the roar and mire of a great high- way over to a more phantasmal further shore. Below its • arches runs the seamy river, low between slopes of forlorn silt; ungainly swans stalk the water's edge, and pigeons pick at the scanty jetsam. Strings of square and lumbering barges ride abreast the ebb, piled with sifted coal, and studded round their black rims with companies of white gulls like frost on a railing. Beyond, and on either baud, are infinitie distances of gold vapour and grey mist, and set above the gold and the mist to the east, baseless and shadowy, the white, delicate spires of Wren's churches.
The best walk is in the Park. The Embankment would be as good if the tramways would allow it the useless quiet which once set it apart among all London highways. The Embank- ment has the right breadth and length of view which should place distance about the walker as if he walked a valley or the flank of a bill. But the tramways interrupt and gird at the silences for which solitary pedestrians hope when looking for a view, and Hyde Park is better. You may get the best of the London winter sunlight by walking the length of the Serpentine from Lancaster Gate to the rhododendrons by Hyde Park Corner, and in that mile and a half of - ordered grass and gravel the best view of all belongs to the bridge. The elms in Kensington Gardens have lost the beauty of twenty years ago. They are lopped and truncated relics of trees, not elms as they, once. were. It was unavoidable, of course; the Gardens would have been deserted by perambulators if the elms had not been lopped ; but the lopping has left them lifting stark limbs in amputated protest, and the wood-pigeons avoid them. The wood-pigeons choose the few trees.left with small • top branches that their feet can close on, and there they bump themselves in the wintry sun fluffing out their feathers till they look as big and round as roosting chickens. That is with the sun behind them ; you must stand on the bridge to see the sun on their feathers, when they perch in grey and companionable bunches about the close twigs of the hawthorns near the water. From the bridge looking north-west you get a view of a graceful needle of a spire,— one of the few spires of London churches that you may see catch the winter sun above a belt of trees. But the real glory is on the water, and beyond the • water to the east. The Serpentine would be nothing, to • the perambulators, and very little to some grown-up people,. without its wildfowl, and from the bridge you can see the Serpentine wild duck fly as wild duck should. They swim on.
the hazy, sunny level of water with broad V's spread out behind their paddling feet ; or they are stirred by sudden, ducklike impulses and fly fast and far, like their forgotten brothers and sisters on reedier lakes and wilder shores. It is the strangest thing to hear, on a London bridge, the quick, cackling undertone which the wildfowler knows means that duck are making their sudden decision to leave the water, and then to see the long necks and the flashing breasts swing over the bridge. No bird takes the water with such a glorious sweep and rush of cleft ripples as a wild duck. He slides down the blowing air on level pinions ; then up go his wings behind him, out and forward come his scarlet legs, his feet spread to cut the surface with his heel and to break it with his web, and in he goes with a severing splash that a mere Christmas Day bather in the Serpentine should envy for the rest of the year. You pass the bathers' notice-board, leaving the bridge, and observe that on Christmas Day and other days in the winter you are permitted to bathe in the Serpentine after six in the evening. The framer of that particular by-law knew what to forbid.
London has its singing birds in December, and the thrushes in the hawthorns by the Serpentine sing as wild anthems to the riders in Rotten Row as the country birds sing to the carters in Sussex and Kent. Missel-thrushes may sing with the song-thrushes, but not so readily. But the song of *inter birds belongs, except for the thrushes, to the sun- light of the country. The London robins, where robins are to be found, have not the spirits of the country birds. Missel-thrushes for full song need a country gale and rain threshing free among tossed branches, which the wind may break or not as it pleases. The quieter notes of the chorus, too, you can only hear in country coppices and gardens, and of all quiet garden notes the hedge-sparrow's only in the least busy places. The hedge-sparrow in winter takes his note from the sunshine, and contentedly filters scraps of his spring carols into the tiniest jets and trills of singing. He is the bird of veiled December.
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