Warlock o Glenwarlock | Page 3

not have seen
across the yard for the falling flakes.
But when my story opens, the summer held the old house and the older
hills in its embrace. The sun was pouring torrents of light and heat into
the valley, and the slopes of it were covered with green. The bees were
about, contenting themselves with the flowers, while the heather was
getting ready its bloom for them, and a boy of fourteen was sitting in a
little garden that lay like a dropped belt of beauty about the feet of the
grim old walls. This was on the other side--that to the south, parting the
house from the slope where the corn began--now with the ear
half-formed. The boy sat on a big stone, which once must have had
some part in the house itself, or its defences, but which he had never
known except as a seat for himself. His back leaned against the hoary
wall, and he was in truth meditating, although he did not look as if he

were. He was already more than an incipient philosopher, though he
could not yet have put into recognizable shape the thought that was
now passing through his mind. The bees were the primary but not the
main subject of it. It came thus: he thought how glad the bees would be
when their crop of heather was ripe; then he thought how they preferred
the heather to the flowers; then, that the one must taste nicer to them
than the other; and last awoke the question whether their taste of sweet
was the same as his. "For," said he, "if their honey is sweet to them
with the same sweetness with which it is sweet to me, then there is
something in the make of the bee that's the same with the make of me;
and perhaps then a man might some day, if he wanted, try the taste of
being a bee all out for a little while." But to see him, nobody would
have thought he was doing anything but basking in the sun. The scents
of the flowers all about his feet came and went on the eddies of the air,
paying my lord many a visit in his antechamber, his brain; the windy
noises of the insects, the watery noises of the pigeons, the noises from
the poultry yard, the song of the mountain river, visited, him also
through the portals of his ears; but at the moment, the boy seemed lost
in the mere fundamental satisfaction of existence.
Neither, although broad summer was on the earth, and all the hill-tops,
and as much of the valleys as their shadows did not hide, were bathed
in sunlight, although the country was his native land, and he loved it
with the love of his country's poets, was the consciousness of the boy
free from a certain strange kind of trouble connected with, if not
resulting from the landscape before him. A Celt through many of his
ancestors, and his mother in particular, his soul, full of undefined
emotion, was aware of an ever recurring impulse to song, ever checked
and broken, ever thrown back upon itself. There were a few books in
the house, amongst them certain volumes of verse--a copy of Cowly,
whose notable invocation of Light he had instinctively blundered upon;
one of Milton; the translated Ossian; Thomson's Seasons--with a few
more; and from the reading of these, among other results, had arisen
this--that, in the midst of his enjoyment of the world around him, he
found himself every now and then sighing after a lovelier nature than
that before his eyes. There he read of mountains, if not wilder, yet
loftier and more savage than his own, of skies more glorious, of forests
of such trees as he knew only from one or two old engravings in the

house, on which he looked with a strange, inexplicable reverence: he
would sometimes wake weeping from a dream of mountains, or of
tossing waters. Once with his waking eyes he saw a mist afar off,
between the hills that ramparted the horizon, grow rosy after the sun
was down, and his heart filled as with the joy of a new discovery.
Around him, it is true, the waters rushed well from their hills, but their
banks had little beauty. Not merely did the want of trees distress him,
but the nature of their channel; most of them, instead of rushing
through rocks, cut their way only through beds of rough gravel, and
their bare surroundings were desolate without grandeur--almost mean
to eyes that had not yet pierced to the soul of them. Nor had he yet
learned to admire the lucent brown of the bog waters. There seemed to
be in the boy a strain of