reality the failure that Cyrus believed him to be?
Or was it merely that he had drifted into that "depressing view" of
existence against which he so earnestly warned his parishioners? Perhaps
it wasn't Cyrus after all who had produced this effect. Perhaps the
touch of indigestion he had felt after dinner had not entirely
disappeared. Perhaps it meant that he was "getting on"--sixty-five his
last birthday. Perhaps--but already the March wind, fresh and
bud-scented, was blowing away his despondency. Already he was beginning
to feel again that fortifying conviction that whatever was unpleasant
could not possibly be natural.

Ahead of him the straight ashen road flushed to pale red where it
climbed a steep hillside, and when he gained the top, the country lay
before him in all the magic loveliness of early spring. Out of the rosy
earth innumerable points of tender green were visible in the sunlight
and invisible again beneath the faintly rippling shadows that filled the
hollows. From every bough, from every bush, from every creeper which
clung trembling to the rail fences, this wave of green, bursting through
the sombre covering of winter, quivered, as delicate as foam, in the
brilliant sunshine. On either side labourers were working, and where the
ploughs pierced the soil they left narrow channels of darkness.

In the soul of Gabriel, that essence of the spring, which is immortally
young and restless, awakened and gave him back his youth, as it gave the
new grass to the fields and the longing for joy to the hearts of the
ploughmen. He forgot that he was "getting on." He forgot the unnatural
depression which had made him imagine for a moment that the world was a
more difficult place than he had permitted himself to believe--so
difficult a place, indeed, that for some people there could be no
solution of its injustice, its brutality, its dissonance, its
inequalities. The rapture in the song of the bluebirds was sweeter than
the voice of Cyrus to which he had listened. And in a meadow on the
right, an old grey horse, scarred, dim-eyed, spavined, stood resting one
crooked leg, while he gazed wistfully over the topmost rail of the fence
into the vivid green of the distance--for into his aching old bones,
also, there had passed a little of that longing for joy which was born
of the miraculous softness and freshness of the spring. To him, as well
as to Gabriel and to the ploughmen and to the bluebirds flitting, like
bits of fall