se rich odours
which seem so much more pungent by night than by day--those odours of
summer eves that Keats has fixed for ever in the imagination:--

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet.
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs;
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn....

Ah, that was it. I remembered now. A fortnight ago, when I last came up
this lane by night, it was the flash of the white hawthorn in the starlight
that burst upon me with such a sudden beauty. I knew the spot. It was just
beyond here, where the tall hedgerow leans over the grass side-track and
makes a green arbour by the wayside. I should come to it in a minute or
two, and catch once more that ecstasy of spring.

And when I reached the spot the white hawthorn had vanished. The arbour was
there, but its glory had faded. The two weeks I had spent in Fleet Street
had stripped it of its crown, and the whole pageant of the year must pass
before I could again experience that sudden delight of the hedgerows
bursting into foam. I do not mind confessing that I continued my way up the
lane with something less than my former exhilaration. Partly no doubt this
was due to the fact that the hill at this point begins its job of climbing
in earnest, and is a stiff pull at the end of a long day's work and a
tiresome journey--especially if you are carrying a bag.

But the real reason of the slight shadow that had fallen on my spirit was
the vanished hawthorn. Poor sentimentalist, you say, to cherish these idle
fancies in this stern world of blood and tears. Well, perhaps it is this
stern world of blood and tears that gives these idle fancies their
poignancy. Perhaps it is through those fancies that one feels the
transitoriness of other things. The coming and the parting in the round of
nature are so wonderfully mingled that we can never be quite sure whether
the joy of the one triumphs over the regret for the other. It is always
"Hail" and "Farewell" in one breath. I heard the cuckoo calling across the
meadows to-day, and already I noticed a faltering in his second note. Soon
the second note will be silent altogether, and the single call will sound
over the valley like the curfew bell of spring.

Who, I thought, would not fix these fleeting moments of beauty if he could?
Who would not keep the cuckoo's twin shout floating