SHORT EXCURSION IN ANTI-CLIMAX. A mind that after a long season of
oblivion in pain returns to wakefulness without a keen edge for the
world, is much in danger of souring permanently. Diana's love of nature
saved her from the dire mischance during a two months' residence at
Copsley, by stupefying her senses to a state like the barely conscious
breathing on the verge of sleep. February blew South-west for the
pairing of the birds. A broad warm wind rolled clouds of every ambiguity
of form in magnitude over peeping azure, or skimming upon lakes of blue
and lightest green, or piling the amphitheatre for majestic sunset. Or
sometimes those daughters of the wind flew linked and low, semi-purple,
threatening the shower they retained and teaching gloom to rouse a
songful nest in the bosom of the viewer. Sometimes they were April,
variable to soar with rain-skirts and sink with sunshafts. Or they
drenched wood and field for a day and opened on the high South-western
star. Daughters of the wind, but shifty daughters of this wind of
the dropping sun, they have to be watched to be loved in their
transformations.

Diana had Arthur Rhodes and her faithful Leander for walking companions.
If Arthur said: 'Such a day would be considered melancholy by London
people,' she thanked him in her heart, as a benefactor who had revealed
to her things of the deepest. The simplest were her food. Thus does
Nature restore us, by drugging the brain and making her creature
confidingly animal for its new growth. She imagined herself to have
lost the power to think; certainly she had not the striving or the wish.
Exercise of her limbs to reach a point of prospect, and of her ears and
eyes to note what bird had piped, what flower was out on the banks, and
the leaf of what tree it was that lay beneath the budding, satiated her
daily desires. She gathered unknowingly a sheaf of landscapes, images,
keys of dreamed horizons, that opened a world to her at any chance
breath altering shape or hue: a different world from the one of her old
ambition. Her fall had brought her renovatingly to earth, and the
saving naturalness of the woman recreated her childlike, with shrouded
recollections of her strange taste of life behind her; with a tempered
fresh blood to enjoy aimlessly, and what would erewhile have been a
barrenness to her sensibilities.

In time the craving was evolved for positive knowledge, and shells
and stones and weeds were deposited on the librar