not sleep. From
within some little grove of other trees a single poplar makes a slight
sign; or a long row of poplars suddenly sweep the wind. They are salient
everywhere, and full of replies. They are as fresh as streams.

It is difficult to realize a drought where there are many poplars. And
yet their green is not rich; the coolest have a colour much mingled with
a cloud-grey. It does but need fresh and simple eyes to recognize their
unfaded life. When the other trees grow dark and keep still, the poplar
and the aspen do not darken--or hardly--and the deepest summer will not
find a day in which they do not keep awake. No waters are so vigilant,
even where a lake is bare to the wind.

When Keats said of his Dian that she fastened up her hair "with fingers
cool as aspen leaves," he knew the coolest thing in the world. It is a
coolness of colour, as well as of a leaf which the breeze takes on both
sides--the greenish and the greyish. The poplar green has no glows, no
gold; it is an austere colour, as little rich as the colour of willows,
and less silvery than theirs. The sun can hardly gild it; but he can
shine between. Poplars and aspens let the sun through with the wind. You
may have the sky sprinkled through them in high midsummer, when all the
woods are close.

Sending your fancy poplar-gathering, then, you ensnare wild trees,
beating with life. No fisher's net ever took such glancing fishes, nor
did the net of a constellation's shape ever enclose more vibrating
Pleiades.

WELLS

The world at present is inclined to make sorry mysteries or unattractive
secrets of the methods and supplies of the fresh and perennial means of
life. A very dull secret is made of water, for example, and the plumber
sets his seal upon the floods whereby we live. They are covered, they
are carried, they are hushed, from the spring to the tap; and when their
voices are released at last in the London scullery, why, it can hardly be
said that the song is eloquent of the natural source of waters, whether
earthly or heavenly. There is not one of the circumstances of this
capture of streams--the company, the water-rate, and the rest--that is
not a sign of the ill-luck of modern devices in regard to style. For
style implies a candour and simplicity of means, an action, a gesture, as
it were, in the doing of small things; it is the ignorance of secret
ways; whereas the finish of modern life and its neatness seem to be