s, the wide sweeping outline
of these hills of green boughs, induce an inclination, like them, to
rest. To recline upon the grass and with half-closed eyes gaze upon them
is enough.

The delicious silence is not the silence of night, of lifelessness; it
is the lack of jarring, mechanical noise; it is not silence but the
sound of leaf and grass gently stroked by the soft and tender touch of
the summer air. It is the sound of happy finches, of the slow buzz of
humble-bees, of the occasional splash of a fish, or the call of a
moorhen. Invisible in the brilliant beams above, vast legions of insects
crowd the sky, but the product of their restless motion is a slumberous
hum.

These sounds are the real silence; just as a tiny ripple of the water
and the swinging of the shadows as the boughs stoop are the real
stillness. If they were absent, if it was the soundlessness and
stillness of stone, the mind would crave for something. But these fill
and content it. Thus reclining, the storm and stress of life
dissolve--there is no thought, no care, no desire. Somewhat of the
Nirvana of the earth beneath--the earth which for ever produces and
receives back again and yet is for ever at rest--enters into and soothes
the heart.

The time slips by, a rook emerges from yonder mass of foliage, and idly
floats across, and is hidden in another tree. A whitethroat rises from a
bush and nervously discourses, gesticulating with wings and tail, for a
few moments. But this is not possible for long; the immense magnetism of
London, as I have said before, is too near. There comes the quick short
beat of a steam launch shooting down the river hard by, and the dream is
over. I rise and go on again.

Already one of the willows planted about the pond is showing the yellow
leaf, before midsummer. It reminds me of the inevitable autumn. In
October these ponds, now apparently deserted, will be full of moorhens.
I have seen and heard but one to-day, but as the autumn comes on they
will be here again, feeding about the island, or searching on the sward
by the shore. Then, too, among the beeches that lead from hence towards
the fanciful pagoda the squirrels will be busy. There are numbers of
them, and their motions may be watched with ease. I turn down by the
river; in the ditch at the foot of the ha-ha wall is plenty of duckweed,
the Lemna of the tank.

A little distance away, and almost on the shore, as it seems, of the
Thames, is a really noble hors