ittle bunch of
glittering stamens with an air of inattention, fine, radiating 'nerves'
in the flamboyant style of architecture, like those which, in church,
framed the stair to the rood-loft or closed the perpendicular tracery
of the windows, but here spread out into pools of fleshy white, like
strawberry-beds in spring. How simple and rustic, in comparison with
these, would seem the dog-roses which, in a few weeks' time, would be
climbing the same hillside path in the heat of the sun, dressed in the
smooth silk of their blushing pink bodices, which would be undone and
scattered by the first breath of wind.

But it was in vain that I lingered before the hawthorns, to breathe in,
to marshal! before my mind (which knew not what to make of it), to lose
in order to rediscover their invisible and unchanging odour, to absorb
myself in the rhythm which disposed their flowers here and there with
the light-heartedness of youth, and at intervals as unexpected as
certain intervals of music; they offered me an indefinite continuation
of the same charm, in an inexhaustible profusion, but without letting
me delve into it any more deeply, like those melodies which one can play
over a hundred times in succession without coming any nearer to their
secret. I turned away from them for a moment so as to be able to return
to them with renewed strength. My eyes followed up the slope which,
outside the hedge, rose steeply to the fields, a poppy that had strayed
and been lost by its fellows, or a few cornflowers that had fallen
lazily behind, and decorated the ground here and there with their
flowers like the border of a tapestry, in which may be seen at intervals
hints of the rustic theme which appears triumphant in the panel itself;
infrequent still, spaced apart as the scattered houses which warn us
that we are approaching a village, they betokened to me the vast expanse
of waving corn beneath the fleecy clouds, and the sight of a single
poppy hoisting upon its slender rigging and holding against the breeze
its scarlet ensign, over the buoy of rich black earth from which it
sprang, made my heart beat as does a wayfarer's when he perceives, upon
some low-lying ground, an old and broken boat which is being caulked and
made seaworthy, and cries out, although he has not yet caught sight of
it, "The Sea!"

And then I returned to my hawthorns, and stood before them as one stands
before those masterpieces of painting which, one imagines, one will