A line of
dark Spanish oaks from which the sharp pointed acorns were dropping,
darkest green oaks, shut out the shore. A thousand starlings were flung
up into the air out of these oaks, as if an impatient hand had cast them
into the sky; then down they fell again, with a ceaseless whistling and
clucking; up they went and down they came, lost in the deep green foliage
as if they had dropped in the sea. The long level of the wheat-field
plain stretched out from my feet towards the far-away Downs, so level
that the first hedge shut off the fields beyond; and every now and then
over these hedges there rose up the white forms of sea-gulls drifting to
and fro among the elms. White sea-gulls--birds of divination, you might
say--a good symbol of the times, for now we plough the ocean. The barren
sea! In the Greek poets you may find constant reference to it as that
which could not be reaped or sowed. Ulysses, to betoken his madness, took
his plough down to the shore and drew furrows in the sand--the sea that
even Demeter, great goddess, could not sow nor bring to any fruition. Yet
now the ocean is our wheat-field and ships are our barns. The sea-gull
should be painted on the village tavern sign instead of the golden
wheatsheaf.
There could be no more flat and uninteresting surface than this field, a
damp wet brown, water slowly draining out of the furrows, not a bird that
I can see. No hare certainly, or partridge, or even a rabbit--nothing to
sit or crouch--on that cold surface, tame and level as the brown cover of
a book.
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