Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III Susanna was seated on the moss, at the roots of a wide-spreading oak. She was leaning back, so that she could look up, up, through vistas of changing greens, ?black-green to gold-green, ? through a thousand labyrinthine avenues and counter-avenues of leaves and branches, with broken shafts of sunlight caught in them here and there, to the glimpses of blue sky visible beyond. The tree gave you a sense of great spaces, and depths, and differences, like a world; and it was full of life, like a city. Birds came and went and hopped from bough to bough, twittering importantly of affairs to them important; squirrels scampered over the rough bark, in sudden panic haste, darting little glances, sidewise and behind, after pursuers that (we will hope) were fancied; and other birds, out of sight in the loftier regions, piped their insistent calls, or sang their tireless epithalamiums. Spiders hung in their gossamer lairs, only too tensely motionless not to seem dead; but if a gnat came?with what swift, accurate, and relentless vigour they sprang upon and garotted him. Sometimes a twig snapped, or a tyoungacorn fell, or a caterpillar let himself down by a long silken thread. And the air under the oak was tonic with its good oaken smell. Susanna was leaning back in a sort of reverie, held by the charm of these things. We have no trees like this in Italy, she was vaguely thinking. The trees and the wild creatures are never so near to one there; one never gets so intimate with them; Nature is not so accessible and friendly. She remembered having read somewhere that such enjoyment as she was now experiencing, the enjoyment of commune with the mere sweet out-of- door things of the earth, was a Pagan enjoyment, and un-Christian; and her mind revolted at this, and she thought, No. T...
Synopsis
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