Wiltshire Essays Author:Maurice Henry Hewlett General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1921 Original Publisher: H. Milford, Oxford University Press Subjects: Literary Collections / Essays Reference / Quotations Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General ... more »Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: The Great I "ANCY or superstition (and if they don't actually call L cousins, who is to tell them apart ?) led me to see on the Feast of St. Valentine evident signs that it was what we here believe it, the Birds' wedding-day. There are those, too, who hail it the beginning of Spring; and this year they had reason on their side. // ver et Venus. . .. The whole countryside lay, in Browning's jolly phrase,' washed in the morning's water-gold'; the mild air streamed in from the west; the little brooks coursing over the warped meadows showed steel-blue. And the birds were full of business. I met a bullfinch, deeply involved, dressed to kill. The not impossible She was somewhere at hand, though I could not see her. The moorfowl were playing Pan and Syrinx in backwaters of the river, or through the watercress-beds; a starling whistled thoughtfully, with an eye upon my chimney-stacks; and the scattered clumps of moss below the barn-eaves were evidence that building was begun. But not the birds alone were upon the Great Affair, Nature's only affair, when all's said. There were signs in the nutwalk, not to be mistaken, that the earth was astir -- an artless display indeed, which must have enraptured Dr. Erasmus Darwin in his day, and would have titillated agreeably the Reverend Laurence Sterne if he had been up to it. This annual amorous preoccupation fills me with wonder and praise; it is one of those every-day miracles which seem much more miraculous than the most burning pages of the Acta S...« less