EBOOK, PROSE IDYLLS ***
Transcribed from the 1882 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
PROSE IDYLLS, NEW AND OLD
Contents:
A Charm of Birds
Chalk-Stream Studies
The Fens
My Winter-Garden
From Ocean to Sea
North Devon
I. 'A CHARM OF BIRDS.' {1}
Is it merely a fancy that we English, the educated people among us at
least, are losing that love for spring which among our old
forefathers rose almost to worship? That the perpetual miracle of
the budding leaves and the returning song-birds awakes no longer in
us the astonishment which it awoke yearly among the dwellers in the
old world, when the sun was a god who was sick to death each winter,
and returned in spring to life and health, and glory; when the death
of Adonis, at the autumnal equinox, was wept over by the Syrian
women, and the death of Baldur, in the colder north, by all living
things, even to the dripping trees, and the rocks furrowed by the
autumn rains; when Freya, the goddess of youth and love, went forth
over the earth each spring, while the flowers broke forth under her
tread over the brown moors, and the birds welcomed her with song;
when, according to Olaus Magnus, the Goths and South Swedes had, on
the return of spring, a mock battle between summer and winter, and
welcomed the returning splendour of the sun with dancing and mutual
feasting, rejoicing that a better season for fishing and hunting was
approaching? To those simpler children of a simpler age, in more
direct contact with the daily and yearly facts of Nature, and more
dependent on them for their bodily food and life, winter and spring
were the two great facts of existence; the symbols, the one of death,
the other of life; and the battle between the two--the battle of the
sun with darkness, of winter with spring, of death with life, of
bereavement with love--lay at the root of all their myths and all
their creeds.
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