Do you think that he does not remember the death?
The huge carcass dragged out of the stream, followed by dripping,
panting dogs; the blowing of the mort, and the last wild halloo, when
the horn-note and the voices rang through the autumn woods, and
rolled up the smooth flat mountain sides; and Brendon answered
Countisbury, and Countisbury sent it on to Lynmouth hills, till it
swept out of the gorge and died away upon the Severn sea? And then,
does he not remember the pause, and the revulsion, and the feeling of
sadness and littleness, almost of shame, as he looked up for the
first time--one can pardon his not having done so before--and saw
where he was, and the beauty of the hill-sides, with the lazy autumn
clouds crawling about their tops, and the great sheets of screes,
glaciers of stone covering acres and acres of the smooth hill-side,
eating far into the woods below, bowing down the oak scrubs with
their weight, and the circular sweeps of down, flecked with
innumerable dark spots of gorse, each of them guarded where they open
into the river chasm by two fortresses of "giant-snouted crags,"--
delicate pink and grey sandstone, from which blocks and crumbling
boulders have been toppling slowly down for ages, beneath the frost
and the whirlwind, and now lie in long downward streams upon the
slope, as if the mountain had been weeping tears of stone? And then,
as the last notes of the mort had died away, did not there come over
him an awe at the silence of the woods, not broken, but deepened, by
the unvarying monotone of the roaring stream beneath, which flashed
and glittered, half-hidden in the dark chasm, in clear brown pools
reflecting every leaf and twig, in boiling pits and walls of foam,
ever changing, and yet for ever the fleeting on past the poor dead
reeking stag and the silent hounds lying about on the moss-
embroidered stones, their lolling tongues showing like bright crimson
sparkles in the deep rich Venetian air of the green sombre shades;
while the startled water-ousel, with his white breast, flitted a few
yards and stopped to stare from a rock's point at the strange
intruders; and a single stock-dove, out of the bosom of the wood,
began calling sadly and softly, with a dreamy peaceful moan? Did he
not see and hear all this, for surely it was there to see and hear?'
'Not he.
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