field than that of the real skies, the shape of the Lyre or the Bear has an altogether new and noble solitude; and the waters play a painter’s part in setting their splendid subject free.  Two movements shake but do not scatter the still night: the bright flashing of constellations in the deep Weir-pool, and the dark flashes of the vague bats flying.  The stars in the stream fluctuate with an alien motion.  Reversed, estranged, isolated, every shape of large stars escapes and returns, escapes and returns.  Fitful in the steady night, those constellations, so few, so whole, and so remote, have a suddenness of gleaming life.  You imagine that some unexampled gale might make them seem to shine with such a movement in the veritable sky; yet nothing but deep water, seeming still in its incessant flight and rebound, could really show such altered stars.  The flood lets a constellation fly, as Juliet’s “wanton” with a tethered bird, only to pluck it home again.  At moments some rhythmic flux of the water seems about to leave the darkly-set, widely-spaced Bear absolutely at large, to dismiss the great stars, and refuse to imitate the skies, and all the water is obscure; then one broken star returns, then fragments of another, and a third and a fourth flit back to their noble places, brilliantly vague, wonderfully visible, mobile, and unalterable.  There is nothing else at once so keen and so elusive.

The aspen poplar had been in captive flight all day, but with no such vanishings as these.  The dimmer constellations of the soft night are reserved by the skies.  Hardly is a secondary star seen by the large and vague eyes of the stream.  They are blind to the Pleiades.

There is a little kind of star that drowns itself by hundreds in the river Thames—the many-rayed silver-white seed that makes journeys on all the winds up and down England and across it in the end of summer.  It is a most expert traveller, turning a little wheel a-tiptoe wherever the wind lets it rest, and speeding on those pretty points when it is not flying.  The streets of London are among its many highways, for it is fragile enough to go far in all sorts of weather.  But it gets disabled if a rough gust tumbles it on the water so that its finely-feathered feet are wet.  On gentle breezes it is able to cross dry-shod, walking the waters.

All unlike is this pilgrim star to the tethered constellations.  It is far adrift.  It goes singly to all the winds.  It offers thistle plants (or whatever is the flower that makes such delicate ashes) to the tops of many thousand hills.  Doubtless the farmer would rather have to meet it in battalions than in these invincible units astray.  But if the farmer owes it a lawful grudge, there is many a rigid riverside garden wherein it would be a great pleasure to sow the thistles of the nearest pasture.

RUSHES AND REEDS

Taller than the grass and lower than the trees, there is another growth that feels the implicit spring.  It had been more abandoned to winter than even the short grass shuddering under a wave of east wind, more than the dumb trees.  For the multitudes of sedges, rushes, canes, and reeds were the appropriate lyre of the cold.  On them the nimble winds played their dry music.  They were part of the winter.  It looked through them and spoke through them.  They were spears and javelins in array to the sound of the drums of the north.

The winter takes fuller possession of these things than of those that stand solid.  The sedges whistle his tune.  They let the colour of his light look through—low-flying arrows and bright bayonets of winter day.

The multitudes of all reeds and rushes grow out of bounds.  They belong to the margins of lands, the space between the farms and the river, beyond the pastures, and where the marsh in flower becomes perilous footing for the cattle.  They are the fringe of the low lands, the sign of streams.  They grow tall between you and the near horizon of flat lands.  They etch their sharp lines upon the sky; and near them grow flowers of stature, including the lofty yellow lily.

Our green country is the better for the grey, soft, cloudy darkness of the sedge, and our full landscape is the better for the distinction of its points, its needles, and its resolute right lines.

Ours is a summer full of voices, and therefore it does not so need the sound of rushes; but they are most sensitive to the stealthy breezes, and betray the passing of a wind that even the tree-tops knew not of.  Sometimes it is a breeze unfelt, but the stiff sedges whisper it along a mile of marsh.  To the strong wind they bend, showing the silver of their sombre little tassels as fish show the silver of their sides turning in the pathless sea.  They are unanimous.  A field of tall flowers tosses many ways in one warm gale, like the many lovers of a poet who have a thousand reasons for their love; but the rushes, more strongly tethered, are swept into a single attitude, again and again, at every renewal of the storm.

Between the pasture and the wave, the many miles of rushes and reeds in England seem to escape that insistent ownership which has so changed (except for a few forests and downs) the aspect of England, and has in fact made the landscape.  Cultivation makes the landscape elsewhere, rather than ownership, for the boundaries in the south are not conspicuous; but here it is ownership.  But the rushes are a gipsy people, amongst us, yet out of reach.  The landowner, if he is rather a gross man, believes these races of reeds are his.  But if he is a man of sensibility, depend upon it he has his interior doubts.  His property, he says, goes right down to the centre of the earth, in the shape of a wedge; how high up it goes into the air it would be difficult to say, and obviously the shape of the wedge must be continued in the direction of increase.  We may therefore proclaim his right to the clouds and their cargo.  It is true that as his ground game is apt to go upon his neighbour’s land to be shot, so the clouds may now and then spend his showers elsewhere.  But the great thing is the view.  A well-appointed country-house sees nothing out of the windows that is not its own.  But he who tells you so, and proves it to you by his own view, is certainly disturbed by an unspoken doubt, if his otherwise contented eyes should happen to be caught by a region of rushes.  The water is his—he had the pond made; or the river, for a space, and the fish, for a time.  But the bulrushes, the reeds!  One wonders whether a very thorough landowner, but a sensitive one, ever resolved that he would endure this sort of thing no longer, and went out armed and had a long acre of sedges scythed to death.

They are probably outlaws.  They are dwellers upon thresholds and upon margins, as the gipsies make a home upon the green edges of a road.  No wild flowers, however wild, are rebels.  The copses and their primroses are good subjects, the oaks are loyal.  Now and then, though, one has a kind of suspicion of some of the other kinds of trees—the Corot trees.  Standing at a distance from the more ornamental trees, from those of fuller foliage, and from all the indeciduous shrubs and the conifers (manifest property, every one), two or three translucent aspens, with which the very sun and the breath of earth are entangled, have sometimes seemed to wear a certain look—an extra-territorial look, let us call it.  They are suspect.  One is inclined to shake a doubtful head at them.

And the landowner feels it.  He knows quite well, though he may not say so, that the Corot trees, though they do not dwell upon margins, are in spirit almost as extra-territorial as the rushes.  In proof of this he very often cuts them down, out of the view, once for all.  The view is better, as a view, without them.  Though their roots are in his ground right enough, there is a something about their heads—.  But the reason he gives for wishing them away is merely that they are “thin.”  A man does not