The Dewy Morn

By Richard Jefferies.

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Volume I

I

The sunbeams streamed over Ashpen Hill into a broad lane, a little after four in the morning. Felise was walking slowly towards the hill, which was yet at some distance, staying every moment to glance aside into the green and dew-laden hedges. On her right the hedge came to the sward; on the left a bank rose, and the hedge went along the summit.

The fragrance of the dew, invisibly evaporating, filled the air she breathed. From sweet-green hawthorn leaves, from heavy grasses drooping, the glittering drops dissolving brought with them the odour of leaf and flower. The larks, long since up, had sung the atmosphere clear of the faint white mist left by the night.

She found blue veronica in a bunch of grass under a dead thorn-branch, blown by the winds months ago out from the hedge. She lifted up the branch to fling it aside, and give the flowers more room and freedom; but she replaced it, reflecting that the thorns would perhaps prevent passing sheep from treading on them.

Upon the bank there was a cowslip; one stalk bore deep orange flowers, the others bunches yet unopened, and clothed in delicate green. Felise took the flower, which no bee had yet sipped, put it to her lips, and then placed it in her dress.

She stepped lightly round the smooth brown boulder-stones with which the lane was dotted in places—rude disjointed efforts at paving—beside which grew bunches of rushes, safe there from the cartwheels. Not even cartwheels could stand the jolt over these iron rocks. She walked sometimes on the elevated sides of the ruts—the earth had been forced up by the crushing weight of wagon-loads; they were grass-grown, and the grass hung over the groove, along which weasels often hunted.

Sometimes she trod the sward by the bank, where it was short, and full of threeleaved clover whose white bloom was not yet out; then, crossing to the opposite side, she sauntered by the hedge there, letting the hawthorn brush her skirt, and the soft green hooks of the young bramble-shoots strive in vain to hold her.

An ash-branch stood out to bar her path. She stopped and touched it, and counted the leaves on the sprays; they were all uneven.

In the grass ahead the pinkish ears of a young rabbit stood up; he was nibbling peacefully, heedless of her approach. Not till she was close did he raise himself to look at her, first sitting on his haunches, then as if about to beg, then away into the burrow.

Her white hand wandered presently among more blue veronica flowering on the slope of the bank. She did not gather—she touched only, and went on. She touched, too, the tips of some brake, freshly-green, and rising rapidly now day by day. A rush of wings—a wood-pigeon came over; he was startled, and, swerving, went higher into the air.

There was honeysuckle on the hedge above the bank, too far to reach. She took a hawthorn leaf, felt it, and dropped it; then pulled a bennet, or grass-stalk, and dropped that; then pulled a rush, and left it. A lover might have tracked her easily by the footmarks on the dewy grass—by the rush thrown down, and by the white handkerchief which she had carried in her hand and unconsciously dropped. A robin came to look at the handkerchief before she had gone many minutes; he thought perhaps there might be a crumb, and he is, too, very inquisitive.

Felise sat down on a great trunk of oak lying in the lane by a gateway, and sighed with very depth of enjoyment. There was a yellowhammer perched on the gate, and he had been singing. When Felise approached, he ceased; but seeing that she was quiet and intended him no harm, he began again. His four or five rising notes, and the long-drawn idle-sounding note with which they conclude, suited so well with the sunshine, they soothed her still further. She sighed again, and let herself sit loosely on the oak-trunk, like the yellowhammer. He had his back humped, and all his body rested comfortably. So did she; she permitted her back to bow, her shoulders to stoop, her limbs to relax, and idle nature to have her own way. After a while she sighed again.

She was bathing in the beauty of the morning—floating upheld on the dewy petals. A swimmer lies on the warm summer water, the softest of couches, extended at full length, the body so gently held that it undulates slightly with the faint swell. So soft is the couch it softens the frame, which becomes supple, flexible, like the water itself.

Felise was lying on the flowers and grass, extended under the sun, steeped in their sweetness. She visibly sat on the oak-trunk—invisibly her nature was reclining, as the swimmer on the sun-warmed sea. Her frame drooped as the soul, which bears it up, flowed outwards, feeling to grass, and flower, and leaf, as the swimmer spreads the arms abroad, and the fingers feel the water. She sighed with deep content, dissolving in the luxurious bath of beauty.

Her strong heart beating, the pulses throbbing, her bosom rising and regularly sinking with the rich waves of life; her supple limbs and roundness filled with the plenty of ripe youth; her white, soft, roseate skin, the surface where the sun touched her hand glistening with the dew of the pore; the bloom upon her—that glow of the morn of life—the hair more lovely than the sunlight; the grace unwritten of perfect form—these produced within her a sense of existence—a consciousness of being, to which she was abandoned; and her lips parted to sigh. The sigh was the expression of feeling herself to be.

To be! To live! To have an intense enjoyment in every inspiration of breath; in every beat of the pulse; in every movement of the limbs; in every sense!

The rugged oak-trunk was pleasant to her. She placed her hand on the brown, stained wood—stained with its own sap, for the bark had been removed. She touched it; and so full of life was her touch, that it found a pleasure in that rude wood. The brown boulder-stone in the lane, ancient, smoothed, and ground in times which have vanished like a cloud, its surface the colour of old polished oak, reflecting the sun with a dull gleam—the very boulder-stone was pleasant to her, so full of life was her sense of sight.

There came a skylark, dropping over the hedge, and alighted on a dusty level spot in the lane. His shadow shot a foot long on the dust, thrown by the level beams of the sun. The dust, in shadow and sunshine—the despised dust—now that the lark drew her glance to it, was pleasant to see.

All things are joyously beautiful to those who feel themselves to be; but it is only given to the chosen of nature to know this exceeding delight.

In herself rapt, the whole face of earth and sky ministered to her, each and all that made up the visible world was flung at her feet. They did homage—Felise, queen of herself, was queen of all.