Milton's Country and Gray's

Milton's Country— and Gray's

An Autumn Reverie

BY FLORENCE L. JONES

— Far from the madding crowd just out of London, the -

valley town lies like a nest amidst sweeping uplands. In the peaceful haze an hour before twilight, the view is one of the most picturesque throughout agricultural England. The harvested oats and barley, bound in sheaves. The fields of still standing wheat, a-ripple like a saffron lake when a zephyr passes over them. The sloping pasture lands, wherein are ruddy patches contributed by quietly grazing cattle. The thick belt of trees beyond. Over it all the slowly-fading pageant of the sunset. In the purpureal light that succeeds, while the evening star brightens, the amber strands of glowing sky, the verdant pasture lands, the number of

MILTON S COTTAGE, CIIALFONT, ST. GILES

MILTON'S COUNTRY— AND GRAY'S 225

lately harrowed acres, the gold of harvest fields, sentineled by shadowy trees, fade into the blue-grey distance, at one with the horizon. In these contrasting slopes, decked at man's wish and Nature's will, boundless to the eye, is an impression of abiding peace and freedom. The tranquil picturesqueness of the scene is enhanced to the inner sense by association with the near vicinity of two great English poets. Involuntarily, too, there arises in that background the haunting lilt of a later singer. Walking through the long, sloping barley fields, "that clothe the world and meet the sky," one feels that they must lead soon to towered Camelot. And hark! Is that a hymn chanted by devout harvesters? Is it the caroling

of the lone Lady of Shalott heard from afar? But it is Milton's Country, and it is Gray's. And looking on these sloping fields, these magnificent trees whose boughs have grown green and become bare in summer's alternation with winter through centuries, one feels that "L'Allegro" or the immortal Elegy might have been perpetuated with inspired quill out of such environment only yesterday. But where are the deep-eaved cottages, the ruddy farm-steads, with quaint weather-cock and gable? Gone with the graceful sweep of the scythe, the merry Maypole, and the boisterous harvest supper. Gone with their raftered chimneys and flaming hearths, and the yokel's belief in gargoylefeatured goblin and cricket-voiced sprite. In their places are the

gaunt chimneys of leather-factories and saw-mills. The valley- red-brick dwellings, elbowed by little nest is crowded with rows of assertive facade villas with exotic names, upon which stares the of a board school. All the dwellings in the valley now are illum- ined with electric light. spire beckons the eye to where grey head-stones lean awry A beneath the sombre shade of evergreens. These fields, these hale world of Lon- and venerable trees, from whence the kaleidoscopic almost the same as when don lies but a score of miles away, are such in his mind's Gray meditated amongst them as when, with ;

reveries. But amidst the wood eye Milton composed his lyrical that appears to remain and pasture of these peaceful uplands, all

are grey head-stones crumbling of things human of the olden time in capital, in the church-yard. In breeze-swept rural district as

226 IMPROVEMENT ERA

nowadays, one is impelled to ponder how "the old order changeth, yielding place to new." The electric light in the valley from a — hundred points signals the march of modernity the inward unrest, the outward uniformity implied in the word — upon these

STOKE POGIS CHURCH fields, over which now hangs the half-shield of the waxing harvest-moon. A sinuous trail of steam and smoke fades in the air like a dream, as a puffing train curves and lurches on its way to London. LONDON, ENGLAND