Essays

								

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 always say everything.

A NORTHERN FANCY

"I remember," said Dryden, writing to Dennis, "I remember poor Nat Lee,
who was then upon the verge of madness, yet made a sober and witty answer
to a bad poet who told him, 'It was an easy thing to write like a
madman.'  'No,' said he, ''tis a very difficult thing to write like a
madman, but 'tis a very easy thing to write like a fool.'"  Nevertheless,
the difficult song of distraction is to be heard, a light high note, in
English poetry throughout two centuries at least, and one English poet
lately set that untethered lyric, the mad maid's song, flying again.
A revolt against the oppression of the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries--the age of the re-discovery of death; against the
crime of tragedies; against the tyranny of Italian example that had made
the poets walk in one way of love, scorn, constancy, inconstancy--may
have caused this trolling of unconsciousness, this tune of innocence, and