Just to sit in the Sun, to bask like an animal in its heat--this
is one of my country recreations. And often I reflect what a
thing after all it is still to be alive and sitting here, above
all the buried people of the world, in the kind and famous
Sunshine.

Beyond the orchard there is a place where the stream, hurrying out
from under a bridge, makes for itself a quiet pool. A beech-tree
upholds its green light over the blue water; and there, when I
have grown weary of the sun, the great glaring indiscriminating
Sun, I can shade myself and read my book. And listening to this
water's pretty voices I invent for it exquisite epithets, calling
it _silver-clean_ or _moss-margined_ or _nymph-frequented_, and
idly promise to place it among the learned fountains and pools
of the world, making of it a cool green thought for English exiles
in the dust and glare of Eastern deserts.




_The Spider_


What shall I compare it to, this fantastic thing I call my Mind?
To a waste-paper basket, to a sieve choked with sediment, or to
a barrel full of floating froth and refuse?

No, what it is really most like is a spider's web, insecurely hung
on leaves and twigs, quivering in every wind, and sprinkled with
dewdrops and dead flies. And at its centre, pondering forever the