The Thread of Gold

Оглавление

Benson Arthur Christopher. The Thread of Gold

I. The Red Spring

II. The Deserted Shrine, The Manor House

III. Leucocholy

IV. The Flower

V. The Fens

VI. The Well and the Chapel

VII. The Cuckoo

VIII. Spring-time

IX. The Hare

X. The Diplodocus

XI. The Beetle

XII. The Farm-yard

XIII. The Artist

XIV. Young Love

XV. A Strange Gathering

XVI. The Cripple

XVII. Oxford

XVIII. Authorship

XIX. Hamlet

XX. A Sealed Spirit

XXI. Leisure

XXII. The Pleasures of Work

XXIII. The Abbey

XXIV. Wordsworth

XXV. Dorsetshire

XXVI. Portland

XXVII. Canterbury Tower

XXVIII. Prayer

XXIX. The Death-bed of Jacob

XXX. By the Sea of Galilee

XXXI. The Apocalypse

XXXII. The Statue

XXXIII. The Mystery of Suffering

XXXIV. Music

XXXV. The Faith of Christ

XXXVI. The Mystery of Evil

XXXVII. Renewal

XXXVIII. The Secret

XXXIX. The Message

XL. After Death

XLI. The Eternal Will

XLII. Until the Evening

CONCLUSION

Отрывок из книги

Very deep in this enchanted land of green hills in which I live, lies a still and quiet valley. No road runs along it; but a stream with many curves and loops, deep-set in hazels and alders, moves brimming down. There is no house to be seen; nothing but pastures and little woods which clothe the hill-sides on either hand. In one of these fields, not far from the stream, lies a secluded spot that I visit duly from time to time. It is hard enough to find the place; and I have sometimes directed strangers to it, who have returned without discovering it. Some twenty yards away from the stream, with a ring of low alders growing round it, there is a pool; not like any other pool I know. The basin in which it lies is roughly circular, some ten feet across. I suppose it is four or five feet deep. From the centre of the pool rises an even gush of very pure water, with a certain hue of green, like a faintly-tinted gem. The water in its flow makes a perpetual dimpling on the surface; I have never known it to fail even in the longest droughts; and in sharp frosty days there hangs a little smoke above it, for the water is of a noticeable warmth.

This spring is strongly impregnated with iron, so strongly that it has a sharp and medical taste; from what secret bed of metal it comes I do not know, but it must be a bed of great extent, for, though the spring runs thus, day by day and year by year, feeding its waters with the bitter mineral over which it passes, it never loses its tinge; and the oldest tradition of the place is that it was even so centuries ago.

.....

Here was a great flat grassy pasture, the water again very near the surface, as the long-leaved water-plants, that sprawled in all the ditches, showed. But when we reached the wicket we seemed to be as far removed from humanity as dwellers in a lonely isle. A few cattle grazed drowsily, and the crisp tearing of the grass by their big lips came softly across the pasture. Inside the wicket stood a single ancient house, uninhabited, and festooned with ivy into a thing more bush than house; though a small Tudor window peeped from the leaves, like the little suspicious eye of some shaggy beast.

A stone's throw away lay a large square moat, full of water, all fringed with ancient gnarled trees; the island which it enclosed was overgrown with tiny thickets of dishevelled box-trees, and huge sprawling laurels; we walked softly round it, and there was our goal: a small church of a whitish stone, in the middle of a little close of old sycamores in stiff summer leaf.

.....