ENCHANTED WOODS

百度搜索 The Celtic Twilight 天涯 或 The Celtic Twilight 天涯在线书库 即可找到本书最新章节.

I 

 Last summer, whenever I had finished my day’s work, I used to go wandering iain roomy woods, and there I would ofte an old tryman, and talk to him about his work and about the woods, and once or twice a friend came with me to whom he would open his heart more readily than to me, He had spent all his life lopping away the witch elm and the hazel and the privet and the hornbeam from the paths, and had thought much about the natural and supernatural creatures of the wood. He has heard the hedgehog—“grainne oge,” he calls him— “grunting like a Christian,” and is certain that he steals apples by rolling about under an apple tree until there is an apple stig to every quill. He is certain too that the cats, of whom there are many in the woods, have a language of their own—some kind of old Irish. He says, “Cats were serpents, and they were made into cats at the time of some great ge in the world. That is why they are hard to kill, and why it is dangerous to meddle with them. If you annoy a cat it might claw or bite you in a way that would put poison in you, and that would be the serpent’s tooth.” Sometimes he thinks they ge into wild cats, and then a nail grows on the end of their tails; but th>.</a>ese wild cats are not the same as the marten cats, who have been always in the woods. The foxes were oame, as the cats are now, but they ran away and became wild. He talks of all wild creatures except squirrels—whom he hates—with what seems an affeate i, though at times his eyes will twih pleasure as he remembers how he made hedgehogs unroll themselves when he was a boy, by putting a wisp of burning straw uhem.

 I am not certain that he distinguishes betweeural and supernatural very clearly. He told me the other day that foxes and cats like, above all, to be in the “forths” and lisses after nightfall; and he will certainly pass from some story about a fox to a story about a spirit with less ge of voice than when he is going to speak about a marten cat—a rare beast now-a-days. Many years ago he used to work in the garden, and ohey put him to sleep in a garden-house where there was a loft full of apples, and all night he could hear people rattling plates and knives and forks over his head in the loft. O any rate, be has seen ahly sight in the woods. He says, “Oime I was out cutting timber over in Inchy, and ab<bdo>.9９ｌｉｂ?</bdo>out eight o’clo when I got there I saw a girl pig nuts, with her hair hanging down over her shoulders, brown hair, and she had a good, face, and she was tall and nothing on her head, and her dress no way gaudy but simple, and when she felt me ing she gathered herself up and was gone as if the earth had swallowed her up. And I followed her and looked for her, but I never could see her again from that day to this, never again.” He used the word as we would use words like fresh or ely.

 Others too have seen spirits in the Ented Woods. A labourer told us of what a friend of his had seen in a part of the woods that is called Shanwalla, from some old village that was before the weed.

 He said, “One evening I parted from Lawrence Mangan in the yard, and he went away through the path in Shanwalla, an’ bid me goodnight. And two hours after, there he was back again in the yard, an’ bid me light a dle that was iable. Aold me that whe into Shanwalla, a little fellow about as high as his knee, but having a head as big as a man’s body, came besi<tt></tt>de him and led him out of the path an’ round about, and at last it brought him to the lime-kiln, and then it vanished a him.”

 A woman told me of a sight that she and others had seen by a certain deep pool in the river. She said, “I came over the stile from the chapel, and others along with me; and a great blast of wind came and two trees were bent and broken and fell into the river, and the splash of water out of it went up to the skies. And those that were with me saw many figures, but myself I only saw one, sitting there by the bank where the trees fell. Dark clothes he had on, and he was headless.”

 A man told me that one day, when he was a boy, he and another boy went to catch a horse in a certain field, full of boulders and bushes of hazel and creeping juniper and rock-roses, that is where the lake side is for a little clear of the woods. He said to the boy that was with him, “I bet a button that if I fling a pebble on to that bush it will stay on it,” meaning that the bush was so matted the pebble would not be able to gh９9ｌｉｂ. it. So he took up “a pebble of cow-dung, and as soon as it hit the bush there came out of it the most beautiful music that ever was heard.” They ran away, and when they had gone about two hundred yards they looked bad saw a woman dressed in white, walking round and round the bush. “First it had the form of a woman, and then of a man, and it was going round the bush.”

 II 

 I ofteangle myself in argument more plicated thahose paths of Inchy as to what is the true nature of apparitions, but at other times I say as Socrates said wheold him a learned opinion about a nymph of the Illissus, “The on opinion is enough for me.” I believe when I am in the mood that all nature is full of people whom we ot see, and that some of these are ugly rotesque, and some wicked or foolish, but very maiful beyond any one we have ever seen, and that these are not far away when we are walking in pleasant and quiet places. Even when I was a boy I could never walk in a wood without feeling that at any moment I might find before me somebody or something I had long looked for without knowing what I looked for. And now I will at times explore every little nook of some poor coppice with almost anxious footsteps, so deep a hold has this imagination upon me.

 You too meet with a like imagination, doubtless, somewhere, wherever your ruling stars will have it, Saturn driving you to the woods, or the Moon, it may be, to the edges of the sea. I will not of a certainty believe that there is nothing in the su, where our forefathers imagihe dead following their shepherd the sun, or nothing but some vague presence as little moving as nothing. If beauty is not a gateway out of the we were taken in at our birth, it will not long be beauty, and we will find it better to sit at home by the fire and fatten a lazy body or to run hither and thither in some foolish sport than to look at the fi show that light and shadow eve..r made among green leaves. I say to myself, when I am well out of that thicket ument, that they are surely there, the divine people, for only we who have her simplicity nor wisdom have dehem, and the simple of all times and the wise men of aimes have seen them and even spoken to them. They live out their passionate lives not far off, as I think, and we shall be among them when we die if we but keep our natures simple and passionate. May it not evehat death shall unite us to all romance, and that some day we shall fight dragons among blue hills, or e to that whereof all romance is but Foreshadowings mingled with the images Of man’s misdeeds ier days than these, as the old men thought in The Earthly Paradise when they were in good spirits.

 1902

百度搜索 The Celtic Twilight 天涯 或 The Celtic Twilight 天涯在线书库 即可找到本书最新章节.