The Return of the Chiff-Chaff

(SPRING SADNESS)

On a warm, brilliant morning in late April I paid a visit to a shallow
lakelet or pond five or six acres in extent which I had discovered some
weeks before hidden in a depression in the land, among luxuriant furze,
bramble, and blackthorn bushes. Between the thickets the boggy ground
was everywhere covered with great tussocks of last year's dead and
faded marsh grass--a wet, rough, lonely place where a lover of solitude
need have no fear of being intruded on by a being of his own species,
or even a wandering moorland donkey. On arriving at the pond I was
surprised and delighted to find half the surface covered with a thick
growth of bog-bean just coming into flower. The quaint three-lobed
leaves, shaped like a grebe's foot, were still small, and the
flowerstocks, thick as corn in a field, were crowned with pyramids of
buds, cream and rosy-red like the opening dropwort clusters, and at the
lower end of the spikes were the full-blown singular, snow-white,
cottony flowers--our strange and beautiful water edelweiss.

A group of ancient, gnarled and twisted alder bushes, with trunks like
trees, grew just on the margin of the pond, and by-and-by I found a
comfortable arm-chair on the lower stout horizontal branches
overhanging the water, and on that seat I rested for a long time,
enjoying the sight of that rare unexpected loveliness.

The chiff-chaff, the common warbler of this moorland district, was now
abundant, more so than anywhere else in England; two or three were
flitting about among the alder leaves within a few feet of my head, and
a dozen at least were singing within hearing, chiff-chaffing near and
far, their notes sounding strangely loud at that still, sequestered
spot. Listening to that insistent sound I was reminded of Warde
Fowler's words about the sweet season which brings new life and hope to
men, and how a seal and sanction is put on it by that same small bird's
clear resonant voice. I endeavoured to recall the passage, saying to
myself that in order to enter fully into the feeling expressed it is
sometimes essential to know an author's exact words. Failing in this, I
listened again to the bird, then let my eyes rest on the expanse of red
and cream-coloured spikes before me, then on the masses of flame-yellow
furze beyond, then on something else. I was endeavouring to keep my
attention on these extraneous things, to shut my mind resolutely
against a thought, intolerably sad, which had surprised me in that
quiet solitary place. Surely, I said, this springtime verdure and
bloom, this fragrance of the furze, the infinite blue of heaven, the
bell-like double note of this my little feathered neighbour in the
alder tree, flitting hither and thither, light and airy himself as