It is difficult to realize a drought where there are many poplars.  And yet their green is not rich; the coolest have a colour much mingled with a cloud-grey.  It does but need fresh and simple eyes to recognize their unfaded life.  When the other trees grow dark and keep still, the poplar and the aspen do not darken—­or hardly—­and the deepest summer will not find a day in which they do not keep awake.  No waters are so vigilant, even where a lake is bare to the wind.

When Keats said of his Dian that she fastened up her hair “with fingers cool as aspen leaves,” he knew the coolest thing in the world.  It is a coolness of colour, as well as of a leaf which the breeze takes on both sides—­the greenish and the greyish.  The poplar green has no glows, no gold; it is an austere colour, as little rich as the colour of willows, and less silvery than theirs.  The sun can hardly gild it; but he can shine between.  Poplars and aspens let the sun through with the wind.  You may have the sky sprinkled through them in high midsummer, when all the woods are close.

Sending your fancy poplar-gathering, then, you ensnare wild trees, beating with life.  No fisher’s net ever took such glancing fishes, nor did the net of a constellation’s shape ever enclose more vibrating Pleiades.

WELLS

The world at present is inclined to make sorry mysteries or unattractive secrets of the methods and supplies of the fresh and perennial means of life.  A very dull secret is made of water, for example, and the plumber sets his seal upon the floods whereby we live.  They are covered, they are carried, they are hushed, from the spring to the tap; and when their voices are released at last in the London scullery, why, it can hardly be said that the song is eloquent of the natural source of waters, whether earthly or heavenly.  There is not one of the circumstances of this capture of streams—­the company, the water-rate, and the rest—­that is not a sign of the ill-luck of modern devices in regard to style.  For style implies a candour and simplicity of means, an action, a gesture, as it were, in the doing of small things; it is the ignorance of secret ways; whereas the finish of modern life and its neatness seem to be secured by a system of little shufflings and surprises.

Dress, among other things, is furnished throughout with such fittings; they form its very construction.  Style does not exist in modern arrayings, for all their prettiness and precision, and for all the successes—­which are not to be denied—­of their outer part; the happy little swagger that simulates style is but another sign of its absence, being prepared by mere dodges and dexterities beneath, and the triumph and success of the present art of raiment—­“fit” itself—­is but the result of a masked and lurking labour and device.