In the great bird country of the north-eastern littoral of England, about Holy Island and the basaltic rocks, the shadows of the high birds are the movement and the pulse of the solitude.  Where there are no woods to make a shade, the sun suffers the brilliant eclipse of flocks of pearl-white sea birds, or of the solitary creature driving on the wind.  Theirs is always a surprise of flight.  The clouds go one way, but the birds go all ways:  in from the sea or out, across the sands, inland to high northern fields, where the crops are late by a month.  They fly so high that though they have the shadow of the sun under their wings, they have the light of the earth there also.  The waves and the coast shine up to them, and they fly between lights.

Black flocks and white they gather their delicate shadows up, “swift as dreams,” at the end of their flight into the clefts, platforms, and ledges of harbourless rocks dominating the North Sea.  They subside by degrees, with lessening and shortening volleys of wings and cries until there comes the general shadow of night wherewith the little shadows close, complete.

The evening is the shadow of another flight.  All the birds have traced wild and innumerable paths across the mid-May earth; their shadows have fled all day faster than her streams, and have overtaken all the movement of her wingless creatures.  But now it is the flight of the very earth that carries her clasped shadow from the sun.

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

All Englishmen know the name of Lucy Hutchinson; and of her calling and election to the most wifely of all wifehoods—­that of a soldier’s wife—­history has made her countrymen aware.  Inasmuch as Colonel Hutchinson was a political soldier, moreover, she is something more than his biographer—­his historian.  And she convinces her reader that her Puritan principles kept abreast of her affections.  There is no self-abandonment; she is not precipitate; keeps her own footing; wife of a soldier as she is, would not have armed him without her own previous indignation against the enemy.  She is a soldier at his orders, but she had warily and freely chosen her captain.

Briefly, and with the dignity that the language of her day kept unmarred for her use, she relates her own childhood and youth.  She was a child such as those serious times desired that a child should be; that is, she was as slightly a child, and for as brief a time, as might be.  Childhood, as an age of progress, was not to be delayed, as an age of imperfection was to be improved, as an age of inability was not to be exposed except when precocity distinguished it.  It must at any rate be shortened.  Lucy Apsley, at four years old, read English perfectly, and was “carried to sermons, and could remember and repeat them exactly.”  “At seven she had eight tutors in several qualities.”  She outstripped her brothers in Latin, albeit they were at school and she had no teacher except her father’s chaplain, who, poor gentleman, was “a pitiful dull fellow.”  She was not companionable.  Her many friends were indulged with “babies” (that is, dolls) and these she pulled to pieces.  She exhorted the maids, she owned, “much.”  But she also heard much of their love stories, and acquired a taste for sonnets.