This place suits my whim, and I like it better year after year.  As with everything else, since I began to love it I find it gradually growing beautiful.  Dreamthorp—­a castle, a chapel, a lake, a straggling strip of gray houses, with a blue film of smoke over all—­lies embosomed in emerald.  Summer, with its daisies, runs up to every cottage door.  From the little height where I am now sitting, I see it beneath me.  Nothing could be more peaceful.  The wind and the birds fly over it.  A passing sunbeam makes brilliant a white gable-end, and brings out the colours of the blossomed apple-tree beyond, and disappears.  I see figures in the street, but hear them not.  The hands on the church clock seem always pointing to one hour.  Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine.  I make a frame of my fingers, and look at my picture.  On the walls of the next Academy’s Exhibition will hang nothing half so beautiful!

My village is, I think, a special favourite of summer’s.  Every window-sill in it she touches with colour and fragrance; everywhere she wakens the drowsy murmurs of the hives; every place she scents with apple-blossom.  Traces of her hand are to be seen on the weir beside the ruined mill; and even the canal, along which the barges come and go, has a great white water-lily asleep on its olive-coloured face.  Never was velvet on a monarch’s robe so gorgeous as the green mosses that be-ruff the roofs of farm and cottage, when the sunbeam slants on them and goes.  The old road out towards the common, and the hoary dikes that might have been built in the reign of Alfred, have not been forgotten by the generous adorning season; for every fissure has its mossy cushion, and the old blocks themselves are washed by the loveliest gray-green lichens in the world, and the large loose stones lying on the ground have gathered to themselves the peacefulest mossy coverings.  Some of these have not been disturbed for a century.  Summer has adorned my village as gaily, and taken as much pleasure in the task, as the people of old, when Elizabeth was queen, took in the adornment of the May-pole against a summer festival.  And, just think, not only Dreamthorp, but every English village she has made beautiful after one fashion or another—­making vivid green the hill slope on which straggling white Welsh hamlets hang right opposite the sea; drowning in apple-blossom the red Sussex ones in the fat valley.  And think, once more, every spear of grass in England she has touched with a livelier green; the crest of every bird she has burnished; every old wall between the four seas has received her mossy and licheny attentions; every nook in every forest she has sown with pale flowers, every marsh she has dashed with the fires of the marigold.  And in the wonderful night the moon knows, she hangs—­the planet on which so many millions of us fight, and sin, and agonise, and die—­a sphere of glow-worm light.