And then at my next movement something squealed sharply.  I turned about, but I could not see it, only I saw a little stir in a rut and heard the diminishing rustle of the unseen creature’s flight.  And at that I turned to my toad again, and its eye moved and it stirred.  And presently, with infirm and hesitating gestures, it stretched its limbs and began to crawl away from me.

But wonder, that gentle sister of fear, had me now.  I saw a little way ahead a brown and crimson butterfly perched upon a cornflower.  I thought at first it was the breeze that stirred it, and then I saw its wings were quivering.  And even as I watched it, it started into life, and spread itself, and fluttered into the air.

I watched it fly, a turn this way, a turn that, until suddenly it seemed to vanish.  And now, life was returning to this thing and that on every side of me, with slow stretchings and bendings, with twitterings, with a little start and stir. . . .

I came slowly, stepping very carefully because of these drugged, feebly awakening things, through the barley to the hedge.  It was a very glorious hedge, so that it held my eyes.  It flowed along and interlaced like splendid music.  It was rich with lupin, honeysuckle, campions, and ragged robin; bed straw, hops, and wild clematis twined and hung among its branches, and all along its ditch border the starry stitchwort lifted its childish faces, and chorused in lines and masses.  Never had I seen such a symphony of note-like flowers and tendrils and leaves.  And suddenly in its depths, I heard a chirrup and the whirr of startled wings.

Nothing was dead, but everything had changed to beauty!  And I stood for a time with clean and happy eyes looking at the intricate delicacy before me and marveling how richly God has made his worlds. . . . .

“Tweedle-Tweezle,” a lark had shot the stillness with his shining thread of song; one lark, and then presently another, invisibly in the air, making out of that blue quiet a woven cloth of gold. . . .

The earth recreated—­only by the reiteration of such phrases may I hope to give the intense freshness of that dawn.  For a time I was altogether taken up with the beautiful details of being, as regardless of my old life of jealous passion and impatient sorrow as though I was Adam new made.  I could tell you now with infinite particularity of the shut flowers that opened as I looked, of tendrils and grass blades, of a blue-tit I picked up very tenderly—­never before had I remarked the great delicacy of feathers—­that presently disclosed its bright black eye and judged me, and perched, swaying fearlessly, upon my finger, and spread unhurried wings and flew away, and of a great ebullition of tadpoles in the ditch; like all the things that lived beneath the water, they had passed unaltered through the Change.  Amid such incidents, I lived those first great moments, losing for a time in the wonder of each little part the mighty wonder of the whole.