COUNTRY LIFE
LINGERING, the other day, on the National Trust land on the Chiltern Hills where Cymbeline once camped, I looked north across the wide plain of Aylesbury, with the sun going down on my left behind Longdown. The huge quilt of stubble fields, pasture, woodland, was soaked in that evening glow warm with promise. Yet I knew that day was over and the chill about to fall. There was neither human sound nor traffic. The only bird-song was that of the robin, soloist of September.
The place, the Moment, were so melancholy, yet so serene, that my open mind was filled with the past and the future simultaneously. I thought of Virgil's prophecy in his fourth Eclogue, " See how the whole creation rejoices in the age that is to be" (Rieu's marvellous translation). Here was surety enough, I felt, the emotion instant with the thought; for of all things most intimately understood by men of every race and tradition, this comes first and is promissory of human sanity. The land on which he lives will, in the end, prevent man from the final political folly—racial suicide. In that same Eclogue Virgil predicted the opening of a Golden Age, in spite of our wickedness and stupidity. But a Country Life column is not the place for me to speculate upon that matter.
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