5 JANUARY 1951, Page 18

COUNTRY LIFE

WHEREVER one may be, and in whatever circumstances, the few minutes during which both hands of the clock pass from the old year into the new are awe-inspiring. When this experience is confronted in a remote country spot. the emotion of awe is sublimated into one of those rare moods of Dantesque rapture, in which the mathematics of the universe become as it were a visible geometry, with the paradox of eternity burning in the centre of time itself.