A wind blew, from what quarter I know not, but it lifted the half-grown leaves so that there was a flash of silver grey in the air. It was the time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification and purples and golds burn in window panes like the beat of an excitable heart; when for some reason the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish (here I pushed into the garden, for, unwisely, the door was left open and no beadles seemed about), the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has to edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. . . .
Somebody was in a hammock, somebody, but in this light they were phantoms, half guessed, half seen, raced across the grass. . . and then on the terrace, as if popping out to breathe the air, to glance at the garden, came a bent figure, formidable yet humble, with her great forehead and her shabby dress-- could it be the famous scholar, could it be J---- H----- herself? All was dim, yet intense too, as if the scarf which the dusk had flung over the garden were torn asunder by star or sword -- the flash of some terrible reality leaping, as its way is, out of the heart of the spring. (
AROO 16-7)
Jane Ellen Harrison d. April 15, 1928.
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