Now, as all good knights in all good tales do -I was riding along, a little apart, and musing to myself I was making my way along a grassy ride in what you might well have supposed to be an enchanted stillness.In otherparts of the park, Spring had been busy - we disturbeda family of rabbits in the new bracken, which rose in strong little involuted fronds, like new-born serpents, somewhere between the feathered and the scaly - There were hosts of black ravens, very busy and important, striding about and stabbing at the roots of things with their blue-black triangular beaks. And larks rising, and spiders throwing out their gleaming geometrical Traps and staggering butter flies and the unevenly speeding blue darts of the dragonflies.And a kestrel riding the air-currents in superlative ease with its gaze concentrated on the bright earth.
So -I went on, on my own - deeper and deeper into the silent Tunnel of the Ride - not so sure of where I was and yet not anxious either, not concerned about my companions nor even about the nearnessof - certain friends. The trees were beech, and the buds, just breaking, fiercely brilliant, and the new, the renewed light on them - intermittent diamond - butthe depths were dark, a silent Nave. And no birds sang, or I heard none, no woodpecker tapped, no thrush whistled or hopped. And I listened to the increasingQuiet - and my horse went softly on the beech-mast - which was wet after rain - not crackling, a little sodden, not wet enough to plash. And I had the sensation, common enough, at least to me, that I was moving out of time, that the way, narrow and dark-dappled, stretched away indifferently before and behind, and that I was who I had been and what I would become - all at once, all wound in one - and I moved onward indifferently, since it was all one, whether I came or went, or remained still. Now to me such moments are poetry. Do not misunderstandme -I do not mean miss ishly "poetical" - but the source of the drivingforce of the lines - And when I write lines I mean the lines of verse indeed, but also some lines of life which run indifferently through us - -from Origin to Finish. Ah, how can I tell you? And to whom but you could I even begin to describe such indescribable - such obscurely untouchable things? Imagine an abstract sketch such as a drawing-master might make to correct your perspective for you - a fan or tunnel of lines, narrowing not to blindness, not to Nought, but to the Vanishing point, to Infinity. And then imagine these Lines embodied in the soft bright leaves and the pale light and the blue moving over it - and the tall trunks with their grey soft hide diminishing - and the very furrows in the ground - such a unique carpet of such browns and sooty blacks and peat and amber and ash - all distinct and all one- all leading on and yet stationary… I cannot say… I trust you know already…
In the distance there appeared to be a Pool. It lay across my path - abrown pool - deep in colour, uncertain in depth - reflecting the canopy in its dark unbroken surface. I looked at it and looked away, and when I looked back it contained a Creature. I must suppose this Creature to have come there by some minor magic, for it had certainly not been there before, and could hardly have walked there, for the surface remained still and unbroken.
Now the Creature was a small hound, milky-white in colour,with a finely pointed little head and black intelligent eyes. It lay - or couched would be better - it was like the sphinx, couchant- half-above and half-below the water, so that its shoulders and haunches were licked and divided by a fine hairline of surface, and its limbs, below the surface, gleamed through flowing green and amber.Its delicate forefeet were stretched before it and its fine tail curled round about. It was as still as though it was made of marble,andthis not for only one or two moments but for some considerable time.
Round its neck it wore a series of spherical silver bells on a silver chain - not miniature tinkling bells, but large bells, akin to gulls' eggs, or even bantam eggs.
My horse and I stopped and stared. And the creature, stone-still always, stared back, with comfortable confidence, and a look, somehow, ofcommand. I was for a period of several moments wholly undecided as to whether this manifestation were a reality, or a hallucination, or what? Had it come from another time? It lay there so improbably, half-submerged, a veritable Canis aquaticus, a water-spirit emerging, or an earth-spirit half-submerged.
I could not for the life of me press on or make it give way or move or vanish. I stared,it stared. It seemed to me a solid Poem, and you came into my mind, and your little dog and your unearthly creatures walking the earth. There also came into my mind several poems of Sir Thos Wyatt - hunting poems for the most part, but where the creatures of the Chase are denizens of the Court Chamber. Noli me tangere, the beast seemed to proclaim haughtily, and indeed I could not and did not advance upon it, but returned to time and daylight and the time-keeping of daily chatter, as best I might.
Now I write it out - it may seem no great matter to you - or to anyone who may read this account of it. And yet it was. It was a sign. I thought of Elizabeth in the days of her youth hunting in that same park with just such small hounds - a Virgin Huntress - an implacable Artemis - and I fancied I saw her fierce face in its whiteness and the deer running from her. (The full-fed ones I passed cropped the turf contentedly enough, or watched me like statues and snuffed the air of my passing.) Did you know that the Wild Hunt used sometimes, after passing through a homestead, to leave a little dog in the hearth which would be frighted with the right charm but otherwise stayed a year, eating the sustenance of the house, until the Huntsmen came again?
I shall write no more on this topic. I have made myself foolish enough and put my dignity wholly in your hands - with as much trust as you expressedtowards me in your never-to-be-forgotten last letter, which, as I said in opening, shall have its answer.
Let me have your view of my apparition -
Swammerdam needs a touch or two more. He was a queer intellect and a lostsoul - despised and rejected like so many great men - the circumstances of his life almost perfectly coincident with the great preoccupations - nay obsessions - of his nature. Think, my dear friend, of the variousness and the shape-shifting and the infinite extensibility of the humanspirit - that can at one time inhabit a stuffy Dutch Cabinet of Curiosities - and dissect a microscopic heart - andcontemplate a visionary water-hound in the brightest English air and leafiness - and tramp about Galilee considering the lilies of those fields with Renan, and pry unforgivably and infantasy into thesecrets of the unseen room where your head is bent over your paper - and you smile at your work - for by this time Melusina is embarked on and the knight comes to the encounter by the Fountain of Thirst -