Then as I wandered in a place of dark leaves, beside the moat under the
frowning towers, I saw a kingfisher sit on a bough, his back powdered
with sapphires, his red breast, his wise head on one side, watching the
stream. In a moment he plunged and disappeared; in an instant he was
back again on his perch, flashing, like Excalibur, over the stream, his
prey in his bill.
For a long morning I wandered about, dizzied with beauty, gazing,
wondering, desiring I knew not what.
Then came the strange thought that this place of dreamful beauty should
be in the hands of a few simple ecclesiastical persons; the town is
little more than a village; century by century it has lived a little,
quiet provincial life. It has produced, so far as I know, no great man.
This soft air, this humid climate, sheltered from the wind, full of
warm sunlight, fed with dew, seems favourable to a long, comfortable,
indolent life. The beauty of the place seems to have had no particular
effect upon the people who live there. It has never been a centre of
thought or activity. It ought, one would have thought, to have produced
a certain kind of poetical temper, even though it were a temper of
indolent enjoyment rather than of creative force. But not even a beauty
born of murmuring sound--and the air is full of murmurs--seemed to have
passed into the faces of the simple townsfolk who make it their home.
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