On the whole, however, the plants have little to complain of in the matter of names.  The milkwort that has been scattering its fine, delicate colours among the short grasses of the bare hills deserves its beautiful name, “grace of God.”  We think of it as the sprigging of a divine mantle cast over the June world.  The greater plantain, that after the recent rain has come out on the hills, with a ruff of purple feathers round its brown cone, neither deserves nor possesses a name connoting sacredness.  It is interesting mainly as a plant that somehow became associated with the voyages and travels of Englishmen, and is known in America as “Englishman’s foot,” because, wherever the Englishman goes, the plant follows him.

The riot of the spring flowers is already passing, however.  As we walk along the path through the corn, we find the wild mustard, that a few weeks ago made a steep field blaze like a precinct of the sun, already withering into a mass of green pods; and the hay in the valley has been cut down with all its crimson clover.  The smell of the tossed hay, as we pass, sends back the memory into an older world.  How is it that sweet smells do not please us so much for what they are as for the things of which they remind us?  At the smell of hay newly stacked we cease to be our present age; we are in a world as distant as that of Theocritus.  There is no ambition in it, no tears or taxes, no men and women pretending, nothing that is not happy.  Every scent is sweet, every sound is a laugh or a bird’s song.  Every man and woman and animal we behold is more interesting than if they had come out of a Noah’s Ark.  Smell has been described as the most sensual of the senses.  It may be so, but it is surely also the sense that is most closely related to the memory.  Old landscapes, old happinesses old gardens, old people, come to life again—­at times, almost unbearably so—­with the smell of wallflower or hay or the sea.  It may be, however, that this is not a universal experience.  Some of us, no doubt, live more in our memories than others:  it is our doom.

Even we, however, are sensualists of the open air, and the spectacle of the wind foaming among the leaves of the oak and elm can easily make us forget all but the present.  The blue hills in the distance when rain is about, the grey arras of wet that advances over the plain, the whitethroat that sings or rather scolds above the hedge as he dances on the wing, the tree-pipit—­or is it another bird?—­that sinks down to the juniper-tip through a honey of music, a rough sea seen in the distance, half shine, half scowl—­any of these things may easily cut us off from history and from hope and immure us in the present hour.  Or may they?  Or do these things too not leave us home-sick, discontented, gloomy—­gloomy if it is only because we are not nearly so gloomy as we ought to be?

XIII

ON FEELING GAY