Author : Arthur Christopher Benson
Publisher : Forgotten Books
Page : 424 pages
File Size : 39,88 MB
Release : 2017-10-12
Category : Self-Help
ISBN : 9780265192085
Book Description
Excerpt from The Silent Isle A stream of hurrying life, here the world flows to you more rarely and deliberately. Indeed, there seems no influx of life at all, nothing but a quiet interchange of voyagers. Promotion arrives from no point of the compass; nothing but a little tide of homely life ebbs and flows in these elm-girt villages above the fen. Of course, the anxious and expectant heart carries its own restlessness every where; but to read of the rush and stress of life in these grassy solitudes seems like the telling of an idle tale. And then the silence of the place! The sounds of life have a value and a distinctness here that I have never known elsewhere. I have lived much of my life in towns; and there, even if one is not conscious of distinct sound, there is a blurred sense of movement in the air, which dulls the ear. But here the Sharp song of the yellow hammer from the hedge, or the cry of the owl from the spinney, come pure and keen through the thin air, purged of all uncertain murmurs. I can hear, it seems, a mile away, the rumble of the long procession of red mud-stained field-carts, or the hum'ming of the threshing-gear; or the chatter of children on the farm-road beyond my Shrubberies breaks clear and jocund on the ear. I become conscious here of how noisily and hurriedly I have lived my life; happily enough, I will confess; but the thought of it all - the class-room, the street, the playing-field - bright and vivacious as it all was, seems now like a boisterous prelude of blaring brass and tingling string, which lapses into some delicate economy of sweet melody and gliding. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.