The whole land now lies waiting for his work, and there is room in the landscape for imagination, just as there is room, too, for every ray, every modulation, of the light, and for the faithful reflection of every delicate interplay of shadow and shine.
From a line of willows at the foot of the hill, a thrush sent suddenly up a real “shout of Spring”; he was thinking, perhaps, of English April, yet this withered and wintry landscape before her was also, Millicent reflected, full of another, a figurative sort of spring, brimful of hope. The green leaves of the willows were famished to thin gold, and through them she could see the shining of a creek. It glittered between the dark sparkles of water-cresses as it neared the road; and the road crossed it by means of a little bridge buried in bushes of fuchsia, then climbed away up out of this nest of greenery, streaked the tawny opposite side of the great gully with white loops and angles and zigzags, and disappeared over the ridge into the next gully beyond.
Millicent did not miss it. Road and gully and widespread radiant stretches—all these were only the foreground. The picture, the real picture, lay still beyond—the unimpeded mountain-view. Away to the right, away to the left, ran the immense white barrier, of which, from this vantage-point, she could just discern both the beginning in the north, and, in the south, the end. Shaggy forest, showing at this distance darkly blue, clothed the foot of the ranges, the lower spurs were bare of snow, the middle heights were only slightly powdered—blue gullies gashed them, and they had brown
