The Heart of England/Chapter 24
CHAPTER XXIV
THE METAMORPHOSIS
As the sun rose I watched a proud ash tree shedding its leaves after a night of frost. It let them go by threes and tens and twenties; very rarely, with little intervals, only one at a time; once or twice a hundred in one flight. Leaflet—for they fall by leaflets—and stalk twirled through the windless air as if they would have liked to fall not quite so rapidly as their companions to that brown and shining and oblivious carpet below. A gentle wind arose from the north and the leaves all went sloping in larger companies to the ground—falling, falling, whispering as they joined the fallen, they fell for a longer time than a poppy spends in opening and shedding its husk in June. But soon only two leaves were left vibrating. In a little while they also, both together, make the leap, twinkling for a short space and then shadowed and lastly bright and silent on the grass. Then the tree stood up entirely bereaved and without a voice, in the silver light of the morning that was still young, and wrote once more its grief in complicated scribble upon a sky of intolerably lustrous pearl.
But by the next day the grief was healed, for what was clearest about its branches was the swiftness and downward rushing and curving flight which they suggested—as of birds stooping in lines to their tree-top nests—as of divers at the moment when their descent mingles with their ascent—as of winged Greek gods and goddesses slanting to earth with wave-like breasts.