Lake and Bird
I had one perfect day during one imperfect weekend. I woke immensely early to a morning full of birds on a rough hill sloping down from an old Berkshire parsonage by many ways and windings to the devious Housatonic. I went dabbling on my knees among innumerable daisies and buttercups and black-eyed Susans to find enough wild strawberries for my breakfast, and ate them with reckless oceans of cream kept the night in a spring so cold that on the most tropic days vessels come up from it clouded and beaded. I neglected the newspapers all day, hoeing and joyfully baking in my garden in the confident expectation of a blessed reward. And then at six precisely, by the sun, not the clock, I slipped, with some splashing, be it admitted, for my dive was eager, into the cool, sweet, quiet, well-sunned, but still tonic waters of an unforgettable lake. Repaid by the first keen shock for the whole day’s scorching, I shouted and ploughed to a deeper pool I know, where the water is never troubled and where now its crystal loneliness was broken by nothing but a few pink laurel-blossoms wind-shaken down upon it. Here I drifted, halcyon for that day, and waited. Not too late it came, the timid challenge, the flaunting confession, the liquid lament, the whistled prayer of the hermit thrush, pulsing through the replying air. I let the spell take me, and lay for a long while at the summit of rapture, not quite sure which was I, which was calm lake, and which was radiant bird.