A MILE from my cottage there is a small pond. It lies in the centre of a triangular lawn where two downland valleys meet. Except for the old shepherd, nobody knows of it. Though it has the beautiful shape of a dew pond, it is not one. It is only a common pond supplied by the surface water of the wide downland gorges, and yet it has always seemed to me to be enchanted. I have often thought as I have passed by it, my head full of meditations which had perhaps little relish of salvation in them, that one day, under a special dispensation, I shall receive from this little pool of water, from this small, green stoup of lustral water, a whisper as to the secret of life. It will be revealed to me, I have thought, as surely and as naturally as the presence of dew makes itself felt on folded twilight flowers found suddenly to be damp to the touch after the dry butterfly periods of a summer’s day.

Always hoping for this hour of grace, I have loitered by the pond’s edge at every season. I have observed with concentrated accuracy the changes that come over its surface. All through the winter months its waters are clear, but in the springtime the pond buttercups grow up and furnish a vegetable screen for the dabbling unrest of the newts, those little ancestors with orange bellies and gilded eyes who alone are privileged to experience the forgotten rhythm of saurian life. In summer the pond becomes green-mantled, the ranunculus disappears, and its place is taken by duckweed, with tiny, floating, sequin-round leaves. It is then that the tadpoles turn into frogs, and it is possible to catch one of these diminutive, yellow-green basilisks and set it upon the back of one’s hand to watch its globular throat blow in and blow out, until with a headlong leap it has escaped into the long grass.

A few seconds’ scrutiny of a frog, in all its perfection, corrects us of that gross apathy with which we too often approach the miracle of our fugitive existence. Use and wont, combined with the congenital lethargy of our kind, make of all life a commonplace thing. Our ordinary minds demand an ordinary world and feel at ease only when they have explained and taken for granted the immortal mysteries among which we have been given so short a license to breathe. Imagine the state of wonder that would possess our spirits had we been suddenly transported to the earth from some arid planet undisturbed by the miraculous urge of life. Why, we should exclaim as much over a little hip-frog as over a thumb-high whelp of a hippogriff surprised under a dock leaf. We should then no longer be blind to the planet’s mysticism latent in wood and stone. A sea gull’s feather picked up would shock us into the excitement we now should feel at finding the pinion of an errant cherubim. We should stand still as a stock to contemplate so slender a quill of air-filled horn which, with its filaments of adhering thistledown, can fan the heavy bodies of animals buoyant through the air. At every step we took we should be startled afresh.

We should stand at the sea’s margin only to learn that the summer waves, dancing like lambs against the congregated beaches, were peopled with legless animals silver-plated, and with the gift of flashing motion. The astonishment we should feel at seeing a cheap ant would keep us on our knees before the galleried citadels of the pismires till nightfall. Could it be possible that insects, scarcely as large as grass seeds, are diligently obedient to laws of a civil polity? And a butterfly seen for the first time — what spectacle so delicate? A painted lady on a scabious, or two chalk-hill blues knit together upon a grass pennant, motionless under the bewitchment of a love more dainty-sweet than the concupiscence of toadstool faëries!

The West Chaldon shepherd told me once that he had seen the ghost of a cow walk into the pond and vanish. ‘There were no stock on down at the time, and she vanished from my eyes as quick as fox in fern.’ I was not surprised by this rumor. The pond was a pond of enchantment. I had always known it. It is a mirror that reflects God’s moving shadows.

It was on a soft evening of this last September that there came to me the breath of the knowledge I sought. Beneath the globe of the sky the downs raised their patient green shoulders with noble simplicity. Recumbent cattle could not have imparted to the mood of that hour a deeper peace. The last rays of the sun touched to brightest silver the fluff of the thistles withered and brown. All was silent, all was expectant. Herring gulls, with swift, inaudible flight, were breasting seaward over the storm-bowed thorn trees on the ridge opposite. Then it was that the messenger for whom I had waited revealed itself at last.

It was a hare. I saw her from far away and did not so much as venture to move a finger. She approached with uncertain steps — now advancing, now retreating, now frolicsome, now grave. The secret nature of the hills seemed during those suspended moments to be open to her sensitive spirit. Like the innocence of a child was the light on the swaying grass ends through which the russet creature, with elf-high ears, gamboled. Nearer and nearer she came. Was she actually coming to drink? Was it possible that I should see her lower her soft brown chin to the water within ten yards of me? Surely if I were permitted to witness so delicate an operation, then at last I should hear the word spoken. I waited and waited. The stillness of the evening was so profound that I could have heard the fur of a field mouse’s jacket brush against the stems of the grass forest of its exploration, while against the skv, infinitely remote, the moon hung in speechless calm.

This hour of glamour in the downland valley was, I knew well, but of an inconsequent second’s duration in the moon’s agelong espionage of the earth’s physical being. She had seen the magical and molten ash of the earth’s orb stirred with the trouble of life. She had seen passionate phantoms, resolute and adroit, raise themselves out of the dust. She had heard them cry out to the gods whose thoroughfares are uncatalogued star spaces. She had seen them go stumbling through lucky grass, their hearts distraught with love. She herself was part of the profound mystery of the humming firmament, the outer rim of which, for a few scattered moments, has been envisaged by the dreaming minds of men. The truth resides in matter’s proud processions as they are revealed to our uncertain senses. In what can be seen, in what can be heard, in what can be touched, tasted, and felt, there is no treason. Only these messengers can be trusted. Here are the golden threads which alone can lead us without betrayal to those true states of beatific vision, ephemeral and sublime, wherein through the medium of our vulgar faculties we may see immortal movement, bright and clear, upon the bypaths of our faery planet.

I was suddenly awakened from my rapture. I had heard a sound, an uncommon sound, a sound tender and sensitive and fresh as soft rain upon the leaf of a parched flower. It was the hare drinking.

LLEWELYN POWYS