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Claude smiled at some such words of mine that day. ‘You talk often of the poetry of sport. I can see nothing in it but animal excitement, and a certain quantity, I suppose, of that animal cunning which the Red Indian possesses in common with the wolf and the cat, and any other beast of prey. As a fact, the majority of sportsmen are of the most unpoetical type of manhood.’

‘More unpoetical than the average man of business, or man of law, Claude? Or even than the average preacher? I believe, on the contrary, that for most of them it is sport which at once keeps alive and satisfies what you would call their aesthetic faculties, and so– smile if you will–helps to make them purer, simpler, more genial men.’

‘Little enough of aesthetic appears either in their conversation or their writing.’

‘Esau is a dumb soul, especially here in England; but he has as deep a heart in him as Jacob, nevertheless, and as tender. Do you fancy that the gentleman over whose book we were grumbling last night, attached no more to his own simple words than you do? His account of a stag’s run looks bald enough to you: but to him (unless Diana struck him blind for intruding on her privacy) what a whole poem of memories there must be in those few words,–“Turned down * * Water for a mile, and crossed the forest to Watersmeet, where he was run into after a gallant race.”‘

‘A whole poem?’

‘Why not? How can there be less, if he had eyes to see?’

‘Does he fancy that it is an account of a run to tell us that “Found at * * * * cover, held away at a slapping pace for * * * * Barn, then turned down the * * * Water for a mile, and crossed the Forest; made for * * * Hill, but being headed, went by ** ** woods to D * * * where he was run into after a gallant race of * * * * hours and * * * *miles”? It is nearly as dull as a history book!’

‘Nay, I never rode with those staghounds: and yet I can fill up his outline for him, wherever the stag was roused. Do you think that he never marked how the panting cavalcade rose and fell on the huge mile-long waves of that vast heather sea; how one long brown hill after another sunk down, greyer and greyer, behind them, and one long grey hill after another swelled up browner and browner before them; and how the sandstone rattled and flew beneath their feet, as the great horses, like Homer’s of old, “devoured up the plain;” and how they struggled down the hill-side, through bushes and rocks, and broad slipping rattling sheets of screes, and saw beneath them stag and pack galloping down the shallow glittering river-bed, throwing up the shingle, striking out the water in long glistening sheets; and how they too swept after them, down the flat valley, rounding crag and headland, which opened one after another in interminable vista, along the narrow strip of sand and rushes, speckled with stunted, moss-bearded, heather-bedded hawthorns, between the great grim lifeless mountain walls? Did he feel no pleasant creeping of the flesh that day at the sound of his own horse-hoofs, as they swept through the long ling with a sound as soft as the brushing of a woman’s tresses, and then rang down on the spongy, black, reverberating soil, chipping the honey-laden fragrant heather blossoms, and tossing them out in a rosy shower? Or, if that were really too slight a thing for the observation of an average sportsman, surely he must recollect the dying away of the hounds’ voices, as the woodland passes engulfed them, whether it were Brendon or at Badger-worthy, or any other place; how they brushed through the narrow forest paths, where the ashes were already golden, while the oaks still kept their sombre green, and the red leaves and berries of the mountain-ash showed bright beneath the dark forest aisles; and how all of a sudden the wild outcry before them seemed to stop and concentrate, thrown back, louder and louder as they rode, off the same echoing crag; till at a sudden turn of the road there stood the stag beneath them in the stream, his back against the black rock with its green cushions of dripping velvet, knee-deep in the clear amber water, the hounds around him, some struggling and swimming in the deep pool, some rolling and tossing and splashing in a mad, half- terrified ring, as he reared into the air on his great haunches, with the sparkling beads running off his red mane, and dropping on his knees, plunged his antlers down among them, with blows which would have each brought certain death with it if the yielding water had not broken the shock. Do you think that he does not remember the death? The huge carcass dragged out of the stream, followed by dripping, panting dogs; the blowing of the mort, and the last wild halloo, when the horn-note and the voices rang through the autumn woods, and rolled up the smooth flat mountain sides; and Brendon answered Countisbury, and Countisbury sent it on to Lynmouth hills, till it swept out of the gorge and died away upon the Severn sea? And then, does he not remember the pause, and the revulsion, and the feeling of sadness and littleness, almost of shame, as he looked up for the first time–one can pardon his not having done so before–and saw where he was, and the beauty of the hill-sides, with the lazy autumn clouds crawling about their tops, and the great sheets of screes, glaciers of stone covering acres and acres of the smooth hill-side, eating far into the woods below, bowing down the oak scrubs with their weight, and the circular sweeps of down, flecked with innumerable dark spots of gorse, each of them guarded where they open into the river chasm by two fortresses of “giant-snouted crags,”– delicate pink and grey sandstone, from which blocks and crumbling boulders have been toppling slowly down for ages, beneath the frost and the whirlwind, and now lie in long downward streams upon the slope, as if the mountain had been weeping tears of stone? And then, as the last notes of the mort had died away, did not there come over him an awe at the silence of the woods, not broken, but deepened, by the unvarying monotone of the roaring stream beneath, which flashed and glittered, half-hidden in the dark chasm, in clear brown pools reflecting every leaf and twig, in boiling pits and walls of foam, ever changing, and yet for ever the fleeting on past the poor dead reeking stag and the silent hounds lying about on the moss- embroidered stones, their lolling tongues showing like bright crimson sparkles in the deep rich Venetian air of the green sombre shades; while the startled water-ousel, with his white breast, flitted a few yards and stopped to stare from a rock’s point at the strange intruders; and a single stock-dove, out of the bosom of the wood, began calling sadly and softly, with a dreamy peaceful moan? Did he not see and hear all this, for surely it was there to see and hear?’