Crambe repetita (23)
Even the shadowy reticulation of a West-country valley, the spring bloom upon fields and woods and red-brick villas that glorifies the tameness of Kent, are but poor thing in comparison with the Eastern counties in September: yellow stripes of mustard, jade stripes of cabbage, stripes of old rose which is the earth, a suggestion of pattern given by the heaps of manure and innumerable shocks of corn, an ardent gravity given by the red-brown of wheat stubble, such as the red-brown sails of a fishing boat give to the milky-blue of a summer sea; here and there a patch of green tarpaulin, and groups of thatched corn-ricks – shadowy, abstract, golden, and yet withal, homely edifices, like the cottages of those villages of Paradise whose smoke Herrick used to see in the distance. An agricultural country has this advantage over heaths and commons and pastoral land that the seasons walk across it visibly.
—Hope Mirrlees (The Counterplot, p.9f.)
