And it is all intoxicating. It is intoxicating almost like a
soporific, like a sensuous drug, to gather the burden to one's body in
the rain, to stumble across the living grass to the shed, to relieve
one's arms of the weight, to throw down the hay on to the heap, to feel
light and free in the dry shed, then to return again into the chill,
hard rain, to stoop again under the rain, and rise to return again with
the burden.
It is this, this endless heat and rousedness of physical sensation which
keeps the body full and potent, and flushes the mind with a blood heat,
a blood sleep. And this sleep, this heat of physical experience, becomes
at length a bondage, at last a crucifixion. It is the life and the
fulfilment of the peasant, this flow of sensuous experience. But at last
it drives him almost mad, because he cannot escape.
For overhead there is always the strange radiance of the mountains,
there is the mystery of the icy river rushing through its pink shoals
into the darkness of the pine-woods, there is always the faint tang of
ice on the air, and the rush of hoarse-sounding water.
And the ice and the upper radiance of snow are brilliant with timeless
immunity from the flux and the warmth of life.
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