192 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

human emotion at all. Like the shell of a house on
a bankrupt housing estate it had never been lived
in.

That poem of A. E. Housman's which begins

Tell me not here, it needs not saying,
What tune the enchantress plays

In aftermaths of soft September
Or under blanching mays.

For she and I were long acquainted
And I knew all her ways

had a curious fascination for me during those weeks;
it was like a succession of pleasant. sounds in a
foreign language; it represented the huge difference
between this Nature and what I had previously
know. I used to reserve it as a last resort for when I
could think of nothing else to tbink about: and recite
it very slowly to myself, wondering whether I had
covered a hundred yards between the first and the last
verse.

The poem had ceased to mean anything; it was
impossible here to rbink of Nature in such terms of
enchantment and nostalgia; it would have been like
cherishing a dead weed in a pot, a sign of mental
derangement.

And full of shade the pillared forest
Would murmur and be mine. . . .

So Housjnan wrote, sharing the feeling of Words*
worth and many English Nature poets, that Nature
something alive which could be possessed as