And if by any chance a simple intelligent person from the country
comes in contact with any aspect of Nature unfamiliar and arresting,
such a person's comment is always worth remark. It is sometimes
an epigram, and at worst it is never a quotation.
Consider, for instance, what wastes of wordy imitation and ambiguity
the ordinary educated person in the big towns could pour out on the
subject of the sea. A country girl I know in the county of Buckingham
had never seen the sea in her life until the other day. When she
was asked what she thought of it she said it was like cauliflowers.
Now that is a piece of pure literature--vivid, entirely independent
and original, and perfectly true. I had always been haunted with
an analogous kinship which I could never locate; cabbages always
remind me of the sea and the sea always reminds me of cabbages.
It is partly, perhaps, the veined mingling of violet and green,
as in the sea a purple that is almost dark red may mix with a green
that is almost yellow, and still be the blue sea as a whole.
But it is more the grand curves of the cabbage that curl over
cavernously like waves, and it is partly again that dreamy repetition,
as of a pattern, that made two great poets, Eschylus and Shakespeare,
use a word like "multitudinous" of the ocean. But just where my
fancy halted the Buckinghamshire young woman rushed (so to speak)
to my imaginative rescue.
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