The Tale of Beowulf Sometime King of the Folk of the Weder Geats
THE TALE OF BEOWULF Sometime King of the Folk of the Weder Geats Translated by WILLIAM MORRIS and A. J. WYATT Longmans, Green, and Co. 39 Paternoster Row, London New York and Bombay MCMIV Bibliographical Note
In the following week Robin went home again.
The clear weather of Easter had broken, and racing clouds, thick as a
pall, sped across the sky that had been so blue and so cheerful; a wind
screamed all day, now high, now low, shattering the tender flowers of
spring, ruffling the Derwent against its current, by which he rode, and
dashing spatters of rain now and again on his back, tossing high and
wide the branches under which he went, until the woods themselves became
as a great melancholy organ, making sad music about him.
When a mind is fluent and uncertain there is no describing it. He
thought he had come to a decision last week; he found that the decision
was shattered as soon as made. He had talked to the priest; he had
resisted Marjorie; and yet to neither of them had he put into formal
words what it was that troubled him. He had asked questions about
vocation, about the place that circumstance occupies in it, of the value
of dispositions, fears, scruples, and resistance. He had, that is,
fingered his wound, half uncovered it, and then covered it up again,
tormented it, glanced at it and then glanced aside; yet the one thing he
had not done was to probe it--not even to allow another to do so.
His mind, then, was fluent and distracted; it formed images before him,
which dissolved as soon as formed; it whirled in little eddies; it threw
up obscuring foam; it ran clear one instant, and the next broke itself
in rapids. He could neither ease it, nor dam it altogether, and he did
THE TALE OF BEOWULF Sometime King of the Folk of the Weder Geats Translated by WILLIAM MORRIS and A. J. WYATT Longmans, Green, and Co. 39 Paternoster Row, London New York and Bombay MCMIV Bibliographical Note