The other side of the street there was
pavement again but no houses of any kind, and what there was in place
of them I did not stop to see, for I turned to my right and walked
along the back of Go-by Street till I came to the open fields and the
gardens of the cottages that I sought. Huge flowers went up out of
these gardens like slow rockets and burst into purple blooms and stood
there huge and radiant on six-foot stalks and softly sang strange
songs. Others came up beside them and bloomed and began singing too.
A very old witch came out of her cottage by the back door and into the
garden in which I stood.
"What are these wonderful flowers?" I said to her.
"Hush! Hush!" she said, "I am putting the poets to bed. These
flowers are their dreams."
And in a lower voice I said: "What wonderful songs are they singing?"
and she said, "Be still and listen."
And I listened and found they were singing of my own childhood and of
things that happened there so far away that I had quite forgotten them
till I heard the wonderful song.
"Why is the song so faint?" I said to her.
"Dead voices," she said, "Dead voices," and turned back again to her
cottage saying: "Dead voices" still, but softly for fear that she
should wake the poets. "They sleep so badly while they live," she
said.
I stole on tiptoe upstairs to the little room from whose windows,
looking one way, we see the fields we know and, looking another, those
hilly lands that I sought--almost I feared not to find them.
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