Immense Peace

The setting of The Wind in the Willows, clearly the banks of the Thames near Pangbourne, connects it with Oxford and Alice in Wonderland, likewise filled with animals—from the scurrying White Rabbit to the sensitive Dormouse who cannot abide talk of cats, and the angry pigeon who mistakes Alice for a serpent. And all inevitably bring to mind Beatrix Potter’s astonishing little books. Let me confess here that as a literal-minded four-year old I was reduced to hopeless weeping when I read the words “His eye fell on a pig,” in The Tale of Pigling Bland. I thought the poor man’s eye had actually become loose, tumbled from its socket and landed on a pig, and I had to be calmed down with much soothing.