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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Spirit of Place, by Alice Meynell
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Spirit of Place
+
+Author: Alice Meynell
+
+Release Date: March 15, 2005  [eBook #1309]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SPIRIT OF PLACE***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1899 John Lane edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+The Spirit of Place and Other Essays
+
+
+Contents:
+
+The Spirit of Place
+Mrs. Dingley
+Solitude
+The Lady of the Lyrics
+July
+Wells
+The Foot
+Have Patience, Little Saint
+The Ladies of the Idyll
+A Derivation
+A Counterchange
+Rain
+Letters of Marceline Valmore
+The Hours of Sleep
+The Horizon
+Habits and Consciousness
+Shadows
+
+
+
+
+THE SPIRIT OF PLACE
+
+
+With mimicry, with praises, with echoes, or with answers, the poets have
+all but outsung the bells.  The inarticulate bell has found too much
+interpretation, too many rhymes professing to close with her inaccessible
+utterance, and to agree with her remote tongue.  The bell, like the bird,
+is a musician pestered with literature.
+
+To the bell, moreover, men do actual violence.  You cannot shake together
+a nightingale's notes, or strike or drive them into haste, nor can you
+make a lark toll for you with intervals to suit your turn, whereas
+wedding-bells are compelled to seem gay by mere movement and hustling.  I
+have known some grim bells, with not a single joyous note in the whole
+peal, so forced to hurry for a human festival, with their harshness made
+light of, as though the Bishop of Hereford had again been forced to dance
+in his boots by a merry highwayman.
+
+The clock is an inexorable but less arbitrary player than the bellringer,
+and the chimes await their appointed time to fly--wild prisoners--by twos
+or threes, or in greater companies.  Fugitives--one or twelve taking
+wing--they are sudden, they are brief, they are gone; they are delivered
+from the close hands of this actual present.  Not in vain is the sudden
+upper door opened against the sky; they are away, hours of the past.
+
+Of all unfamiliar bells, those which seem to hold the memory most surely
+after but one hearing are bells of an unseen cathedral of France when one
+has arrived by night; they are no more to be forgotten than the bells in
+"Parsifal."  They mingle with the sound of feet in unknown streets, they
+are the voices of an unknown tower; they are loud in their own language.
+The spirit of place, which is to be seen in the shapes of the fields and
+the manner of the crops, to be felt in a prevalent wind, breathed in the
+breath of the earth, overheard in a far street-cry or in the tinkle of
+some black-smith, calls out and peals in the cathedral bells.  It speaks
+its local tongue remotely, steadfastly, largely, clamorously, loudly, and
+greatly by these voices; you hear the sound in its dignity, and you know
+how familiar, how childlike, how life-long it is in the ears of the
+people.  The bells are strange, and you know how homely they must be.
+Their utterances are, as it were, the classics of a dialect.
+
+Spirit of place!  It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and
+where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides
+entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath,
+its name.  It is recalled all a lifetime, having been perceived a week,
+and is not scattered but abides, one living body of remembrance.  The
+untravelled spirit of place--not to be pursued, for it never flies, but
+always to be discovered, never absent, without variation--lurks in the by-
+ways and rules over the towers, indestructible, an indescribable unity.
+It awaits us always in its ancient and eager freshness.  It is sweet and
+nimble within its immemorial boundaries, but it never crosses them.  Long
+white roads outside have mere suggestions of it and prophecies; they give
+promise not of its coming, for it abides, but of a new and singular and
+unforeseen goal for our present pilgrimage, and of an intimacy to be
+made.  Was ever journey too hard or too long that had to pay such a
+visit?  And if by good fortune it is a child who is the pilgrim, the
+spirit of place gives him a peculiar welcome, for antiquity and the
+conceiver of antiquity (who is only a child) know one another; nor is
+there a more delicate perceiver of locality than a child.  He is well
+used to words and voices that he does not understand, and this is a
+condition of his simplicity; and when those unknown words are bells, loud
+in the night, they are to him as homely and as old as lullabies.
+
+If, especially in England, we make rough and reluctant bells go in gay
+measures, when we whip them to run down the scale to ring in a
+wedding--bells that would step to quite another and a less agile march
+with a better grace--there are belfries that hold far sweeter companies.
+If there is no music within Italian churches, there is a most curious
+local immemorial music in many a campanile on the heights.  Their way is
+for the ringers to play a tune on the festivals, and the tunes are not
+hymn tunes or popular melodies, but proper bell-tunes, made for bells.
+Doubtless they were made in times better versed than ours in the
+sub-divisions of the arts, and better able to understand the strength
+that lies ready in the mere little submission to the means of a little
+art, and to the limits--nay, the very embarrassments--of those means.  If
+it were but possible to give here a real bell-tune--which cannot be, for
+those melodies are rather long--the reader would understand how some
+village musician of the past used his narrow means as a composer for the
+bells, with what freshness, completeness, significance, fancy, and what
+effect of liberty.
+
+These hamlet-bells are the sweetest, as to their own voices, in the
+world.  Then I speak of their antiquity I use the word relatively.  The
+belfries are no older than the sixteenth or seventeenth century, the time
+when Italy seems to have been generally rebuilt.  But, needless to say,
+this is antiquity for music, especially in Italy.  At that time they must
+have had foundries for bells of tender voices, and pure, warm, light, and
+golden throats, precisely tuned.  The hounds of Theseus had not a more
+just scale, tuned in a peal, than a North Italian belfry holds in leash.
+But it does not send them out in a mere scale, it touches them in the
+order of the game of a charming melody.  Of all cheerful sounds made by
+man this is by far the most light-hearted.  You do not hear it from the
+great churches.  Giotto's coloured tower in Florence, that carries the
+bells for Santa Maria del Fiore and Brunelleschi's silent dome, does not
+ring more than four contralto notes, tuned with sweetness, depth, and
+dignity, and swinging one musical phrase which softly fills the country.
+
+The village belfry it is that grows so fantastic and has such nimble
+bells.  Obviously it stands alone with its own village, and can therefore
+hear its own tune from beginning to end.  There are no other bells in
+earshot.  Other such dovecote-doors are suddenly set open to the cloud,
+on a _festa_ morning, to let fly those soft-voiced flocks, but the
+nearest is behind one of many mountains, and our local tune is
+uninterrupted.  Doubtless this is why the little, secluded, sequestered
+art of composing melodies for bells--charming division of an art, having
+its own ends and means, and keeping its own wings for unfolding by
+law--dwells in these solitary places.  No tunes in a town would get this
+hearing, or would be made clear to the end of their frolic amid such a
+wide and lofty silence.
+
+Nor does every inner village of Italy hold a bell-tune of its own; the
+custom is Ligurian.  Nowhere so much as in Genoa does the nervous tourist
+complain of church bells in the morning, and in fact he is made to hear
+an honest rout of them betimes.  But the nervous tourist has not,
+perhaps, the sense of place, and the genius of place does not signal to
+him to go and find it among innumerable hills, where one by one, one by
+one, the belfries stand and play their tunes.  Variable are those lonely
+melodies, having a differing gaiety for the festivals; and a pitiful air
+is played for the burial of a villager.
+
+As for the poets, there is but one among so many of their bells that
+seems to toll with a spiritual music so loud as to be unforgotten when
+the mind goes up a little higher than the earth, to listen in thought to
+earth's untethered sounds.  This is Milton's curfew, that sways across
+one of the greatest of all the seashores of poetry--"the wide-watered."
+
+
+
+
+MRS. DINGLEY
+
+
+We cannot do her honour by her Christian name. {1}  All we have to call
+her by more tenderly is the mere D, the D that ties her to Stella, with
+whom she made the two-in-one whom Swift loved "better a thousand times
+than life, as hope saved."  MD, without full stops, Swift writes it eight
+times in a line for the pleasure of writing it.  "MD sometimes means
+Stella alone," says one of many editors.  "The letters were written
+nominally to Stella and Mrs. Dingley," says another, "but it does not
+require to be said that it was really for Stella's sake alone that they
+were penned."  Not so.  "MD" never stands for Stella alone.  And the
+editor does not yet live who shall persuade one honest reader, against
+the word of Swift, that Swift loved Stella only, with an ordinary love,
+and not, by a most delicate exception, Stella and Dingley, so joined that
+they make the "she" and "her" of every letter.  And this shall be a paper
+of reparation to Mrs. Dingley.
+
+No one else in literary history has been so defrauded of her honours.  In
+love "to divide is not to take away," as Shelley says; and Dingley's half
+of the tender things said to MD is equal to any whole, and takes nothing
+from the whole of Stella's half.  But the sentimentalist has fought
+against Mrs. Dingley from the outset.  He has disliked her, shirked her,
+misconceived her, and effaced her.  Sly sentimentalist--he finds her
+irksome.  Through one of his most modern representatives he has but
+lately called her a "chaperon."  A chaperon!
+
+MD was not a sentimentalist.  Stella was not so, though she has been
+pressed into that character; D certainly was not, and has in this respect
+been spared by the chronicler; and MD together were "saucy charming MD,"
+"saucy little, pretty, dear rogues," "little monkeys mine," "little
+mischievous girls," "nautinautinautidear girls," "brats," "huzzies both,"
+"impudence and saucy-face," "saucy noses," "my dearest lives and
+delights," "dear little young women," "good dallars, not crying dallars"
+(which means "girls"), "ten thousand times dearest MD," and so forth in a
+hundred repetitions.  They are, every now and then, "poor MD," but
+obviously not because of their own complaining.  Swift called them so
+because they were mortal; and he, like all great souls, lived and loved,
+conscious every day of the price, which is death.
+
+The two were joined by love, not without solemnity, though man, with his
+summary and wholesale ready-made sentiment, has thus obstinately put them
+asunder.  No wholesale sentiment can do otherwise than foolishly play
+havoc with such a relation.  To Swift it was the most secluded thing in
+the world.  "I am weary of friends, and friendships are all monsters,
+except MD's;" "I ought to read these letters I write after I have done.
+But I hope it does not puzzle little Dingley to read, for I think I mend:
+but methinks," he adds, "when I write plain, I do not know how, but we
+are not alone, all the world can see us.  A bad scrawl is so snug; it
+looks like PMD."  Again: "I do not like women so much as I did.  MD, you
+must know, are not women."  "God Almighty preserve you both and make us
+happy together."  "I say Amen with all my heart and vitals, that we may
+never be asunder ten days together while poor Presto lives."  "Farewell,
+dearest beloved MD, and love poor, poor Presto, who has not had one happy
+day since he left you, as hope saved."
+
+With them--with her--he hid himself in the world, at Court, at the bar of
+St. James's coffee-house, whither he went on the Irish mail-day, and was
+"in pain except he saw MD's little handwriting."  He hid with them in the
+long labours of these exquisite letters every night and morning.  If no
+letter came, he comforted himself with thinking that "he had it yet to be
+happy with."  And the world has agreed to hide under its own manifold and
+lachrymose blunders the grace and singularity--the distinction--of this
+sweet romance.  "Little, sequestered pleasure-house"--it seemed as though
+"the many could not miss it," but not even the few have found it.
+
+It is part of the scheme of the sympathetic historian that Stella should
+be the victim of hope deferred, watching for letters from Swift.  But day
+and night Presto complains of the scantiness of MD's little letters; he
+waits upon "her" will: "I shall make a sort of journal, and when it is
+full I will send it whether MD writes or not; and so that will be
+pretty."  "Naughty girls that will not write to a body!"  "I wish you
+were whipped for forgetting to send.  Go, be far enough, negligent
+baggages."  "You, Mistress Stella, shall write your share, and then comes
+Dingley altogether, and then Stella a little crumb at the end; and then
+conclude with something handsome and genteel, as 'your most humble
+cumdumble.'"  But Scott and Macaulay and Thackeray are all exceedingly
+sorry for Stella.
+
+Swift is most charming when he is feigning to complain of his task: "Here
+is such a stir and bustle with this little MD of ours; I must be writing
+every night; O Lord, O Lord!"  "I must go write idle things, and twittle
+twattle."  "These saucy jades take up so much of my time with writing to
+them in the morning."  Is it not a stealthy wrong done upon Mrs. Dingley
+that she should be stripped of all these ornaments to her name and
+memory?  When Swift tells a woman in a letter that there he is "writing
+in bed, like a tiger," she should go gay in the eyes of all generations.
+
+They will not let Stella go gay, because of sentiment; and they will not
+let Mrs. Dingley go gay, because of sentiment for Stella.  Marry come up!
+Why did not the historians assign all the tender passages (taken very
+seriously) to Stella, and let Dingley have the jokes, then?  That would
+have been no ill share for Dingley.  But no, forsooth, Dingley is allowed
+nothing.
+
+There are passages, nevertheless, which can hardly be taken from her.  For
+now and then Swift parts his dear MD.  When he does so he invariably
+drops those initials and writes "Stella" or "Ppt" for the one, and "D" or
+"Dingley" for the other.  There is no exception to this anywhere.  He is
+anxious about Stella's "little eyes," and about her health generally;
+whereas Dingley is strong.  Poor Ppt, he thinks, will not catch the "new
+fever," because she is not well; "but why should D escape it, pray?"  And
+Mrs. Dingley is rebuked for her tale of a journey from Dublin to Wexford.
+"I doubt, Madam Dingley, you are apt to lie in your travels, though not
+so bad as Stella; she tells thumpers."  Stella is often reproved for her
+spelling, and Mrs. Dingley writes much the better hand.  But she is a
+puzzle-headed woman, like another.  "What do you mean by my fourth
+letter, Madam Dinglibus?  Does not Stella say you had my fifth, goody
+Blunder?"  "Now, Mistress Dingley, are you not an impudent slut to except
+a letter next packet?  Unreasonable baggage!  No, little Dingley, I am
+always in bed by twelve, and I take great care of myself."  "You are a
+pretending slut, indeed, with your 'fourth' and 'fifth' in the margin,
+and your 'journal' and everything.  O Lord, never saw the like, we shall
+never have done."  "I never saw such a letter, so saucy, so journalish,
+so everything."  Swift is insistently grateful for their inquiries for
+his health.  He pauses seriously to thank them in the midst of his
+prattle.  Both women--MD--are rallied on their politics: "I have a fancy
+that Ppt is a Tory, I fancy she looks like one, and D a sort of trimmer."
+
+But it is for Dingley separately that Swift endured a wild bird in his
+lodgings.  His man Patrick had got one to take over to her in Ireland.
+"He keeps it in a closet, where it makes a terrible litter; but I say
+nothing; I am as tame as a clout."
+
+Forgotten Dingley, happy in this, has not had to endure the ignominy, in
+a hundred essays, to be retrospectively offered to Swift as an unclaimed
+wife; so far so good.  But two hundred years is long for her to have gone
+stripped of so radiant a glory as is hers by right.  "Better, thanks to
+MD's prayers," wrote the immortal man who loved her, in a private
+fragment of a journal, never meant for Dingley's eyes, nor for Ppt's, nor
+for any human eyes; and the rogue Stella has for two centuries stolen all
+the credit of those prayers, and all the thanks of that pious
+benediction.
+
+
+
+
+SOLITUDE
+
+
+The wild man is alone at will, and so is the man for whom civilization
+has been kind.  But there are the multitudes to whom civilization has
+given little but its reaction, its rebound, its chips, its refuse, its
+shavings, sawdust and waste, its failures; to them solitude is a right
+foregone or a luxury unattained; a right foregone, we may name it, in the
+case of the nearly savage, and a luxury unattained in the case of the
+nearly refined.  These has the movement of the world thronged together
+into some blind by-way.
+
+Their share in the enormous solitude which is the common, unbounded, and
+virtually illimitable possession of all mankind has lapsed, unclaimed.
+They do not know it is theirs.  Of many of their kingdoms they are
+ignorant, but of this most ignorant.  They have not guessed that they own
+for every man a space inviolate, a place of unhidden liberty and of no
+obscure enfranchisement.  They do not claim even the solitude of closed
+corners, the narrow privacy of the lock and key; nor could they command
+so much.  For the solitude that has a sky and a horizon they know not how
+to wish.
+
+It lies in a perpetual distance.  England has leagues thereof,
+landscapes, verge beyond verge, a thousand thousand places in the woods,
+and on uplifted hills.  Or rather, solitudes are not to be measured by
+miles; they are to be numbered by days.  They are freshly and freely the
+dominion of every man for the day of his possession.  There is loneliness
+for innumerable solitaries.  As many days as there are in all the ages,
+so many solitudes are there for men.  This is the open house of the
+earth; no one is refused.  Nor is the space shortened or the silence
+marred because, one by one, men in multitudes have been alone there
+before.  Solitude is separate experience.  Nay, solitudes are not to be
+numbered by days, but by men themselves.  Every man of the living and
+every man of the dead might have had his "privacy of light."
+
+It needs no park.  It is to be found in the merest working country; and a
+thicket may be as secret as a forest.  It is not so difficult to get for
+a time out of sight and earshot.  Even if your solitude be enclosed, it
+is still an open solitude, so there be "no cloister for the eyes," and a
+space of far country or a cloud in the sky be privy to your hiding-place.
+But the best solitude does not hide at all.
+
+This the people who have drifted together into the streets live whole
+lives and never know.  Do they suffer from their deprivation of even the
+solitude of the hiding-place?  There are many who never have a whole hour
+alone.  They live in reluctant or indifferent companionship, as people
+may in a boarding-house, by paradoxical choice, familiar with one another
+and not intimate.  They live under careless observation and subject to a
+vagabond curiosity.  Theirs is the involuntary and perhaps the
+unconscious loss which is futile and barren.
+
+One knows the men, and the many women, who have sacrificed all their
+solitude to the perpetual society of the school, the cloister, or the
+hospital ward.  They walk without secrecy, candid, simple, visible,
+without moods, unchangeable, in a constant communication and practice of
+action and speech.  Theirs assuredly is no barren or futile loss, and
+they have a conviction, and they bestow the conviction, of solitude
+deferred.
+
+Who has painted solitude so that the solitary seemed to stand alone and
+inaccessible?  There is the loneliness of the shepherdess in many a
+drawing of J.F. Millet.  The little figure is away, aloof.  The girl
+stands so when the painter is gone.  She waits so on the sun for the
+closing of the hours of pasture.  Millet has her as she looks, out of
+sight.
+
+Now, although solitude is a prepared, secured, defended, elaborate
+possession of the rich, they too deny themselves the natural solitude of
+a woman with a child.  A newly-born child is so nursed and talked about,
+handled and jolted and carried about by aliens, and there is so much
+importunate service going forward, that a woman is hardly alone long
+enough to become aware, in recollection, how her own blood moves
+separately, beside her, with another rhythm and different pulses.  All is
+commonplace until the doors are closed upon the two.  This unique
+intimacy is a profound retreat, an absolute seclusion.  It is more than
+single solitude; it is a redoubled isolation more remote than mountains,
+safer than valleys, deeper than forests, and further than mid-sea.
+
+That solitude partaken--the only partaken solitude in the world--is the
+Point of Honour of ethics.  Treachery to that obligation and a betrayal
+of that confidence might well be held to be the least pardonable of all
+crimes.  There is no innocent sleep so innocent as sleep shared between a
+woman and a child, the little breath hurrying beside the longer, as a
+child's foot runs.  But the favourite crime of the sentimentalist is that
+of a woman against her child.  Her power, her intimacy, her opportunity,
+that should be her accusers, are held to excuse her.  She gains the most
+slovenly of indulgences and the grossest compassion, on the vulgar
+grounds that her crime was easy.
+
+Lawless and vain art of a certain kind is apt to claim to-day, by the
+way, some such fondling as a heroine of the dock receives from common
+opinion.  The vain artist had all the opportunities of the situation.  He
+was master of his own purpose, such as it was; it was his secret, and the
+public was not privy to his artistic conscience.  He does violence to the
+obligations of which he is aware, and which the world does not know very
+explicitly.  Nothing is easier.  Or he is lawless in a more literal
+sense, but only hopes the world will believe that he has a whole code of
+his own making.  It would, nevertheless, be less unworthy to break
+obvious rules obviously in the obvious face of the public, and to abide
+the common rebuke.
+
+It has just been said that a park is by no means necessary for the
+preparation of a country solitude.  Indeed, to make those far and wide
+and long approaches and avenues to peace seems to be a denial of the
+accessibility of what should be so simple.  A step, a pace or so aside,
+is enough to lead thither.
+
+A park insists too much, and, besides, does not insist very sincerely.  In
+order to fulfil the apparent professions and to keep the published
+promise of a park, the owner thereof should be a lover of long seclusion
+or of a very life of loneliness.  He should have gained the state of
+solitariness which is a condition of life quite unlike any other.  The
+traveller who may have gone astray in countries where an almost life-long
+solitude is possible knows how invincibly apart are the lonely figures he
+has seen in desert places there.  Their loneliness is broken by his
+passage, it is true, but hardly so to them.  They look at him, but they
+are not aware that he looks at them.  Nay, they look at him as though
+they were invisible.  Their un-self-consciousness is absolute; it is in
+the wild degree.  They are solitaries, body and soul; even when they are
+curious, and turn to watch the passer-by, they are essentially alone.
+Now, no one ever found that attitude in a squire's figure, or that look
+in any country gentleman's eyes.  The squire is not a life-long solitary.
+He never bore himself as though he were invisible.  He never had the
+impersonal ways of a herdsman in the remoter Apennines, with a blind,
+blank hut in the rocks for his dwelling.  Millet would not even have
+taken him as a model for a solitary in the briefer and milder sylvan
+solitudes of France.  And yet nothing but a life-long, habitual, and wild
+solitariness would be quite proportionate to a park of any magnitude.
+
+If there is a look of human eyes that tells of perpetual loneliness, so
+there is also the familiar look that is the sign of perpetual crowds.  It
+is the London expression, and, in its way, the Paris expression.  It is
+the quickly caught, though not interested, look, the dull but ready
+glance of those who do not know of their forfeited place apart; who have
+neither the open secret nor the close; no reserve, no need of refuge, no
+flight nor impulse of flight; no moods but what they may brave out in the
+street, no hope of news from solitary counsels.
+
+
+
+
+THE LADY OF THE LYRICS
+
+
+She is eclipsed, or gone, or in hiding.  But the sixteenth century took
+her for granted as the object of song; she was a class, a state, a sex.
+It was scarcely necessary to waste the lyrist's time--time that went so
+gaily to metre as not to brook delays--in making her out too clearly.  She
+had no more of what later times call individuality than has the rose, her
+rival, her foil when she was kinder, her superior when she was cruel, her
+ever fresh and ever conventional paragon.  She needed not to be devised
+or divined; she was ready.  A merry heart goes all the day; the lyrist's
+never grew weary.  Honest men never grow tired of bread or of any other
+daily things whereof the sweetness is in their own simplicity.
+
+The lady of the lyrics was not loved in mortal earnest, and her
+punishment now and then for her ingratitude was to be told that she was
+loved in jest.  She did not love; her fancy was fickle; she was not moved
+by long service, which, by the way, was evidently to be taken for granted
+precisely like the whole long past of a dream.  She had not a good
+temper.  When the poet groans it seems that she has laughed at him; when
+he flouts her, we may understand that she has chidden her lyrist in no
+temperate terms.  In doing this she has sinned not so much against him as
+against Love.  With that she is perpetually reproved.  The lyrist
+complains to Love, pities Love for her scorning, and threatens to go away
+with Love, who is on his side.  The sweetest verse is tuned to love when
+the loved one proves worthy.
+
+There is no record of success for this policy.  She goes on dancing or
+scolding, as the case may be, and the lyrist goes on boasting of his
+constancy, or suddenly renounces it for a day.  The situation has
+variants, but no surprise or ending.  The lover's convention is explicit
+enough, but it might puzzle a reader to account for the lady's.  Pride in
+her beauty, at any rate, is hers--pride so great that she cannot bring
+herself to perceive the shortness of her day.  She is so unobservant as
+to need to be told that life is brief, and youth briefer than life; that
+the rose fades, and so forth.
+
+Now we need not assume that the lady of the lyrics ever lived.  But
+taking her as the perfectly unanimous conception of the lyrists, how is
+it she did not discover these things unaided?  Why does the lover
+invariably imagine her with a mind intensely irritable under his own
+praise and poetry?  Obviously we cannot have her explanation of any of
+these matters.  Why do the poets so much lament the absence of truth in
+one whose truth would be of little moment?  And why was the convention so
+pleasant, among all others, as to occupy a whole age--nay, two great
+ages--of literature?
+
+Music seems to be principally answerable.  For the lyrics of the lady are
+"words for music" by a great majority.  There is hardly a single poem in
+the Elizabethan Song-books, properly so named, that has what would in our
+day be called a tone of sentiment.  Music had not then the tone herself;
+she was ingenious, and so must the words be.  She had the air of epigram,
+and an accurately definite limit.  So, too, the lady of the lyrics, who
+might be called the lady of the stanzas, so strictly does she go by
+measure.  When she is quarrelsome, it is but fuguishness; when she
+dances, she does it by a canon.  She could not but be perverse, merrily
+sung to such grave notes.
+
+So fixed was the law of this perversity that none in the song-books is
+allowed to be kind enough for a "melody," except one lady only.  She may
+thus derogate, for the exceedingly Elizabethan reason that she is
+"brown."  She is brown and kind, and a "sad flower," but the song made
+for her would have been too insipid, apparently, without an antithesis.
+The fair one is warned that her disdain makes her even less lovely than
+the brown.
+
+Fair as a lily, hard to please, easily angry, ungrateful for innumerable
+verses, uncertain with the regularity of the madrigal, and inconstant
+with the punctuality of a stanza, she has gone with the arts of that day;
+and neither verse nor music will ever make such another lady.  She
+refused to observe the transiency of roses; she never really
+intended--much as she was urged--to be a shepherdess; she was never
+persuaded to mitigate her dress.  In return, the world has let her
+disappear.  She scorned the poets until they turned upon her in the
+epigram of many a final couplet; and of these the last has been long
+written.  Her "No" was set to counterpoint in the part-song, and she
+frightened Love out of her sight in a ballet.  Those occupations are
+gone, and the lovely Elizabethan has slipped away.  She was something
+less than mortal.
+
+But she who was more than mortal was mortal too.  This was no lady of the
+unanimous lyrists, but a rare visitant unknown to these exquisite little
+talents.  She was not set for singing, but poetry spoke of her; sometimes
+when she was sleeping, and then Fletcher said--
+
+   None can rock Heaven to sleep but her.
+
+Or when she was singing, and Carew rhymed--
+
+   Ask me no more whither doth haste
+   The nightingale when May is past;
+   For in your sweet dividing throat
+   She winters, and keeps warm her note.
+
+Sometimes when the lady was dead, and Carew, again, wrote on her
+monument--
+
+   And here the precious dust is laid,
+   Whose purely-tempered clay was made
+   So fine that it the guest betrayed.
+
+But there was besides another Lady of the lyrics; one who will never pass
+from the world, but has passed from song.  In the sixteenth century and
+in the seventeenth century this lady was Death.  Her inspiration never
+failed; not a poet but found it as fresh as the inspiration of life.
+Fancy was not quenched by the inevitable thought in those days, as it is
+in ours, and the phrase lost no dignity by the integrity of use.
+
+To every man it happens that at one time of his life--for a space of
+years or for a space of months--he is convinced of death with an
+incomparable reality.  It might seem as though literature, living the
+life of a man, underwent that conviction in those ages.  Death was as
+often on the tongues of men in older ages, and oftener in their hands,
+but in the sixteenth century it was at their hearts.  The discovery of
+death did not shake the poets from their composure.  On the contrary, the
+verse is never measured with more majestic effect than when it moves in
+honour of this Lady of the lyrics.  Sir Walter Raleigh is but a jerky
+writer when he is rhyming other things, however bitter or however solemn;
+but his lines on death, which are also lines on immortality, are
+infinitely noble.  These are, needless to say, meditations upon death by
+law and violence; and so are the ingenious rhymes of Chidiock Tichborne,
+written after his last prose in his farewell letter to his wife--"Now,
+Sweet-cheek, what is left to bestow on thee, a small recompense for thy
+deservings"--and singularly beautiful prose is this.  So also are
+Southwell's words.  But these are exceptional deaths, and more dramatic
+than was needed to awake the poetry of the meditative age.
+
+It was death as the end of the visible world and of the idle business of
+life--not death as a passage nor death as a fear or a darkness--that was
+the Lady of the lyrists.  Nor was their song of the act of dying.  With
+this a much later and much more trivial literature busied itself.  Those
+two centuries felt with a shock that death would bring an end, and that
+its equalities would make vain the differences of wit and wealth which
+they took apparently more seriously than to us seems probable.  They
+never wearied of the wonder.  The poetry of our day has an entirely
+different emotion for death as parting.  It was not parting that the
+lyrists sang of; it was the mere simplicity of death.  None of our
+contemporaries will take such a subject; they have no more than the
+ordinary conviction of the matter.  For the great treatment of obvious
+things there must evidently be an extraordinary conviction.
+
+But whether the chief Lady of the lyrics be this, or whether she be the
+implacable Elizabethan feigned by the love-songs, she has equally passed
+from before the eyes of poets.
+
+
+
+
+JULY
+
+
+One has the leisure of July for perceiving all the differences of the
+green of leaves.  It is no longer a difference in degrees of maturity,
+for all the trees have darkened to their final tone, and stand in their
+differences of character and not of mere date.  Almost all the green is
+grave, not sad and not dull.  It has a darkened and a daily colour, in
+majestic but not obvious harmony with dark grey skies, and might look, to
+inconstant eyes, as prosaic after spring as eleven o'clock looks after
+the dawn.
+
+Gravity is the word--not solemnity as towards evening, nor menace as at
+night.  The daylight trees of July are signs of common beauty, common
+freshness, and a mystery familiar and abiding as night and day.  In
+childhood we all have a more exalted sense of dawn and summer sunrise
+than we ever fully retain or quite recover; and also a far higher
+sensibility for April and April evenings--a heartache for them, which in
+riper years is gradually and irretrievably consoled.
+
+But, on the other hand, childhood has so quickly learned to find daily
+things tedious, and familiar things importunate, that it has no great
+delight in the mere middle of the day, and feels weariness of the summer
+that has ceased to change visibly.  The poetry of mere day and of late
+summer becomes perceptible to mature eyes that have long ceased to be
+sated, have taken leave of weariness, and cannot now find anything in
+nature too familiar; eyes which have, indeed, lost sight of the further
+awe of midsummer daybreak, and no longer see so much of the past in April
+twilight as they saw when they had no past; but which look freshly at the
+dailiness of green summer, of early afternoon, of every sky of any form
+that comes to pass, and of the darkened elms.
+
+Not unbeloved is this serious tree, the elm, with its leaf sitting close,
+unthrilled.  Its stature gives it a dark gold head when it looks alone to
+a late sun.  But if one could go by all the woods, across all the old
+forests that are now meadowlands set with trees, and could walk a county
+gathering trees of a single kind in the mind, as one walks a garden
+collecting flowers of a single kind in the hand, would not the harvest be
+a harvest of poplars?  A veritable passion for poplars is a most
+intelligible passion.  The eyes do gather them, far and near, on a whole
+day's journey.  Not one is unperceived, even though great timber should
+be passed, and hill-sides dense and deep with trees.  The fancy makes a
+poplar day of it.  Immediately the country looks alive with signals; for
+the poplars everywhere reply to the glance.  The woods may be all
+various, but the poplars are separate.
+
+All their many kinds (and aspens, their kin, must be counted with them)
+shake themselves perpetually free of the motionless forest.  It is easy
+to gather them.  Glances sent into the far distance pay them a flash of
+recognition of their gentle flashes; and as you journey you are suddenly
+aware of them close by.  Light and the breezes are as quick as the eyes
+of a poplar-lover to find the willing tree that dances to be seen.
+
+No lurking for them, no reluctance.  One could never make for oneself an
+oak day so well.  The oaks would wait to be found, and many would be
+missed from the gathering.  But the poplars are alert enough for a
+traveller by express; they have an alarum aloft, and do not sleep.  From
+within some little grove of other trees a single poplar makes a slight
+sign; or a long row of poplars suddenly sweep the wind.  They are salient
+everywhere, and full of replies.  They are as fresh as streams.
+
+It is difficult to realize a drought where there are many poplars.  And
+yet their green is not rich; the coolest have a colour much mingled with
+a cloud-grey.  It does but need fresh and simple eyes to recognize their
+unfaded life.  When the other trees grow dark and keep still, the poplar
+and the aspen do not darken--or hardly--and the deepest summer will not
+find a day in which they do not keep awake.  No waters are so vigilant,
+even where a lake is bare to the wind.
+
+When Keats said of his Dian that she fastened up her hair "with fingers
+cool as aspen leaves," he knew the coolest thing in the world.  It is a
+coolness of colour, as well as of a leaf which the breeze takes on both
+sides--the greenish and the greyish.  The poplar green has no glows, no
+gold; it is an austere colour, as little rich as the colour of willows,
+and less silvery than theirs.  The sun can hardly gild it; but he can
+shine between.  Poplars and aspens let the sun through with the wind.  You
+may have the sky sprinkled through them in high midsummer, when all the
+woods are close.
+
+Sending your fancy poplar-gathering, then, you ensnare wild trees,
+beating with life.  No fisher's net ever took such glancing fishes, nor
+did the net of a constellation's shape ever enclose more vibrating
+Pleiades.
+
+
+
+
+WELLS
+
+
+The world at present is inclined to make sorry mysteries or unattractive
+secrets of the methods and supplies of the fresh and perennial means of
+life.  A very dull secret is made of water, for example, and the plumber
+sets his seal upon the floods whereby we live.  They are covered, they
+are carried, they are hushed, from the spring to the tap; and when their
+voices are released at last in the London scullery, why, it can hardly be
+said that the song is eloquent of the natural source of waters, whether
+earthly or heavenly.  There is not one of the circumstances of this
+capture of streams--the company, the water-rate, and the rest--that is
+not a sign of the ill-luck of modern devices in regard to style.  For
+style implies a candour and simplicity of means, an action, a gesture, as
+it were, in the doing of small things; it is the ignorance of secret
+ways; whereas the finish of modern life and its neatness seem to be
+secured by a system of little shufflings and surprises.
+
+Dress, among other things, is furnished throughout with such fittings;
+they form its very construction.  Style does not exist in modern
+arrayings, for all their prettiness and precision, and for all the
+successes--which are not to be denied--of their outer part; the happy
+little swagger that simulates style is but another sign of its absence,
+being prepared by mere dodges and dexterities beneath, and the triumph
+and success of the present art of raiment--"fit" itself--is but the
+result of a masked and lurking labour and device.
+
+The masters of fine manners, moreover, seem to be always aware of the
+beauty that comes of pausing slightly upon the smaller and slighter
+actions, such as meaner men are apt to hurry out of the way.  In a word,
+the workman, with his finish and accomplishment, is the dexterous
+provider of contemporary things; and the ready, well-appointed, and
+decorated life of all towns is now altogether in his hands; whereas the
+artist craftsman of other times made a manifestation of his means.  The
+first hides the streams, under stress and pressure, in paltry pipes which
+we all must make haste to call upon the earth to cover, and the second
+lifted up the arches of the aqueduct.
+
+The search of easy ways to live is not always or everywhere the way to
+ugliness, but in some countries, at some dates, it is the sure way.  In
+all countries, and at all dates, extreme finish compassed by hidden means
+must needs, from the beginning, prepare the abolition of dignity.  This
+is easy to understand, but it is less easy to explain the ill-fortune
+that presses upon the expert workman, in search of easy ways to live, all
+the ill-favoured materials, makes them cheap for him, makes them
+serviceable and effectual, urges him to use them, seal them, and inter
+them, turning the trim and dull completeness out to the view of the daily
+world.  It is an added mischance.  Nor, on the other hand, is it easy to
+explain the beautiful good luck attending the simpler devices which are,
+after all, only less expert ways of labour.  In those happy conditions,
+neither from the material, suggesting to the workman, nor from the
+workman looking askance at his unhandsome material, comes a first
+proposal to pour in cement and make fast the underworld, out of sight.
+But fate spares not that suggestion to the able and the unlucky at their
+task of making neat work of the means, the distribution, the traffick of
+life.
+
+The springs, then, the profound wells, the streams, are of all the means
+of our lives those which we should wish to see open to the sun, with
+their waters on their progress and their way to us; but, no, they are
+lapped in lead.
+
+King Pandion and his friends lie not under heavier seals.
+
+Yet we have been delighted, elsewhere, by open floods.  The hiding-place
+that nature and the simpler crafts allot to the waters of wells are, at
+their deepest, in communication with the open sky.  No other mine is so
+visited; for the noonday sun himself is visible there; and it is fine to
+think of the waters of this planet, shallow and profound, all charged
+with shining suns, a multitude of waters multiplying suns, and carrying
+that remote fire, as it were, within their unalterable freshness.  Not a
+pool without this visitant, or without passages of stars.  As for the
+wells of the Equator, you may think of them in their last recesses as the
+daily bathing-places of light; a luminous fancy is able so to scatter
+fitful figures of the sun, and to plunge them in thousands within those
+deeps.
+
+Round images lie in the dark waters, but in the bright waters the sun is
+shattered out of its circle, scattered into waves, broken across stones,
+and rippled over sand; and in the shallow rivers that fall through
+chestnut woods the image is mingled with the mobile figures of leaves.  To
+all these waters the agile air has perpetual access.  Not so can great
+towns be watered, it will be said with reason; and this is precisely the
+ill-luck of great towns.
+
+Nevertheless, there are towns, not, in a sense, so great, that have the
+grace of visible wells; such as Venice, where every _campo_ has its
+circle of carved stone, its clashing of dark copper on the pavement, its
+soft kiss of the copper vessel with the surface of the water below, and
+the cheerful work of the cable.
+
+Or the Romans knew how to cause the parted floods to measure their plain
+with the strong, steady, and level flight of arches from the watersheds
+in the hills to the and city; and having the waters captive, they knew
+how to compel them to take part, by fountains, in this Roman triumph.
+They had the wit to boast thus of their brilliant prisoner.
+
+None more splendid came bound to Rome, or graced captivity with a more
+invincible liberty of the heart.  And the captivity and the leap of the
+heart of the waters have outlived their captors.  They have remained in
+Rome, and have remained alone.  Over them the victory was longer than
+empire, and their thousands of loud voices have never ceased to confess
+the conquest of the cold floods, separated long ago, drawn one by one,
+alive, to the head and front of the world.
+
+Of such a transit is made no secret.  It was the most manifest fact of
+Rome.  You could not look to the city from the mountains or to the
+distance from the city without seeing the approach of those perpetual
+waters--waters bound upon daily tasks and minute services.  This, then,
+was the style of a master, who does not lapse from "incidental
+greatness," has no mean precision, out of sight, to prepare the finish of
+his phrases, and does not think the means and the approaches are to be
+plotted and concealed.  Without anxiety, without haste, and without
+misgiving are all great things to be done, and neither interruption in
+the doing nor ruin after they are done finds anything in them to betray.
+There was never any disgrace of means, and when the world sees the work
+broken through there is no disgrace of discovery.  The labour of
+Michelangelo's chisel, little more than begun, a Roman structure long
+exposed in disarray--upon these the light of day looks full, and the
+Roman and the Florentine have their unrefuted praise.
+
+
+
+
+THE FOOT
+
+
+Time was when no good news made a journey, and no friend came near, but a
+welcome was uttered, or at least thought, for the travelling feet of the
+wayfarer or the herald.  The feet, the feet were beautiful on the
+mountains; their toil was the price of all communication, and their
+reward the first service and refreshment.  They were blessed and bathed;
+they suffered, but they were friends with the earth; dews in grass at
+morning, shallow rivers at noon, gave them coolness.  They must have
+grown hard upon their mountain paths, yet never so hard but they needed
+and had the first pity and the readiest succour.  It was never easy for
+the feet of man to travel this earth, shod or unshod, and his feet are
+delicate, like his colour.
+
+If they suffered hardship once, they suffer privation now.  Yet the feet
+should have more of the acquaintance of earth, and know more of flowers,
+freshness, cool brooks, wild thyme, and salt sand than does anything else
+about us.  It is their calling; and the hands might be glad to be stroked
+for a day by grass and struck by buttercups, as the feet are of those who
+go barefoot; and the nostrils might be flattered to be, like them, so
+long near moss.  The face has only now and then, for a resting-while,
+their privilege.
+
+If our feet are now so severed from the natural ground, they have
+inevitably lost life and strength by the separation.  It is only the
+entirely unshod that have lively feet.  Watch a peasant who never wears
+shoes, except for a few unkind hours once a week, and you may see the
+play of his talk in his mobile feet; they become as dramatic as his
+hands.  Fresh as the air, brown with the light, and healthy from the
+field, not used to darkness, not grown in prison, the foot of the
+_contadino_ is not abashed.  It is the foot of high life that is prim,
+and never lifts a heel against its dull conditions, for it has forgotten
+liberty.  It is more active now than it lately was--certainly the foot of
+woman is more active; but whether on the pedal or in the stirrup, or clad
+for a walk, or armed for a game, or decked for the waltz, it is in bonds.
+It is, at any rate, inarticulate.
+
+It has no longer a distinct and divided life, or none that is visible and
+sensible.  Whereas the whole living body has naturally such infinite
+distinctness that the sense of touch differs, as it were, with every
+nerve, and the fingers are so separate that it was believed of them of
+old that each one had its angel, yet the modern foot is, as much as
+possible, deprived of all that delicate distinction: undone,
+unspecialized, sent back to lower forms of indiscriminate life.  It is as
+though a landscape with separate sweetness in every tree should be rudely
+painted with the blank--blank, not simple--generalities of a vulgar hand.
+Or as though one should take the pleasures of a day of happiness in a
+wholesale fashion, not "turning the hours to moments," which joy can do
+to the full as perfectly as pain.
+
+The foot, with its articulations, is suppressed, and its language
+confused.  When Lovelace likens the hand of Amarantha to a violin, and
+her glove to the case, he has at any rate a glove to deal with, not a
+boot.  Yet Amarantha's foot is as lovely as her hand.  It, too, has a
+"tender inward"; no wayfaring would ever make it look anything but
+delicate; its arch seems too slight to carry her through a night of
+dances; it does, in fact, but balance her.  It is fit to cling to the
+ground, but rather for springing than for rest.
+
+And, doubtless, for man, woman, and child the tender, irregular,
+sensitive, living foot, which does not even stand with all its little
+surface on the ground, and which makes no base to satisfy an
+architectural eye, is, as it were, the unexpected thing.  It is a part of
+vital design and has a history; and man does not go erect but at a price
+of weariness and pain.  How weak it is may be seen from a footprint: for
+nothing makes a more helpless and unsymmetrical sign than does a naked
+foot.
+
+Tender, too, is the silence of human feet.  You have but to pass a season
+amongst the barefooted to find that man, who, shod, makes so much ado, is
+naturally as silent as snow.  Woman, who not only makes her armed heel
+heard, but also goes rustling like a shower, is naturally silent as snow.
+The vintager is not heard among the vines, nor the harvester on his
+threshing-floor of stone.  There is a kind of simple stealth in their
+coming and going, and they show sudden smiles and dark eyes in and out of
+the rows of harvest when you thought yourself alone.  The lack of noise
+in their movement sets free the sound of their voices, and their laughter
+floats.
+
+But we shall not praise the "simple, sweet" and "earth-confiding feet"
+enough without thanks for the rule of verse and for the time of song.  If
+Poetry was first divided by the march, and next varied by the dance, then
+to the rule of the foot are to be ascribed the thought, the instruction,
+and the dream that could not speak by prose.  Out of that little physical
+law, then, grew a spiritual law which is one of the greatest things we
+know; and from the test of the foot came the ultimate test of the
+thinker: "Is it accepted of Song?"
+
+The monastery, in like manner, holds its sons to little trivial rules of
+time and exactitude, not to be broken, laws that are made secure against
+the restlessness of the heart fretting for insignificant
+liberties--trivial laws to restrain from a trivial freedom.  And within
+the gate of these laws which seem so small, lies the world of mystic
+virtue.  They enclose, they imply, they lock, they answer for it.  Lesser
+virtues may flower in daily liberty and may flourish in prose; but
+infinite virtues and greatness are compelled to the measure of poetry,
+and obey the constraint of an hourly convent bell.  It is no wonder that
+every poet worthy the name has had a passion for metre, for the very
+verse.  To him the difficult fetter is the condition of an interior range
+immeasurable.
+
+
+
+
+HAVE PATIENCE, LITTLE SAINT
+
+
+Some considerable time must have gone by since any kind of courtesy
+ceased, in England, to be held necessary in the course of communication
+with a beggar.  Feeling may be humane, and the interior act most gentle;
+there may be a tacit apology, and a profound misgiving unexpressed; a
+reluctance not only to refuse but to be arbiter; a dislike of the office;
+a regret, whether for the unequal distribution of social luck or for a
+purse left at home, equally sincere; howbeit custom exacts no word or
+sign, nothing whatever of intercourse.  If a dog or a cat accosts you, or
+a calf in a field comes close to you with a candid infant face and
+breathing nostrils of investigation, or if any kind of animal comes to
+you on some obscure impulse of friendly approach, you acknowledge it.  But
+the beggar to whom you give nothing expects no answer to a question, no
+recognition of his presence, not so much as the turn of your eyelid in
+his direction, and never a word to excuse you.
+
+Nor does this blank behaviour seem savage to those who are used to
+nothing else.  Yet it is somewhat more inhuman to refuse an answer to the
+beggar's remark than to leave a shop without "Good morning."  When
+complaint is made of the modern social manner--that it has no merit but
+what is negative, and that it is apt even to abstain from courtesy with
+more lack of grace than the abstinence absolutely requires--the habit of
+manner towards beggars is probably not so much as thought of.  To the
+simply human eye, however, the prevalent manner towards beggars is a
+striking thing; it is significant of so much.
+
+Obviously it is not easy to reply to begging except by the intelligible
+act of giving.  We have not the ingenuous simplicity that marks the caste
+answering more or less to that of Vere de Vere, in Italy, for example.  An
+elderly Italian lady on her slow way from her own ancient ancestral
+_palazzo_ to the village, and accustomed to meet, empty-handed, a certain
+number of beggars, answers them by a retort which would be, literally
+translated, "Excuse me, dear; I, too, am a poor devil," and the last word
+she naturally puts into the feminine.
+
+Moreover, the sentence is spoken in all the familiarity of the local
+dialect--a dialect that puts any two people at once upon equal terms as
+nothing else can do it.  Would it were possible to present the phrase to
+English readers in all its own helpless good-humour.  The excellent woman
+who uses it is practising no eccentricity thereby, and raises no smile.
+It is only in another climate, and amid other manners, that one cannot
+recall it without a smile.  To a mind having a lively sense of contrast
+it is not a little pleasant to imagine an elderly lady of corresponding
+station in England replying so to importunities for alms; albeit we have
+nothing answering to the good fellowship of a broad patois used currently
+by rich and poor, and yet slightly grotesque in the case of all
+speakers--a dialect in which, for example, no sermon is ever preached,
+and in which no book is ever printed, except for fun; a dialect
+"familiar, but by no means vulgar."  Besides, even if our Englishwoman
+could by any possibility bring herself to say to a mendicant, "Excuse me,
+dear; I, too, am a poor devil," she would still not have the opportunity
+of putting the last word punctually into the feminine, which does so
+complete the character of the sentence.
+
+The phrase at the head of this paper is the far more graceful phrase of
+excuse customary in the courteous manners of Portugal.  And everywhere in
+the South, where an almost well-dressed old woman, who suddenly begins to
+beg from you when you least expected it, calls you "my daughter," you can
+hardly reply without kindness.  Where the tourist is thoroughly well
+known, doubtless the company of beggars are used to savage manners in the
+rich; but about the by-ways and remoter places there must still be some
+dismay at the anger, the silence, the indignation, and the inexpensive
+haughtiness wherewith the opportunity of alms-giving is received by
+travellers.
+
+In nothing do we show how far the West is from the East so emphatically
+as we show it by our lofty ways towards those who so manifestly put
+themselves at our feet.  It is certainly not pleasant to see them there;
+but silence or a storm of impersonal protest--a protest that appeals
+vaguely less to the beggars than to some not impossible police--does not
+seem the most appropriate manner of rebuking them.  We have, it may be, a
+scruple on the point of human dignity, compromised by the entreaty and
+the thanks of the mendicant; but we have a strange way of vindicating
+that dignity when we refuse to man, woman, or child the recognition of a
+simply human word.  Nay, our offence is much the greater of the two.  It
+is not merely a rough and contemptuous intercourse, it is the refusal of
+intercourse--the last outrage.  How do we propose to redress those
+conditions of life that annoy us when a brother whines, if we deny the
+presence, the voice, and the being of this brother, and if, because
+fortune has refused him money, we refuse him existence?
+
+We take the matter too seriously, or not seriously enough, to hold it in
+the indifference of the wise.  "Have patience, little saint," is a phrase
+that might teach us the cheerful way to endure our own unintelligible
+fortunes in the midst, say, of the population of a hill-village among the
+most barren of the Maritime Alps, where huts of stone stand among the
+stones of an unclothed earth, and there is no sign of daily bread.  The
+people, albeit unused to travellers, yet know by instinct what to do, and
+beg without the delay of a moment as soon as they see your unwonted
+figure.  Let it be taken for granted that you give all you can; some form
+of refusal becomes necessary at last, and the gentlest--it is worth while
+to remember--is the most effectual.  An indignant tourist, one who to the
+portent of a puggaree which, perhaps, he wears on a grey day, adds that
+of ungovernable rage, is so wild a visitor that no attempt at all is made
+to understand him; and the beggars beg dismayed but unalarmed,
+uninterruptedly, without a pause or a conjecture.  They beg by rote,
+thinking of something else, as occasion arises, and all indifferent to
+the violence of the rich.
+
+It is the merry beggar who has so lamentably disappeared.  If a beggar is
+still merry anywhere, he hides away what it would so cheer and comfort us
+to see; he practises not merely the conventional seeming, which is hardly
+intended to convince, but a more subtle and dramatic kind of semblance,
+of no good influence upon the morals of the road.  He no longer trusts
+the world with a sight of his gaiety.  He is not a wholehearted
+mendicant, and no longer keeps that liberty of unstable balance whereby
+an unattached creature can go in a new direction with a new wind.  The
+merry beggar was the only adventurer free to yield to the lighter touches
+of chance, the touches that a habit of resistance has made imperceptible
+to the seated and stable social world.
+
+The visible flitting figure of the unfettered madman sprinkled our
+literature with mad songs, and even one or two poets of to-day have, by
+tradition, written them; but that wild source of inspiration has been
+stopped; it has been built over, lapped and locked, imprisoned, led
+underground.  The light melancholy and the wind-blown joys of the song of
+the distraught, which the poets were once ingenious to capture, have
+ceased to sound one note of liberty in the world's ears.  But it seems
+that the grosser and saner freedom of the happy beggar is still the
+subject of a Spanish song.
+
+That song is gay, not defiant it is not an outlaw's or a robber's, it is
+not a song of violence or fear.  It is the random trolling note of a man
+who owes his liberty to no disorder, failure, or ill-fortune, but takes
+it by choice from the voluntary world, enjoys it at the hand of
+unreluctant charity; who twits the world with its own choice of bonds,
+but has not broken his own by force.  It seems, therefore, the song of an
+indomitable liberty of movement, light enough for the puffs of a zephyr
+chance.
+
+
+
+
+THE LADIES OF THE IDYLL
+
+
+Little Primrose dames of the English classic, the wife and daughters of
+the Vicar of Wakefield have no claim whatever to this name of lady.  It
+is given to them in this page because Goldsmith himself gave it to them
+in the yet undepreciated state of the word, and for the better reason
+that he obviously intended them to be the equals of the men to whom he
+marries them, those men being, with all their faults, gentlemen.
+Goldsmith, in a word, meant them to be ladies, of country breeding, but
+certainly fit for membership of that large class of various fortune
+within which the name makes a sufficient equality.
+
+He, their author, thought them sufficient.  Having amused himself
+ingeniously throughout the story with their nameless vulgarities, he
+finally hurries them into so much sentiment as may excuse the convention
+of heroes in love.  He plays with their coarseness like a perfectly
+pleased and clever showman, and then piously and happily shuts up his
+couples--the gentle Dr. Primrose with his abominable Deborah; the
+excellent Mr. Burchell with the paltry Sophia; Olivia--but no, Olivia is
+not so certainly happy ever after; she has a captured husband ready for
+her in a state of ignominy, but she has also a forgotten farmer somewhere
+in the background--the unhappy man whom, with her father's permission,
+this sorry heroine had promised to marry in order that his wooing might
+pluck forward the lagging suit of the squire.
+
+Olivia, then, plays her common trick upon the harmless Williams, her
+father conniving, with a provision that he urges with some demonstration
+of virtue: she shall consent to make the farmer happy if the proposal of
+the squire be not after all forthcoming.  But it is so evident her author
+knew no better, that this matter may pass.  It involves a point of
+honour, of which no one--neither the maker of the book nor anyone he
+made--is aware.  What is better worth considering is the fact that
+Goldsmith was completely aware of the unredeemed vulgarity of the ladies
+of the Idyll, and cheerfully took it for granted as the thing to be
+expected from the mother-in-law of a country gentleman and the daughters
+of a scholar.  The education of women had sunk into a degradation never
+reached before, inasmuch as it was degraded in relation to that of men.
+It would matter little indeed that Mrs. Primrose "could read any English
+book without much spelling" if her husband and son were as definitely
+limited to journeyman's field-labour as she was to the pickling and the
+gooseberry wine.  Any of those industries is a better and more liberal
+business than unselect reading, for instance, or than unselect writing.
+Therefore let me not be misunderstood to complain too indiscriminately of
+that century or of an unlettered state.  What is really unhandsome is the
+new, slovenly, and corrupt inequality whereinto the century had fallen.
+
+That the mother of daughters and sons should be fatuous, a village
+worldling, suspicious, ambitious, ill-bred, ignorant, gross, insolent,
+foul-mouthed, pushing, importunate, and a fool, seems natural, almost
+innocently natural, in Goldsmith's story; the squalid Mrs. Primrose is
+all this.  He is still able, through his Vicar, in the most charmingly
+humorous passage in the book, to praise her for her "prudence, economy,
+and obedience."  Her other, more disgusting, characteristics give her
+husband an occasion for rebuking her as "Woman!"  This is done, for
+example, when, despite her obedience, she refuses to receive that unlucky
+schemer, her own daughter, returned in ruins, without insulting her by
+the sallies of a kitchen sarcasm.
+
+She plots with her daughters the most disastrous fortune hunt.  She has
+given them a teaching so effectual that the Vicar has no fear lest the
+paltry Sophia should lose her heart to the good, the sensible Burchell,
+who had saved her life; for he has no fortune.  Mrs. Primrose begins
+grotesquely, with her tedious histories of the dishes at dinner, and she
+ends upon the last page, anxious, amid the general happiness, in regard
+to securing the head of the table.  Upon these feminine humours the
+author sheds his Vicar's indulgent smile.  What a smile for a
+self-respecting husband to be pricked to smile!  A householder would
+wince, one would think, at having opportunity to bestow its tolerance
+upon his cook.
+
+Between these two housewifely appearances, Mrs. Primrose potters through
+the book; plots--always squalidly; talks the worst kinds of folly; takes
+the lead, with a loud laugh, in insulting a former friend; crushes her
+repentant daughter with reproaches that show envy rather than
+indignation, and kisses that daughter with congratulation upon hearing
+that she had, unconsciously and unintentionally, contracted a valid
+marriage (with a rogue); spoils and makes common and unclean everything
+she touches; has but two really gentle and tender moments all through the
+story; and sets, once for all, the example in literature of the woman we
+find thenceforth, in Thackeray, in Douglas Jerrold, in Dickens, and _un
+peu partout_.
+
+Hardly less unspiritual, in spite of their conventional romance of youth
+and beauty, are the daughters of the squalid one.  The author, in making
+them simple, has not abstained from making them cunning.  Their vanities
+are well enough, but these women are not only vain, they are so envious
+as to refuse admiration to a sister-in-law--one who is their rival in no
+way except in so much as she is a contemporary beauty.  "Miss Arabella
+Wilmot," says the pious father and vicar, "was allowed by all (except my
+two daughters) to be completely pretty."
+
+They have been left by their father in such brutal ignorance as to be
+instantly deceived into laughing at bad manners in error for humour.  They
+have no pretty or sensitive instincts.  "The jests of the rich," says the
+Vicar, referring to his own young daughters as audience, "are ever
+successful."  Olivia, when the squire played off a dullish joke, "mistook
+it for humour.  She thought him, therefore, a very fine gentleman."  The
+powders and patches for the country church, the ride thither on
+Blackberry, in so strange a procession, the face-wash, the dreams and
+omens, are all good gentle comedy; we are completely convinced of the
+tedium of Mrs. Primrose's dreams, which she told every morning.  But
+there are other points of comedy that ought not to precede an author's
+appeal to the kind of sentiment about to be touched by the tragic scenes
+of _The Vicar of Wakefield_.
+
+In odd sidling ways Goldsmith bethinks himself to give his principal
+heroine a shadow of the virtues he has not bestowed upon her.  When the
+unhappy Williams, above-mentioned, has been used in vain by Olivia, and
+the squire has not declared himself, and she is on the point of keeping
+her word to Williams by marrying him, the Vicar creates a situation out
+of it all that takes the reader roundly by surprise: "I frequently
+applauded her resolution in preferring happiness to ostentation."  The
+good Goldsmith!  Here is Olivia perfectly frank with her father as to her
+exceedingly sincere preference for ostentation, and as to her stratagem
+to try to obtain it at the expense of honour and of neighbour Williams;
+her mind is as well known to her father as her father's mind is known to
+Oliver Goldsmith, and as Oliver Goldsmith's, Dr. Primrose's, and Olivia's
+minds are known to the reader.  And in spite of all, your Goldsmith and
+your Vicar turn you this phrase to your very face.  You hardly know which
+way to look; it is so disconcerting.
+
+Seeing that Olivia (with her chance-recovered virtue) and Sophia may both
+be expected to grow into the kind of matronhood represented by their
+mother, it needs all the conditions of fiction to surround the close of
+their love-affairs with the least semblance of dignity.  Nor, in fact,
+can it be said that the final winning of Sophia is an incident that errs
+by too much dignity.  The scene is that in which Burchell, revealed as
+Sir William Thornhill, feigns to offer her in marriage to the
+good-natured rogue, Jenkinson, fellow prisoner with her father, in order
+that, on her indignant and distressed refusal, he may surprise her
+agreeably by crying, "What?  Not have him?  If that be the case, I think
+I must have you myself."  Even for an avowedly eccentric master of whims,
+this is playing with forbidden ironies.  True, he catches her to his
+breast with ardour, and calls her "sensible."  "Such sense and such
+heavenly beauty," finally exclaims the happy man.  Let us make him a
+present of the heavenly beauty.  It is the only thing not disproved, not
+dispraised, not disgraced, by a candid study of the Ladies of the Idyll.
+
+
+
+
+A DERIVATION
+
+
+By what obscure cause, through what ill-directed industry, and under the
+constraint of what disabling hands, had the language of English poetry
+grown, for an age, so rigid that a natural writer at the end of the
+eighteenth century had much ado to tell a simple story in sufficient
+verse?  All the vital exercise of the seventeenth century had left the
+language buoyant; it was as elastic as deep and mobile waters; then
+followed the grip of that incapacitating later style.  Much later,
+English has been so used as to become flaccid--it has been stretched, as
+it were, beyond its power of rebound, or certainly beyond its power of
+rebound in common use (for when a master writes he always uses a tongue
+that has suffered nothing).  It is in our own day that English has been
+so over-strained.  In Crabbe's day it had been effectually curbed,
+hindered, and hampered, and it cannot be said of Crabbe that he was a
+master who takes natural possession of a language that has suffered
+nothing.  He was evidently a man of talent who had to take his part with
+the times, subject to history.  To call him a poet was a mere convention.
+There seems to be not a single moment of poetry in his work, and
+assuredly if he had known the earlier signification of the word he would
+have been the last man to claim the incongruous title of poet.  But it is
+impossible to state the question as it would have presented itself to
+Crabbe or to any other writer of his quality entering into the same
+inheritance of English.
+
+It is true that Crabbe read and quoted Milton; so did all his
+contemporaries; and to us now it seems that poetry cannot have been
+forgotten by any age possessing _Lycidas_.  Yet that age can scarcely be
+said to have in any true sense possessed _Lycidas_.  There are other
+things, besides poetry, in Milton's poems.  We do not entirely know,
+perhaps, but we can conjecture how a reader in Crabbe's late eighteenth
+century, looking in Milton for authority for all that he unluckily and
+vainly admired, would well find it.  He would find the approval of
+Young's "Night Thoughts" did he search for it, as we who do not search
+for it may not readily understand.  A step or so downwards, from a few
+passages in "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained," an inevitable drop
+in the derivation, a depression such as is human, and everything, from
+Dryden to "The Vanity of Human Wishes," follows, without violence and
+perhaps without wilful misappreciation.  The poet Milton fathered,
+legitimately enough, an unpoetic posterity.  Milton, therefore, who might
+have kept an age, and many a succeeding age, on the heights of poetry by
+lines like these--
+
+   Who sing and singing in their glory move--
+
+by this, and by many and many another so divine--Milton justified also
+the cold excesses of his posterity by the example of more than one group
+of blank verse lines in his greatest poem.  Manifestly the sanction is a
+matter of choice, and depends upon the age: the age of Crabbe found in
+Milton such ancestry as it was fit for.
+
+Crabbe, then, was not a poet of poetry.  But he came into possession of a
+metrical form charged by secondary poets with a contented second-class
+dignity that bears constant reference, in the way of respect rather than
+of imitation, to the state and nobility of Pope at his best--the couplet.
+The weak yet rigid "poetry" that fell to his lot owed all the decorum it
+possessed to the mechanical defences and props--the exclusions
+especially--of this manner of versification.  The grievous thing was
+that, being moved to write simply of simple things, he had no more supple
+English for his purpose.  His effort to disengage the phrase--long
+committed to convention and to an exposed artifice--did but prove how
+surely the ancient vitality was gone.
+
+His preface to "The Borough, a Poem," should be duly read before the
+"poem" itself, for the prose has a propriety all its own.  Everything is
+conceived with the most perfect moderation, and then presented in a form
+of reasoning that leaves you no possible ground of remonstrance.  In
+proposing his subject Crabbe seems to make an unanswerable apology with a
+composure that is almost sweet.  For instance, at some length and with
+some nobility he anticipates a probable conjecture that his work was done
+"without due examination and revisal," and he meets the conjectured
+criticism thus: "Now, readers are, I believe, disposed to treat with more
+than common severity those writers who have been led into presumption by
+the approbation bestowed upon their diffidence, and into idleness and
+unconcern by the praises given to their attention."  It would not be
+possible to say a smaller thing with greater dignity and gentleness.  It
+is worth while to quote this prose of a "poet" who lived between the
+centuries, if only in order to suggest the chastening thought, "It is a
+pity that no one, however little he may have to say, says it now in this
+form!"  The little, so long as it is reasonable, is so well suited in
+this antithesis and logic.  Is there no hope that journalism will ever
+take again these graces of unanswerable argument?  No: they would no
+longer wear the peculiar aspect of adult innocence that was Crabbe's.
+
+
+
+
+A COUNTERCHANGE
+
+
+"Il s'est trompe de defunte."  The writer of this phrase had his sense of
+that portly manner of French, and his burlesque is fine; but--the paradox
+must be risked--because he was French he was not able to possess all its
+grotesque mediocrity to the full; that is reserved for the English
+reader.  The words are in the mouth of a widower who, approaching his
+wife's tomb, perceives there another "monsieur."  "Monsieur," again; the
+French reader is deprived of the value of this word, too, in its place;
+it says little or nothing to him, whereas the Englishman, who has no word
+of the precise bourgeois significance that it sometimes bears, but who
+must use one of two English words of different allusion--man or I
+gentleman--knows the exact value of its commonplace.  The serious
+Parisian, then, sees "un autre monsieur;" as it proves anon, there had
+been a divorce in the history of the lady, but the later widower is not
+yet aware of this, and explains to himself the presence of "un monsieur"
+in his own place by that weighty phrase, "Il s'est trompe de defunte."
+
+The strange effect of a thing so charged with allusion and with national
+character is to cause an English reader to pity the mocking author who
+was debarred by his own language from possessing the whole of his own
+comedy.  It is, in fact, by contrast with his English that an Englishman
+does possess it.  Your official, your professional Parisian has a
+vocabulary of enormous, unrivalled mediocrity.  When the novelist
+perceives this he does not perceive it all, because some of the words are
+the only words in use.  Take an author at his serious moments, when he is
+not at all occupied with the comedy of phrases, and he now and then
+touches a word that has its burlesque by mere contrast with English.
+"L'Histoire d'un Crime," of Victor Hugo, has so many of these touches as
+to be, by a kind of reflex action, a very school of English.  The whole
+incident of the omnibus in that grave work has unconscious international
+comedy.  The Deputies seated in the interior of the omnibus had been, it
+will be remembered, shut out of their Chamber by the perpetrator of the
+Coup d'Etat, but each had his official scarf.  Scarf--pish!--"l'echarpe!"
+"Ceindre l'echarpe"--there is no real English equivalent.  Civic
+responsibility never was otherwise adequately expressed.  An indignant
+deputy passed his scarf through the window of the omnibus, as an appeal
+to the public, "et l'agita."  It is a pity that the French reader, having
+no simpler word, is not in a position to understand the slight burlesque.
+Nay, the mere word "public," spoken with this peculiar French good faith,
+has for us I know not what untransferable gravity.
+
+There is, in short, a general international counterchange.  It is
+altogether in accordance with our actual state of civilization, with its
+extremely "specialized" manner of industry, that one people should make a
+phrase, and another should have and enjoy it.  And, in fact, there are
+certain French authors to whom should be secured the use of the literary
+German whereof Germans, and German women in particular, ought with all
+severity to be deprived.  For Germans often tell you of words in their
+own tongue that are untranslatable; and accordingly they should not be
+translated, but given over in their own conditions, unaltered, into safer
+hands.  There would be a clearing of the outlines of German ideas, a
+better order in the phrase; the possessors of an alien word, with the
+thought it secures, would find also their advantage.
+
+So with French humour.  It is expressly and signally for English ears.  It
+is so even in the commonest farce.  The unfortunate householder, for
+example, who is persuaded to keep walking in the conservatory "pour
+retablir la circulation," and the other who describes himself "sous-chef
+de bureau dans l'enregistrement," and he who proposes to "faire hommage"
+of a doubtful turbot to the neighbouring "employe de l'octroi"--these and
+all their like speak commonplaces so usual as to lose in their own
+country the perfection of their dulness.  We only, who have the
+alternative of plainer and fresher words, understand it.  It is not the
+least of the advantages of our own dual English that we become sensible
+of the mockery of certain phrases that in France have lost half their
+ridicule, uncontrasted.
+
+Take again the common rhetoric that has fixed itself in conversation in
+all Latin languages--rhetoric that has ceased to have allusions, either
+majestic or comic.  To the ear somewhat unused to French this proffers a
+frequent comedy that the well-accustomed ear, even of an Englishman, no
+longer detects.  A guard on a French railway, who advised two travellers
+to take a certain train for fear they should be obliged to "vegeter" for
+a whole hour in the waiting-room of such or such a station seemed to the
+less practised tourist to be a fresh kind of unexpected humourist.
+
+One of the phrases always used in the business of charities and
+subscriptions in France has more than the intentional comedy of the farce-
+writer; one of the most absurd of his personages, wearying his visitors
+in the country with a perpetual game of bowls, says to them: "Nous jouons
+cinquante centimes--les benefices seront verses integralement a la
+souscription qui est ouverte a la commune pour la construction de notre
+maison d'ecole."
+
+"Fletrir," again.  Nothing could be more rhetorical than this perfectly
+common word of controversy.  The comic dramatist is well aware of the
+spent violence of this phrase, with which every serious Frenchman will
+reply to opponents, especially in public matters.  But not even the comic
+dramatist is aware of the last state of refuse commonplace that a word of
+this kind represents.  Refuse rhetoric, by the way, rather than Emerson's
+"fossil poetry," would seem to be the right name for human language as
+some of the processes of the several recent centuries have left it.
+
+The French comedy, then, is fairly stuffed with thin-S for an Englishman.
+They are not all, it is true, so finely comic as "Il s'est trompe de
+defunte."  In the report of that dull, incomparable sentence there is
+enough humour, and subtle enough, for both the maker and the reader; for
+the author who perceives the comedy as well as custom will permit, and
+for the reader who takes it with the freshness of a stranger.  But if not
+so keen as this, the current word of French comedy is of the same quality
+of language.  When of the fourteen couples to be married by the mayor,
+for instance, the deaf clerk has shuffled two, a looker-on pronounces:
+"Il s'est empetre dans les futurs."  But for a reader who has a full
+sense of the several languages that exist in English at the service of
+the several ways of human life, there is, from the mere terminology of
+official France, high or low--daily France--a gratuitous and uncovenanted
+smile to be had.  With this the wit of the report of French literature
+has not little to do.  Nor is it in itself, perhaps, reasonably comic,
+but the slightest irony of circumstance makes it so.  A very little of
+the mockery of conditions brings out all the latent absurdity of the
+"sixieme et septieme arron-dissements," in the twinkling of an eye.  So
+is it with the mere "domicile;" with the aid of but a little of the
+burlesque of life, the suit at law to "reintegrer le domicile conjugal"
+becomes as grotesque as a phrase can make it.  Even "a domicile"
+merely--the word of every shopman--is, in the unconscious mouths of the
+speakers, always awaiting the lightest touch of farce, if only an
+Englishman hears it; so is the advice of the police that you shall
+"circuler" in the street; so is the request, posted up, that you shall
+not, in the churches.
+
+So are the serious and ordinary phrases, "maison nuptiale," "maison
+mortuaire," and the still more serious "repos dominical," "oraison
+dominicale."  There is no majesty in such words.  The unsuspicious
+gravity with which they are spoken broadcast is not to be wondered at,
+the language offering no relief of contrast; and what is much to the
+credit of the comic sensibility of literature is the fact that, through
+this general unconsciousness, the ridicule of a thousand authors of
+comedy perceives the fun, and singles out the familiar thing, and compels
+that most elaborate dulness to amuse us.  _Us_, above all, by virtue of
+the custom of counterchange here set forth.
+
+Who shall say whether, by operation of the same exchange, the English
+poets that so persist in France may not reveal something within the
+English language--one would be somewhat loth to think so--reserved to the
+French reader peculiarly?  Byron to the multitude, Edgar Poe to the
+select?  Then would some of the mysteries of French reading of English be
+explained otherwise than by the plainer explanation that has hitherto
+satisfied our haughty curiosity.  The taste for rhetoric seemed to
+account for Byron, and the desire of the rhetorician to claim a taste for
+poetry seemed to account for Poe.  But, after all, _patatras_!  Who can
+say?
+
+
+
+
+RAIN
+
+
+Not excepting the falling stars--for they are far less sudden--there is
+nothing in nature that so outstrips our unready eyes as the familiar
+rain.  The rods that thinly stripe our landscape, long shafts from the
+clouds, if we had but agility to make the arrowy downward journey with
+them by the glancing of our eyes, would be infinitely separate, units, an
+innumerable flight of single things, and the simple movement of intricate
+points.
+
+The long stroke of the raindrop, which is the drop and its path at once,
+being our impression of a shower, shows us how certainly our impression
+is the effect of the lagging, and not of the haste, of our senses.  What
+we are apt to call our quick impression is rather our sensibly tardy,
+unprepared, surprised, outrun, lightly bewildered sense of things that
+flash and fall, wink, and are overpast and renewed, while the gentle eyes
+of man hesitate and mingle the beginning with the close.  These inexpert
+eyes, delicately baffled, detain for an instant the image that puzzles
+them, and so dally with the bright progress of a meteor, and part slowly
+from the slender course of the already fallen raindrop, whose moments are
+not theirs.  There seems to be such a difference of instants as invests
+all swift movement with mystery in man's eyes, and causes the past, a
+moment old, to be written, vanishing, upon the skies.
+
+The visible world is etched and engraved with the signs and records of
+our halting apprehension; and the pause between the distant woodman's
+stroke with the axe and its sound upon our ears is repeated in the
+impressions of our clinging sight.  The round wheel dazzles it, and the
+stroke of the bird's wing shakes it off like a captivity evaded.
+Everywhere the natural haste is impatient of these timid senses; and
+their perception, outrun by the shower, shaken by the light, denied by
+the shadow, eluded by the distance, makes the lingering picture that is
+all our art.  One of the most constant causes of all the mystery and
+beauty of that art is surely not that we see by flashes, but that nature
+flashes on our meditative eyes.  There is no need for the impressionist
+to make haste, nor would haste avail him, for mobile nature doubles upon
+him, and plays with his delays the exquisite game of visibility.
+
+Momently visible in a shower, invisible within the earth, the
+ministration of water is so manifest in the coming rain-cloud that the
+husbandman is allowed to see the rain of his own land, yet unclaimed in
+the arms of the rainy wind.  It is an eager lien that he binds the shower
+withal, and the grasp of his anxiety is on the coming cloud.  His sense
+of property takes aim and reckons distance and speed, and even as he
+shoots a little ahead of the equally uncertain ground-game, he knows
+approximately how to hit the cloud of his possession.  So much is the
+rain bound to the earth that, unable to compel it, man has yet found a
+way, by lying in wait, to put his price upon it.  The exhaustible cloud
+"outweeps its rain," and only the inexhaustible sun seems to repeat and
+to enforce his cumulative fires upon every span of ground, innumerable.
+The rain is wasted upon the sea, but only by a fantasy can the sun's
+waste be made a reproach to the ocean, the desert, or the sealed-up
+street.  Rossetti's "vain virtues" are the virtues of the rain, falling
+unfruitfully.
+
+Baby of the cloud, rain is carried long enough within that troubled
+breast to make all the multitude of days unlike each other.  Rain, as the
+end of the cloud, divides light and withholds it; in its flight warning
+away the sun, and in its final fall dismissing shadow.  It is a threat
+and a reconciliation; it removes mountains compared with which the Alps
+are hillocks, and makes a childlike peace between opposed heights and
+battlements of heaven.
+
+
+
+
+THE LETTERS OF MARCELINE VALMORE
+
+
+"Prends garde a moi, ma fille, et couvre moi bien!"  Marceline Desbordes-
+Valmore, writing from France to her daughter Ondine, who was delicate and
+chilly in London in 1841, has the same solicitous, journeying fancy as
+was expressed by two other women, both also Frenchwomen, and both
+articulate in tenderness.  Eugenie de Guerin, that queen of sisters, had
+preceded her with her own complaint, "I have a pain in my brother's
+side"; and in another age Mme. de Sevigne had suffered, in the course of
+long posts and through infrequent letters--a protraction of conjectured
+pain--within the frame of her absent daughter.  She phrased her plight in
+much the same words, confessing the uncancelled union with her child that
+had effaced for her the boundaries of her personal life.
+
+Is not what we call a life--the personal life--a separation from the
+universal life, a seclusion, a division, a cleft, a wound?  For these
+women, such a severance was in part healed, made whole, closed up, and
+cured.  Life was restored between two at a time of human-kind.  Did these
+three women guess that their sufferings of sympathy with their children
+were indeed the signs of a new and universal health--the prophecy of
+human unity?
+
+The sign might have been a more manifest and a happier prophecy had this
+union of tenderness taken the gay occasion as often as the sad.  Except
+at times, in the single case of Mme. de Sevigne, all three--far more
+sensitive than the rest of the world--were yet not sensitive enough to
+feel equally the less sharp communication of joy.  They claimed, owned,
+and felt sensibly the pangs and not the pleasures of the absent.  Or if
+not only the pangs, at least they were apprehensive chiefly in that sense
+which human anxiety and foreboding have lent to the word; they were
+apprehensive of what they feared.  "Are you warm?" writes Marceline
+Valmore to her child.  "You have so little to wear--are you really warm?
+Oh, take care of me--cover me well."  Elsewhere she says, "You are an
+insolent child to think of work.  Nurse your health, and mine.  Let us
+live like fools"; whereby she meant that she should work with her own
+fervent brain for both, and take the while her rest in Ondine.  If this
+living and unshortened love was sad, it must be owned that so, too, was
+the story.  Eugenie and Maurice de Guerin were both to die soon, and
+Marceline was to lose this daughter and another.
+
+But set free from the condition and occasion of pain and sorrow, this
+life without boundaries which mothers have undergone seems to suggest and
+to portend what the progressive charity of generations may be--and is, in
+fact, though the continuity does not always appear--in the course of the
+world.  If a love and life without boundaries go down from a mother into
+her child, and from that child into her children again, then
+incalculable, intricate, universal, and eternal are the unions that
+seem--and only seem--so to transcend the usual experience.  The love of
+such a mother passes unchanged out of her own sight.  It drops down ages,
+but why should it alter?  What in her daughter should she make so much
+her own as that daughter's love for her daughter in turn?  There are no
+lapses.
+
+Marceline Valmore, married to an actor who seems to have "created the
+classic genre" in vain, found the sons and daughters of other women in
+want.  Some of her rich friends, she avers, seem to think that the
+sadness of her poems is a habit--a matter of metre and rhyme, or, at
+most, that it is "temperament."  But others take up the cause of those
+whose woes, as she says, turned her long hair white too soon.
+Sainte-Beuve gave her his time and influence, succoured twenty political
+offenders at her instance, and gave perpetually to her poor.  "He never
+has any socks," said his mother; "he gives them all away, like Beranger."
+"He gives them with a different accent," added the literary Marceline.
+
+Even when the stroller's life took her to towns she did not hate, but
+loved--her own Douai, where the names of the streets made her heart leap,
+and where her statue stands, and Bordeaux, which was, in her eyes, "rosy
+with the reflected colour of its animating wine"--she was taken away from
+the country of her verse.  The field and the village had been dear to
+her, and her poems no longer trail and droop, but take wing, when they
+come among winds, birds, bells, and waves.  They fly with the whole
+volley of a summer morning.  She loved the sun and her liberty, and the
+liberty of others.  It was apparently a horror of prisons that chiefly
+inspired her public efforts after certain riots at Lyons had been reduced
+to peace.  The dead were free, but for the prisoners she worked, wrote,
+and petitioned.  She looked at the sentinels at the gates of the Lyons
+gaols with such eyes as might have provoked a shot, she thinks.
+
+During her lifetime she very modestly took correction from her
+contemporaries, for her study had hardly been enough for the whole art of
+French verse.  But Sainte-Beuve, Baudelaire, and Verlaine have praised
+her as one of the poets of France.  The later critics--from Verlaine
+onwards--will hold that she needs no pardon for certain slight
+irregularities in the grouping of masculine and feminine rhymes, for upon
+this liberty they themselves have largely improved.  The old rules in
+their completeness seemed too much like a prison to her.  She was set
+about with importunate conditions--a caesura, a rhyme, narrow lodgings in
+strange towns, bankruptcies, salaries astray--and she took only a little
+gentle liberty.
+
+
+
+
+THE HOURS OF SLEEP
+
+
+There are hours claimed by Sleep, but refused to him.  None the less are
+they his by some state within the mind, which answers rhythmically and
+punctually to that claim.  Awake and at work, without drowsiness, without
+languor, and without gloom, the night mind of man is yet not his day
+mind; he has night-powers of feeling which are at their highest in
+dreams, but are night's as well as sleep's.  The powers of the mind in
+dreams, which are inexplicable, are not altogether baffled because the
+mind is awake; it is the hour of their return as it is the hour of a
+tide's, and they do return.
+
+In sleep they have their free way.  Night then has nothing to hamper her
+influence, and she draws the emotion, the senses, and the nerves of the
+sleeper.  She urges him upon those extremities of anger and love,
+contempt and terror to which not only can no event of the real day
+persuade him, but for which, awake, he has perhaps not even the capacity.
+This increase of capacity, which is the dream's, is punctual to the
+night, even though sleep and the dream be kept at arm's length.
+
+The child, not asleep, but passing through the hours of sleep and their
+dominions, knows that the mood of night will have its hour; he puts off
+his troubled heart, and will answer it another time, in the other state,
+by day.  "I shall be able to bear this when I am grown up" is not oftener
+in a young child's mind than "I shall endure to think of it in the day-
+time."  By this he confesses the double habit and double experience, not
+to be interchanged, and communicating together only by memory and hope.
+
+Perhaps it will be found that to work all by day or all by night is to
+miss something of the powers of a complex mind.  One might imagine the
+rhythmic experience of a poet, subject, like a child, to the time, and
+tempering the extremities of either state by messages of remembrance and
+expectancy.
+
+Never to have had a brilliant dream, and never to have had any delirium,
+would be to live too much in the day; and hardly less would be the loss
+of him who had not exercised his waking thought under the influence of
+the hours claimed by dreams.  And as to choosing between day and night,
+or guessing whether the state of day or dark is the truer and the more
+natural, he would be rash who should make too sure.
+
+In order to live the life of night, a watcher must not wake too much.
+That is, he should not alter so greatly the character of night as to lose
+the solitude, the visible darkness, or the quietude.  The hours of sleep
+are too much altered when they are filled by lights and crowds; and
+Nature is cheated so, and evaded, and her rhythm broken, as when the
+larks caged in populous streets make ineffectual springs and sing
+daybreak songs when the London gas is lighted.  Nature is easily
+deceived; and the muse, like the lark, may be set all astray as to the
+hour.  You may spend the peculiar hours of sleep amid so much noise and
+among so many people that you shall not be aware of them; you may thus
+merely force and prolong the day.  But to do so is not to live well both
+lives; it is not to yield to the daily and nightly rise and fall and to
+be cradled in the swing of change.
+
+There surely never was a poet but was now and then rocked in such a
+cradle of alternate hours.  "It cannot be," says Herbert, "that I am he
+on whom Thy tempests fell all night."
+
+It is in the hours of sleep that the mind, by some divine paradox, has
+the extremest sense of light.  Almost the most shining lines in English
+poetry--lines that cast sunrise shadows--are those of Blake, written
+confessedly from the side of night, the side of sorrow and dreams, and
+those dreams the dreams of little chimney-sweepers; all is as dark as he
+can make it with the "bags of soot"; but the boy's dream of the green
+plain and the river is too bright for day.  So, indeed, is another
+brightness of Blake's, which is also, in his poem, a child's dream, and
+was certainly conceived by him in the hours of sleep, in which he woke to
+write the Songs of Innocence:-
+
+   O what land is the land of dreams?
+   What are its mountains, and what are its streams?
+   O father, I saw my mother there,
+   Among the lilies by waters fair.
+   Among the lambs clothed in white,
+   She walk'd with her Thomas in sweet delight.
+
+To none but the hours claimed and inspired by sleep, held awake by
+sufferance of sleep, belongs such a vision.
+
+Corot also took the brilliant opportunity of the hours of sleep.  In some
+landscapes of his early manner he has the very light of dreams, and it
+was surely because he went abroad at the time when sleep and dreams
+claimed his eyes that he was able to see so spiritual an illumination.
+Summer is precious for a painter, chiefly because in summer so many of
+the hours of sleep are also hours of light.  He carries the mood of man's
+night out into the sunshine--Corot did so--and lives the life of night,
+in all its genius, in the presence of a risen sun.  In the only time when
+the heart can dream of light, in the night of visions, with the rhythmic
+power of night at its dark noon in his mind, his eyes see the soaring of
+the actual sun.
+
+He himself has not yet passed at that hour into the life of day.  To that
+life belongs many another kind of work, and a sense of other kinds of
+beauty; but the summer daybreak was seen by Corot with the extreme
+perception of the life of night.  Here, at last, is the explanation of
+all the memories of dreams recalled by these visionary paintings, done in
+earlier years than were those, better known, that are the Corots of all
+the world.  Every man who knows what it is to dream of landscape meets
+with one of these works of Corot's first manner with a cry, not of
+welcome only, but of recognition.  Here is morning perceived by the
+spirit of the hours of sleep.
+
+
+
+
+THE HORIZON
+
+
+To mount a hill is to lift with you something lighter and brighter than
+yourself or than any meaner burden.  You lift the world, you raise the
+horizon; you give a signal for the distance to stand up.  It is like the
+scene in the Vatican when a Cardinal, with his dramatic Italian hands,
+bids the kneeling groups to arise.  He does more than bid them.  He lifts
+them, he gathers them up, far and near, with the upward gesture of both
+arms; he takes them to their feet with the compulsion of his expressive
+force.  Or it is as when a conductor takes his players to successive
+heights of music.  You summon the sea, you bring the mountains, the
+distances unfold unlooked-for wings and take an even flight.  You are but
+a man lifting his weight upon the upward road, but as you climb the
+circle of the world goes up to face you.
+
+Not here or there, but with a definite continuity, the unseen unfolds.
+This distant hill outsoars that less distant, but all are on the wing,
+and the plain raises its verge.  All things follow and wait upon your
+eyes.  You lift these up, not by the raising of your eyelids, but by the
+pilgrimage of your body.  "Lift thine eyes to the mountains."  It is then
+that other mountains lift themselves to your human eyes.
+
+It is the law whereby the eye and the horizon answer one another that
+makes the way up a hill so full of universal movement.  All the landscape
+is on pilgrimage.  The town gathers itself closer, and its inner harbours
+literally come to light; the headlands repeat themselves; little cups
+within the treeless hills open and show their farms.  In the sea are many
+regions.  A breeze is at play for a mile or two, and the surface is
+turned.  There are roads and curves in the blue and in the white.  Not a
+step of your journey up the height that has not its replies in the steady
+motion of land and sea.  Things rise together like a flock of
+many-feathered birds.
+
+But it is the horizon, more than all else, you have come in search of.
+That is your chief companion on your way.  It is to uplift the horizon to
+the equality of your sight that you go high.  You give it a distance
+worthy of the skies.  There is no distance, except the distance in the
+sky, to be seen from the level earth; but from the height is to be seen
+the distance of this world.  The line is sent back into the remoteness of
+light, the verge is removed beyond verge, into a distance that is
+enormous and minute.
+
+So delicate and so slender is the distant horizon that nothing less near
+than Queen Mab and her chariot can equal its fineness.  Here on the edges
+of the eyelids, or there on the edges of the world--we know no other
+place for things so exquisitely made, so thin, so small and tender.  The
+touches of her passing, as close as dreams, or the utmost vanishing of
+the forest or the ocean in the white light between the earth and the air;
+nothing else is quite so intimate and fine.  The extremities of a
+mountain view have just such tiny touches as the closeness of closed eyes
+shuts in.
+
+On the horizon is the sweetest light.  Elsewhere colour mars the
+simplicity of light; but there colour is effaced, not as men efface it,
+by a blur or darkness, but by mere light.  The bluest sky disappears on
+that shining edge; there is not substance enough for colour.  The rim of
+the hill, of the woodland, of the meadow-land, of the sea--let it only be
+far enough--has the same absorption of colour; and even the dark things
+drawn upon the bright edges of the sky are lucid, the light is among
+them, and they are mingled with it.  The horizon has its own way of
+making bright the pencilled figures of forests, which are black but
+luminous.
+
+On the horizon, moreover, closes the long perspective of the sky.  There
+you perceive that an ordinary sky of clouds--not a thunder sky--is not a
+wall but the underside of a floor.  You see the clouds that repeat each
+other grow smaller by distance; and you find a new unity in the sky and
+earth that gather alike the great lines of their designs to the same
+distant close.  There is no longer an alien sky, tossed up in
+unintelligible heights above a world that is subject to intelligible
+perspective.
+
+Of all the things that London has foregone, the most to be regretted is
+the horizon.  Not the bark of the trees in its right colour; not the
+spirit of the growing grass, which has in some way escaped from the
+parks; not the smell of the earth unmingled with the odour of soot; but
+rather the mere horizon.  No doubt the sun makes a beautiful thing of the
+London smoke at times, and in some places of the sky; but not there, not
+where the soft sharp distance ought to shine.  To be dull there is to put
+all relations and comparisons in the wrong, and to make the sky lawless.
+
+A horizon dark with storm is another thing.  The weather darkens the line
+and defines it, or mingles it with the raining cloud; or softly dims it,
+or blackens it against a gleam of narrow sunshine in the sky.  The stormy
+horizon will take wing, and the sunny.  Go high enough, and you can raise
+the light from beyond the shower, and the shadow from behind the ray.
+Only the shapeless and lifeless smoke disobeys and defeats the summer of
+the eyes.
+
+Up at the top of the seaward hill your first thought is one of some
+compassion for sailors, inasmuch as they see but little of their sea.  A
+child on a mere Channel cliff looks upon spaces and sizes that they
+cannot see in the Pacific, on the ocean side of the world.  Never in the
+solitude of the blue water, never between the Cape of Good Hope and Cape
+Horn, never between the Islands and the West, has the seaman seen
+anything but a little circle of sea.  The Ancient Mariner, when he was
+alone, did but drift through a thousand narrow solitudes.  The sailor has
+nothing but his mast, indeed.  And but for his mast he would be isolated
+in as small a world as that of a traveller through the plains.
+
+Round the plains the horizon lies with folded wings.  It keeps them so
+perpetually for man, and opens them only for the bird, replying to flight
+with flight.
+
+A close circlet of waves is the sailor's famous offing.  His offing
+hardly deserves the name of horizon.  To hear him you might think
+something of his offing, but you do not so when you sit down in the
+centre of it.
+
+As the upspringing of all things at your going up the heights, so steady,
+so swift, is the subsidence at your descent.  The further sea lies away,
+hill folds down behind hill.  The whole upstanding world, with its looks
+serene and alert, its distant replies, its signals of many miles, its
+signs and communications of light, gathers down and pauses.  This flock
+of birds which is the mobile landscape wheels and goes to earth.  The
+Cardinal weighs down the audience with his downward hands.  Farewell to
+the most delicate horizon.
+
+
+
+
+HABITS AND CONSCIOUSNESS
+
+
+Education might do somewhat to control the personal habits for which
+ungenerous observant men are inclined to dislike one another.  It has
+done little.  As to literature, this has had the most curiously diverse
+influence upon the human sensitiveness to habit.  Tolstoi's perception of
+habits is keener than a child's, and he takes them uneasily, as a child
+does not.  He holds them to be the occasion, if not the cause, of hatred.
+Anna Karenina, as she drank her coffee, knew that her sometime lover was
+dreading to hear her swallow it, and was hating the crooking of her
+little finger as she held her cup.  It is impossible to live in a world
+of habits with such an apprehension of habits as this.
+
+It is no wonder that Tolstoi denies to other men unconsciousness, and
+even preoccupation.  With him perception never lapses, and he will not
+describe a murderer as rapt away by passion from the details of the room
+and the observation of himself; nor will he represent a theologian as
+failing--even while he thinks out and decides the question of his
+faith--to note the things that arrest his present and unclouded eyes.  No
+habits would dare to live under those glances.  They must die of dismay.
+
+Tolstoi sees everything that is within sight.  That he sees this
+multitude of things with invincible simplicity is what proves him an
+artist; nevertheless, for such perception as his there is no peace.  For
+when it is not the trivialities of other men's habits but the actualities
+of his own mind that he follows without rest, for him there is no
+possible peace but sleep.  To him, more than to all others, it has been
+said, "Watch!"  There is no relapse, there is no respite but sleep or
+death.
+
+To such a mind every night must come with an overwhelming change, a
+release too great for gratitude.  What a falling to sleep!  What a
+manumission, what an absolution!  Consciousness and conscience set free
+from the exacted instant replies of the unrelapsing day.  And at the
+awakening all is ready yet once more, and apprehension begins again: a
+perpetual presence of mind.
+
+Dr. Johnson was "absent."  No man of "absent" mind is without some hourly
+deliverance.  It is on the present mind that presses the burden of the
+present world.
+
+
+
+
+SHADOWS
+
+
+Another good reason that we ought to leave blank, unvexed, and
+unencumbered with paper patterns the ceiling and walls of a simple house
+is that the plain surface may be visited by the unique designs of
+shadows.  The opportunity is so fine a thing that it ought oftener to be
+offered to the light and to yonder handful of long sedges and rushes in a
+vase.  Their slender grey design of shadows upon white walls is better
+than a tedious, trivial, or anxious device from the shop.
+
+The shadow has all intricacies of perspective simply translated into line
+and intersecting curve, and pictorially presented to the eyes, not to the
+mind.  The shadow knows nothing except its flat designs.  It is single;
+it draws a decoration that was never seen before, and will never be seen
+again, and that, untouched, varies with the journey of the sun, shifts
+the interrelation of a score of delicate lines at the mere passing of
+time, though all the room be motionless.  Why will design insist upon its
+importunate immortality?  Wiser is the drama, and wiser the dance, that
+do not pause upon an attitude.  But these walk with passion or pleasure,
+while the shadow walks with the earth.  It alters as the hours wheel.
+
+Moreover, while the habit of your sunward thoughts is still flowing
+southward, after the winter and the spring, it surprises you in the
+sudden gleam of a north-westering sun.  It decks a new wall; it is shed
+by a late sunset through a window unvisited for a year past; it betrays
+the flitting of the sun into unwonted skies--a sun that takes the
+midsummer world in the rear, and shows his head at a sally-porte, and is
+about to alight on an unused horizon.  So does the grey drawing, with
+which you have allowed the sun and your pot of rushes to adorn your room,
+play the stealthy game of the year.
+
+You need not stint yourself of shadows, for an occasion.  It needs but
+four candles to make a hanging Oriental bell play the most buoyant
+jugglery overhead.  Two lamps make of one palm-branch a symmetrical
+countercharge of shadows, and here two palm-branches close with one
+another in shadow, their arches flowing together, and their paler greys
+darkening.  It is hard to believe that there are many to prefer a
+"repeating pattern."
+
+It must be granted to them that a grey day robs of their decoration the
+walls that should be sprinkled with shadows.  Let, then, a plaque or a
+picture be kept for hanging on shadowless clays.  To dress a room once
+for all, and to give it no more heed, is to neglect the units of the
+days.
+
+Shadows within doors are yet only messages from that world of shadows
+which is the landscape of sunshine.  Facing a May sun you see little
+except an infinite number of shadows.  Atoms of shadow--be the day bright
+enough--compose the very air through which you see the light.  The trees
+show you a shadow for every leaf, and the poplars are sprinkled upon the
+shining sky with little shadows that look translucent.  The liveliness of
+every shadow is that some light is reflected into it; shade and shine
+have been entangled as though by some wild wind through their million
+molecules.
+
+The coolness and the dark of night are interlocked with the unclouded
+sun.  Turn sunward from the north, and shadows come to life, and are
+themselves the life, the action, and the transparence of their day.
+
+To eyes tired and retired all day within lowered blinds, the light looks
+still and changeless.  So many squares of sunshine abide for so many
+hours, and when the sun has circled away they pass and are extinguished.
+Him who lies alone there the outer world touches less by this long
+sunshine than by the haste and passage of a shadow.  Although there may
+be no tree to stand between his window and the south, and although no
+noonday wind may blow a branch of roses across the blind, shadows and
+their life will be carried across by a brilliant bird.
+
+To the sick man a cloud-shadow is nothing but an eclipse; he cannot see
+its shape, its color, its approach, or its flight.  It does but darken
+his window as it darkens the day, and is gone again; he does not see it
+pluck and snatch the sun.  But the flying bird shows him wings.  What
+flash of light could be more bright for him than such a flash of
+darkness?
+
+It is the pulse of life, where all change had seemed to be charmed.  If
+he had seen the bird itself he would have seen less--the bird's shadow
+was a message from the sun.
+
+There are two separated flights for the fancy to follow, the flight of
+the bird in the air, and the flight of its shadow on earth.  This goes
+across the window blind, across the wood, where it is astray for a while
+in the shades; it dips into the valley, growing vaguer and larger, runs,
+quicker than the wind, uphill, smaller and darker on the soft and dry
+grass, and rushes to meet its bird when the bird swoops to a branch and
+clings.
+
+In the great bird country of the north-eastern littoral of England, about
+Holy Island and the basaltic rocks, the shadows of the high birds are the
+movement and the pulse of the solitude.  Where there are no woods to make
+a shade, the sun suffers the brilliant eclipse of flocks of pearl-white
+sea birds, or of the solitary creature driving on the wind.  Theirs is
+always a surprise of flight.  The clouds go one way, but the birds go all
+ways: in from the sea or out, across the sands, inland to high northern
+fields, where the crops are late by a month.  They fly so high that
+though they have the shadow of the sun under their wings, they have the
+light of the earth there also.  The waves and the coast shine up to them,
+and they fly between lights.
+
+Black flocks and white they gather their delicate shadows up, "swift as
+dreams," at the end of their flight into the clefts, platforms, and
+ledges of harbourless rocks dominating the North Sea.  They subside by
+degrees, with lessening and shortening volleys of wings and cries until
+there comes the general shadow of night wherewith the little shadows
+close, complete.
+
+The evening is the shadow of another flight.  All the birds have traced
+wild and innumerable paths across the mid-May earth; their shadows have
+fled all day faster than her streams, and have overtaken all the movement
+of her wingless creatures.  But now it is the flight of the very earth
+that carries her clasped shadow from the sun.
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+
+{1}  I found it afterwards: it was Rebecca.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SPIRIT OF PLACE***
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