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+Project Gutenberg's Etext of The Spirit of Place by Alice Meynell
+#6 in our series by Alice Meynell
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+The Spirit of Place and Other Essays
+
+by Alice Meynell
+
+May, 1998  [Etext #1309]
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+Project Gutenberg's Etext of The Spirit of Place by Alice Meynell
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+
+
+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 lifelong 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 byways 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 e la souscription qui est ouverte e 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 "e 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 counter-change 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 e 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 Project Gutenberg's Etext of The Spirit of Place by Alice Meynell
+
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