I gratefully acknowledge the constant presence of an element in my life which for want of a better name I will call the sense of beauty. I mean by that the unaccountable thrill of emotion by which one is sometimes surprised, often quite suddenly and unexpectedly; this sense of wonder, which darts upon the mind with an almost physical sensation, seems to come in two different ways. With some, the majority I believe, it originates entirely in personal relations with other human beings and is known as love; with others it arises over a larger region, and is inspired by a sudden perception of some incommunicable beauty in a flower, a scent, a view, a picture, a poem. Those in whom the latter sense predominates are, I think, less apt to be affected by human relationships, but pass through the world in a certain solitary and wistful mood, with perhaps more wide and general sources of happiness but less liable to be stirred to the depths of[20] their being by a friendship or a passion. To take typical examples of such a class I conceive that Wordsworth and William Morris were instances. Wordsworth derived, I believe, his highest inspiration from the solemn dignities of nature, in her most stupendous and majestic forms; while to Morris belonged that power, which amounted in him to positive genius, for seeing beauty in the most homely and simple things. Beauty and Mystery
I was myself haunted from a very early date by the sense of beauty and mystery, though not for many years could I give it a name; but I have found in my case that it originated as a rule in some minute effect of natural things. I have seen some of the wildest and most astounding natural prospects in Europe; I have climbed high rocky peaks and threaded mountain solitudes, but some overshadowing of horror and awe has robbed emotion of its most intimate joy; and I have always found myself more thrilled by some tranquil vignette—the moon rising through a forest glade, a red sunset between the boughs of pines, the crisping wave of some broken eddy, the “green-dense and dim-delicious” depth of a woodland pool, the weathered gables[21] of an ancient manor, an orchard white with the snows of spring—than I have ever been by the sight of the most solemn mountain-head or the furious breakers of some uncontrolled tide.
Two or three of these sacred sights I may venture to describe, taking them at random out of the treasure-house of memory; two belong to my schooldays. I was a pupil at a big suburban school; the house which we inhabited had once been the villa of a well-known statesman, and had large and dignified grounds, where with certain restrictions, we were allowed to ramble. They were bounded on one side by a high paling, inaccessible to small limbs, and a vague speculation as to what was behind the fence long dwelt with me. One day, however, I found that I could loose a portion of a broken paling, and looking through I saw a quiet place, the tail of a neglected shrubbery; the spot seemed quite unvisited; the laurels grew thickly about, and tall elms gave an austere gloom to the little glade; the ground was pathless, and thickly overgrown with periwinkles, but in the centre were three tiny grave-mounds, the graves, I have since reflected, of dogs, but which I at the time[22] supposed to be the graves of children. I gazed with a singular sense of mystery, and strange dream-pictures rose instinctively in my mind, weaving themselves over the solitary and romantic spot. It is strange how often in dreams and gentle reveries I have visited the place.
The Enchanted Land
The next is a later vision. Near the public school where I was educated lay a forest to which we had free admittance. I found that by hard walking it was just possible to reach a wooded hill which was a conspicuous feature of the distant landscape, but the time at my disposal between two school engagements never sufficed to penetrate farther. From the top of this hill it was possible to get a view of a large tract of forest ground, an open grassy glade, with large trees of towering greenness standing sentinel on either side; the bracken grew luxuriantly in places, and at the end of the glade was a glint of water in the horn of some forest pool. This place was to me a veritable “magic casement”; beyond lay the enchanted land into which I could not penetrate, the blue hills on the horizon seen over the tree-tops. I never dreamt of them as inhabited by human beings like myself, but as[23] some airy region, with leagues of dreaming woods and silent forest spaces. At times a deer would slowly cross the open vale, and stand to sniff the breeze; the very cooing of the doves in their leafy fastnesses had a richer and drowsier sound.
But the home of incommunicable dreams, beyond all others, is to me a certain mill—Grately Mill—that is not many miles from my present home. My mother had an old aunt who lived in a pleasant house in the neighbourhood, and we used to go there when I was a child to spend a few weeks of the early summer.
A little vague lane led to it: a lane that came from nowhere in particular, and took you nowhere; meandering humbly among the pastures wherever it was convenient to them to permit it, like a fainthearted Christian. Hard by was a tall, high-shouldered, gabled farm of red brick, with a bell perched on the roof in a white pavilion of its own. Down the lane on hot summer days we used to walk—my mother and I: my mother whom I revered as a person of unapproachable age and dim experience, though she had been in the schoolroom herself but a year or two before my[24] birth; I trotting by her side with a little fishing-rod in a grey holland case, to fish for perch in the old pond at the Hall.
The lane grew sandier and damper: a rivulet clucked in the ditch, half-hidden in ragged-robin with its tattered finery, and bright varnished ranunculus; the rivulet was a mysterious place enough ever since the day when we found it full of waving clusters of strange dark creatures, more eel than fish, which had all appeared with miraculous unanimity in a single night—lamperns, the village naturalist called them, and told us that in ancient days they were a delicacy; while I, in my childish mind, at once knew that it was this which had gone to the composition of that inexplicable dish, a surfeit of lampreys, as the history had it, of which some greedy monarch died.
Once, too, a bright-coloured eel had been seen at a certain point, who had only just eluded the grasp of hot little fingers. How many times I looked for master eel, expecting to meet him at the same place, and was careful to carry a delightful tin box in my pocket, in which he might travel home in my pocket, and live an honoured life in a basin in the night nursery. Poor eel! I am glad now that[25] he escaped, but then he was only a great opportunity missed—an irreparable regret.
Grately Mill
Then the poor lane, which had been getting more like a water-course every moment, no longer made any pretence, and disappeared into a shallow sheet of clear water—the mill at last! The scene, as I remember it, had a magical charm. On the left, by the side of the lane, rose a crazy footpath of boards and posts with a wooden handrail, and a sluice or two below. Beyond, the deep mill-pool slept, dark and still, all fringed with trees. On the right the stream flowed off among the meadows, disappearing............