descent from Watteau, the old court-painter,* the lack of better ministries to its desire of

one of whose gallant pieces still hung in one beauty.† of the rooms-might explain, together with This house then stood not far beyond the some other things, a noticeable trimness and gloom and rumours of the town, among high comely whiteness about everything there-the garden-walls, bright all summer-time curtains, the couches, the paint on the walls Golden-rod, and brown-and-golden Wall-flower with which the light and shadow played so deli--Flos Parietis, as the children's Latin-reading cately; might explain also the tolerance of the father taught them to call it, while he was great poplar in the garden, a tree most often with them. Tracing back the threads of his despised by English people, but which French | complex spiritual habit, as he was used in after people love, having observed a certain fresh years to do, Florian found that he owed to the way its leaves have of dealing with the wind, | place many tones of sentiment afterwards cusmaking it sound, in never so slight a stirring of the air, like running water.

us.

environment of early childhood. How indelibly, as we afterwards discover, they affect us; with what capricious attractions and associations they figure themselves on the white paper, the smooth wax, of our ingenuous souls, as "with lead in the rock for ever,'' giving form and feature, and as it were assigned house-room in our memory, to early experiences of feeling and thought, which abide with us ever afterwards, thus, and not otherwise. The realities and passions, the rumours of the greater world without, steal in upon us, each by its own special little passage-way, through the wall of custom about us; and never afterwards quite detach themselves from this or that accident, or trick, in the mode of their first entrance to Our susceptibilities, the discovery of our powers, manifold experiences-our various experiences of the coming and going of bodily pain, for instance-belong to this or the other well-remembered place in the material habitation that little white room with the window across which the heavy blossoms could beat so peevishly in the wind, with just that particular catch or throb, such a sense of teasing in it, on gusty mornings; and the early habitation thus gradually becomes a sort of material shrine or sanctuary of sentiment; a system of visible symbolism interweaves itself through all our thoughts and passions; and irresistibly, little shapes, voices, accidents-the angle at which the sun in the morning fell on the pillow become parts of the great chain wherewith we are bound.

So powerful is this instinct, and yet accidents like those I have been speaking of so mechanically determine it; its essence being indeed the early familiar, as constituting our ideal, or typical conception, of rest and security. Out of so many possible conditions, just this for you and that for me, brings ever the unmistak able realisation of the delightful chez soi ;3 this for the Englishman, for me and you, with the closely-drawn white curtain and the shaded lamp; that, quite other, for the wandering Arab, who folds his tent every morning, and makes his sleeping-place among haunted ruins, or in old tombs.

With Florian then the sense of home became singularly intense, his good fortune being that the special character of his home was in itself so essentially home-like. As after many wanderings I have come to fancy that some parts of Surrey and Kent are, for Englishmen, the true landscape, true home-counties, by right, partly, of a certain earthy warmth in the yellow of the sand below their gorse-bushes, and of a certain gray-blue mist after rain, in the hollows of the hills there, welcome to fatigued eyes, and never seen farther south; so I think that the sort of house I have described, with precisely those proportions of red-brick and green, and with a just perceptible monotony in the subdued order of it, for its distinguishing note, is for Englishmen at least typically home-like. And so for Florian that general human instinct was reinforced by this special home-likeness in the place his wandering soul had happened to Thus far, for Florian, what all this had de- light on, as, in the second degree, its body and termined was a peculiarly strong sense of home earthly tabernacle; the sense of harmony be-so forcible a motive with all of us-prompt- tween his soul and its physical environment ing to us our customary love of the earth, and became, for a time at least, like perfectly the larger part of our fear of death, that revul- played music, and the life led there singularly sion we have from it, as from something tranquil and filled with a curious sense of selfstrange, untried, unfriendly; though life-long possession. The love of security, of an habitimprisonment, they tell you, and final banish-ually undisputed standing-ground or sleepingment from home is a thing bitterer still; the place, came to count for much in the generation looking forward to but a short space, a mere childish goûter2 and dessert of it, before the end, being so great a resource of effort to pilgrims and wayfarers, and the soldier in distant quarters, and lending, in lack of that, some power of solace to the thought of sleep in the home churchyard, at least-dead cheek by dead cheek, and with the rain soaking in upon one from above.

1 Job, xix, 24.

2 a slight repast, a taste

Referring to Locke's familiar figure for the state of mind at birth (Locke did not believe in innate ideas). The next figure is derived from the ancient practice of writing on tablets of wax.

and correcting of his thoughts, and afterwards as a salutary principle of restraint in all his wanderings of spirit. The wistful yearning towards home, in absence from it, as the shadows of evening deepened, and he followed in thought what was doing there from hour to hour, interpreted to him much of a yearning and regret he experienced afterwards, towards he knew not what, out of strange ways of feeling and thought in which, from time to time, his spirit found itself alone; and in the tears shed in such absences there seemed always to

3 at home

be some soul-subduing foretaste of what his Weltschmerz,1 and in which the concentrated last tears might be.

to speak, one of them was caught, and he meant with the remembered presence of the red flowto treat it kindly; but in the night its youngers, and their perfume in the darkness about ones could be heard crying after it, and the him; and the longing for some undivined, entire responsive cry of the mother-bird towards them; possession of them was the beginning of a reveand at last, with the first light, though not till lation to him, growing ever clearer, with the after some debate with himself, he went down coming of the gracious summer guise of fields and opened the cage, and saw a sharp bound and trees and persons in each succeeding year, of the prisoner up to her nestlings; and there of a certain, at times seemingly exclusive, prewith came the sense of remorse, that he too dominance in his interests, of beautiful physical was become an accomplice in moving, to the things, a kind of tyranny of the senses over limit of his small power, the springs and han-him. dles of that great machine in things, constructed so ingeniously to play pain-fugues on the delicate nerve-work of living creatures.

In later years he came upon philosophies which occupied him much in the estimate of the proportion of the sensuous and the ideal eleI have remarked how, in the process of our ments in human knowledge, the relative parts brain-building, as the house of thought in which they bear in it; and, in his intellectual scheme, we live gets itself together, like some airy was led to assign very little to the abstract bird's-nest of floating thistle-down and chance thought, and much to its sensible vehicle or straws, compact at last, little accidents have occasion. Such metaphysical speculation did their consequence; and thus it happened that, but reinforce what was instinctive in his way as he walked one evening, a garden gate, of receiving the world, and for him, everywhere, usually closed, stood open; and lo! within, a that sensible vehicle or occasion became, pergreat red hawthorn in full flower, embossing haps only too surely, the necessary concomitant heavily the bleached and twisted trunk and of any perception of things, real enough to be branches, so aged that there were but few green of any weight or reckoning, in his house of leaves thereon-a plumage of tender, crimson thought. There were times when he could fire out of the heart of the dry wood. The think of the necessity he was under of associatperfume of the tree had now and again reached ing all thoughts to touch and sight, as a symhim, in the currents of the wind, over the wall, pathetic link between himself and actual, feeland he had wondered what might be behind it, ing, living objects; a protest in favour of real and was now allowed to fill his arms with the men and women against mere gray, unreal abflowers-flowers enough for all the old blue-stractions; and he remembered gratefully how china pots along the chimney-piece, making the Christian religion, hardly less than the fête in the children's room. Was it some religion of the ancient Greeks, translating so periodic moment in the expansion of soul within much of its spiritual verity into things that may him, or mere trick of heat in the heavily-laden be seen, condescends in part to sanction this summer air? But the beauty of the thing infirmity, if so it be, of our human existence, struck home to him feverishly; and in dreams wherein the world of sense is so much with us,1 all night he loitered along a magic roadway of and welcomed this thought as a kind of keeper crimson flowers, which seemed to open ruddily and sentinel over his soul therein. But cerin thick, fresh masses about his feet, and fill tainly, he came more and more to be unable to softly all the little hollows in the banks on care for, or think of soul but as in an actual either side. Always afterwards, summer by body, or of any world but that wherein are summer, as the flowers came on, the blossom of water and trees, and where men and women the red hawthorn still seemed to him absolutely look, so or so, and press actual hands. It was the reddest of all things; and the goodly crim- the trick even his pity learned, fastening those son, still alive in the works of old Venetian who suffered in anywise to his affections by a masters or old Flemish tapestries, called out kind of sensible attachments. He would think always from afar the recollection of the flame of Julian, fallen into incurable sickness, as in those perishing little petals, as it pulsed spoiled in the sweet blossom of his skin like gradually out of them, kept long in the drawers pale amber, and his honey-like hair; of Cecil, of an old cabinet. Also then, for the first time, early dead, as cut off from the lilies, from he seemed to experience a passionateness in his golden summer days, from women's voices; and relation to fair outward objects, an inexplicable then what comforted him a little was the excitement in their presence, which disturbed thought of the turning of the child's flesh to him, and from which he half longed to be free. violets in the turf above him. And thinking of A touch of regret or desire mingled all night 1 See Wordsworth's sonnet, p. 427.

the very poor, it was not the things which most | the touch of the wistful bystander, impressed men care most for that he yearned to give how deeply on one! or would it be, perhaps, a them; but fairer roses, perhaps, and power to mere frail retiring of all things, great or little, taste quite as they will, at their ease and not away from one, into a level distance? task-burdened, a certain desirable, clear light in the new morning, through which sometimes he had noticed them, quite unconscious of it, on their way to their early toil.

For with this desire of physical beauty mingled itself early the fear of death-the fear of death intensified by the desire of beauty. Hitherto he had never gazed upon dead faces, So he yielded himself to these things, to be as sometimes, afterwards, at the Morgue in played upon by them like a musical instrument, Paris, or in that fair cemetery at Munich, and began to note with deepening watchfulness, where all the dead must go and lie in state but always with some puzzled, unutterable long- | before burial, behind glass windows, among the ing in his enjoyment, the phases of the seasons flowers and incense and holy candles—the aged and of the growing or waning day, down even clergy with their sacred ornaments, the young to the shadowy changes wrought on bare wall men in their dancing-shoes and spotless white or ceiling-the light cast up from the snow, linen-after which visits, those waxen, resistbringing out their darkest angles; the brown less faces would always live with him for many light in the cloud, which meant rain; that days, making the broadest sunshine sickly. The almost too austere clearness, in the protracted child had heard indeed of the death of his light of the lengthening day, before warm father, and how, in the Indian station, a fever weather began, as if it lingered but to make a had taken him, so that though not in action he severer workday, with the school-books opened had yet died as a soldier; and hearing of the earlier and later; that beam of June sunshine, "resurrection of the just,'' he could think of at last, as he lay awake before the time, a way him as still abroad in the world, somehow, for of gold-dust across the darkness; all the hum- his protection—a grand, though perhaps rather ming, the freshness, the perfume of the garden terrible figure, in beautiful soldier's things, seemed to lie upon it-and coming in one after- like the figure in the picture of Joshua's Vision noon in September, along the red gravel walk, in the Bible2—and of that, round which the to look for a basket of yellow crab-apples left mourners moved so softly, and afterwards with in the cool, old parlour, he remembered it the such solemn singing, as but a worn-out garment more, and how the colours struck upon him, left at a deserted lodging. So it was, until on because a wasp on one bitten apple stung him, a summer day he walked with his mother and he felt the passion of sudden, severe pain. through a fair churchyard. In a bright dress For this too brought its curious reflexions; and, he rambled among the graves, in the gay in relief from it, he would wonder over it weather, and so came, in one corner, upon an how it had then been with him-puzzled at the open grave for a child-a dark space on the depth of the charm or spell over him, which lay, brilliant grass-the black mould lying heaped for a little while at least, in the mere absence up round it, weighing down the little jewelled of pain; once, especially, when an older boy branches of the dwarf rose bushes in flower. taught him to make flowers of sealing-wax, and And therewith came, full-grown, never wholly he had burnt his hand badly at the lighted to leave him, with the certainty that even chiltaper, and been unable to sleep. He remem-dren do sometimes die, the physical horror of bered that also afterwards, as a sort of typical death, with its wholly selfish recoil from the thing-a white vision of heat about him, cling-association of lower forms of life, and the ing closely, through the languid scent of the suffocating weight above. ointments put upon the place to make it well. Also, as he felt this pressure upon him of the sensible world, then, as often afterwards, there would come another sort of curious questioning how the last impressions of eye and ear might happen to him, how they would find him -the scent of the last flower, the soft yellow ness of the last morning, the last recognition of some object of affection, hand or voice; it could not be but that the latest look of the eyes, before their final closing, would be strangely vivid; one would go with the hot tears, the cry,

No benign, grave figure in beautiful soldier's things any longer abroad in the world for his protection! only a few poor, piteous bones; and above them, possibly, a certain sort of figure he hoped not to see. For sitting one day in the garden below an open window, he heard people talking, and could not but listen, how, in a sleepless hour, a sick woman had seen one of the dead sitting beside her, come to call her hence; and from the broken talk evolved with much clearness the notion that not all those dead people had really 1 Luke, xiv, 14.

2 Joshua, v, 13.