on the Continent. My sentiment and not my reason was engaged there. My
eyes were turned to the past, not to the future; the past that one cannot
suspect and mistrust, the shadowy and unquestionable moral possession the
darkest struggles of which wear a halo of glory and peace.

In the preceding month of May we had received an invitation to spend some
weeks in Poland in a country house in the neighbourhood of Cracow, but
within the Russian frontier. The enterprise at first seemed to me
considerable. Since leaving the sea, to which I have been faithful for
so many years, I have discovered that there is in my composition very
little stuff from which travellers are made. I confess that my first
impulse about a projected journey is to leave it alone. But the
invitation received at first with a sort of dismay ended by rousing the
dormant energy of my feelings. Cracow is the town where I spent with my
father the last eighteen months of his life. It was in that old royal
and academical city that I ceased to be a child, became a boy, had known
the friendships, the admirations, the thoughts and the indignations of
that age. It was within those historical walls that I began to
understand things, form affections, lay up a store of memories and a fund
of sensations with which I was to break violently by throwing myself into
an unrelated existence. It was like the experience of another world. The
wings of time made a great dusk over all this, and I feared at first that
if I ventured bodily in there I would discover that I who have had to do
with a good many imaginary lives have been embracing mere shadows in my
youth. I feared. But fear in itself may become a fascination. Men have
gone, alone and trembling, into graveyards at midnight--just to see what
would happen. And this adventure was to be pursued in sunshine. Neither
would it be pursued alone. The invitation was extended to us all. This
journey would have something of a migratory character, the invasion of a
tribe. My present, all that gave solidity and value to it, at any rate,