pleasure to have eyes. It is as if one long near-sighted without
knowing it had suddenly been fitted with the proper spectacles. It is
sweet to have olfactories. Whoso hath lungs, let him breathe. Man was
made to rejoice!

How green, on such a day, are the greens; the distant purples how
purple! The stone walls are cool. The great canvas of the sky has
been but newly brushed in, as if by some modern landscape painter (the
tube colours seem yet hardly dry); the technique, the brush-marks, show
in the unutterably soft, warm-white clouds; or, like a puff of
beaten-egg white, wells above that orchard hill. Higher up, thinly
touched across the blue, a great sweep of downy, swan breast-breast
feathers spreads. But not one canvas is this sky; ceaselessly it
changes with the minutes. To observe is to walk through an endless
gallery of countless pictures. It is alone a life-study. Now the wind
has blown it clear as blue limpidness; now scattered flakes appear; now
it is deep blue; now pale; now it tinges darkly; now it is a layer of
cream. Again, it breaks into shapes--decorative shapes, odd shapes,
lovely shapes, shapes always fresh. Its innovations are unflagging,
inexhaustable. Always art, its genius is infinite.

One must go a journey to discover how vast the sky really is, and the
world. To mount, bending forward, up by a long, tree-walled ascent
from some valley, and come upon this spectacular sight--the fair globe
that man inhabits lying away before one like a gigantic physical map, a
map in relief, cunningly painted in the colours of nature, laid off by
woods and orchards and roads and stone walls into many decorative
shapes until it melts into purple, and fainter and fainter and still
fainter purple Japanese hills. The sight is some of the noble quarry,
the game; this is the anise-seed bag of him that goes a journey. Some