cannot get so near to Nature; I have a sorry dread of her clouds, her
winds, and must walk with tedious circumspection where once I ran and
leapt exultingly. Were it possible, but for one half-hour, to plunge and
bask in the sunny surf, to roll on the silvery sand-hills, to leap from
rock to rock on shining sea-ferns, laughing if I slipped into the
shallows among starfish and anemones! I am much older in body than in
mind; I can but look at what I once enjoyed.



II.


I have been spending a week in Somerset. The right June weather put me
in the mind for rambling, and my thoughts turned to the Severn Sea. I
went to Glastonbury and Wells, and on to Cheddar, and so to the shore of
the Channel at Clevedon, remembering my holiday of fifteen years ago, and
too often losing myself in a contrast of the man I was then and what I am
now. Beautiful beyond all words of description that nook of oldest
England; but that I feared the moist and misty winter climate, I should
have chosen some spot below the Mendips for my home and resting-place.
Unspeakable the charm to my ear of those old names; exquisite the quiet
of those little towns, lost amid tilth and pasture, untouched as yet by
the fury of modern life, their ancient sanctuaries guarded, as it were,
by noble trees and hedges overrun with flowers. In all England there is
no sweeter and more varied prospect than that from the hill of the Holy
Thorn at Glastonbury; in all England there is no lovelier musing place
than the leafy walk beside the Palace Moat at Wells. As I think of the
golden hours I spent there, a passion to which I can give no name takes
hold upon me; my heart trembles with an indefinable ecstasy.