myself very good company. Many a laugh, and "lots" or "heaps"
(according as you are a Northern or a Southern provincial) of
conversation we have all alone, and are usually on exceeding
good terms, which is a pleasure, even when other people like
me, and an immense consolation when they don't. But as I was
saying, I do sometimes fall out with myself, and with human
nature in general (and, in fact, I rather think the secret of
self-complacence lurks somewhere hereabouts,--in a mental
assumption that our virtues are our own, but our faults belong
to the race). But to think that we were so puny and puerile
that we could not stand the beauty that breathed around us!
I do not mean that it killed us, but it drained us. It did not
cease to be beautiful, but we ceased to be overpowered. When
the day began, eye and soul were filled with the light that
never was on sea or shore. We spoke low and little, gazing
with throbbing hearts, breathless, receptive, solemn, and
before twelve o'clock we flatted out and made jests. This is
humiliation,--that our dullard souls cannot keep up to the
pitch of sublimity for two hours; that we could sail through
Glory and Beauty, through Past and Present, and laugh. Low as
I sank with the rest, though, I do believe I held out the
longest: but what can one frail pebble do against a river?
"How pretty cows look in a landscape," I said; for you know,
even if you must come down, it is better to roll down an
inclined plane than to drop over a precipice; and I thought,
since I saw that descent was inevitable, I would at least
engineer the party gently through aesthetics to puns. So I
said, "How pretty cows look in a landscape, so calm and
reflective, and sheep harmoniously happy in the summer-tide."