return, yet they are active, and those who lived beauty in their
lives are still, through that beauty, benevolently active.

I will give you now the change instantaneously produced in me:

There rose in me another, deeper point of view that dispelled as by
magic the disenchantment that had chilled these first days of my
return. I stood here in this old-world garden, but I stood also in
the heart of that beauty, so carefully hidden, so craftily screened
behind the obvious, that strong and virile beauty which is England.
Within call of my voice, still studying by lamplight now the symbols
of her well-established strength, burning, moreover, with the steady
faith which does not easily break across restraint, and loving the
man as she had loved the little boy, sat one, not wondering perhaps
at my unspoken misunderstanding, yet hoping, patiently and in
silence, for its removal in due time. In the house of our boyhood, of
our earliest play and quarrels, unchanged and unchangeable, knowing
simply that I had "come home again to her," our mother waited. . . .

I need not elaborate this for you, you for whom England and our mother
win almost a single, undivided love. I had misjudged, but the cause
of my misjudgment was thus suddenly removed. A subtler understanding
insight, a sympathy born of deeper love, something of greater wisdom,
in a word, awoke in me. The thrill had worked its magic as of old,
but this time in its slower English fashion, deep, and
characteristically sure. To my country (that is, to my first
experience of impersonal love) and to my mother (that is, to my
earliest acquaintance with personal love) I had been ready, in my
impatience, to credit an injustice. Unknown to me, thus, there had
been need of guidance, of assistance. Beauty, having cleared the way,