may become. There the merry little hopes grow for the climber like
flowers and food, immediate, prompt to prove their uses, sufficient: if
just within the grasp, as mortal hopes should be. How the old lax life
closes in about you there! You are the man of your faculties, nothing
more. Why should a man pretend to more? We ask it wonderingly when we
are healthy. Poetic rhapsodists in the vales below may tell you of the
joy and grandeur of the upper regions, they cannot pluck you the medical
herb. He gets that for himself who wanders the marshy ledge at nightfall
to behold the distant Sennhiittchen twinkle, who leaps the green-eyed
crevasses, and in the solitude of an emerald alp stretches a salt hand to
the mountain kine.




CHAPTER LIV

MY RETURN TO ENGLAND

I passed from the Alps to the desert, and fell in love with the East,
until it began to consume me. History, like the air we breathe, must be
in motion to keep us uncorrupt: otherwise its ancient homes are
infectious. My passion for the sun and his baked people lasted awhile,
the drudgery of the habit of voluntary exile some time longer, and then,
quite unawares, I was seized with a thirst for England, so violent that I
abandoned a correspondence of several months, lying for me both at
Damascus and Cairo, to catch the boat for Europe. A dream of a rainy
morning, in the midst of the glowing furnace, may have been the origin of
the wild craving I had for my native land and Janet. The moist air of
flying showers and drenched spring buds surrounded her; I saw her plainly