being rather too close to them to form a philosophical view. Your
love of characteristic points of natural scenery will help you.
When you have once grown familiar with the new surroundings, you
will penetrate the secret of their charm, as you have done here.
You will be able, too, to live a more undisturbed life, not fretted
by all the cross-currents which distract a man in his own land,
when he has a large variety of ties. I declare I did not know I was
so good a rhetorician; I shall end by convincing myself that there
is no real happiness to be found except in expatriation!

Seriously, my dear Herbert, I do understand the sadness of the
change; but one gets no good by dwelling on the darker side; there
are and will be times, I know, of depression. When one lies awake
in the morning, before the nerves are braced by contact with the
wholesome day; when one has done a tiring piece of work, and is
alone, and in that frame of mind when one needs occupation but yet
is not brisk enough to turn to the work one loves; in those dreary
intervals between one's work, when one is off with the old and not
yet on with the new--well I know all the corners of the road, the
shadowy cavernous places where the demons lie in wait for one, as
they do for the wayfarer (do you remember?), in Bewick, who,
desiring to rest by the roadside, finds the dingle all alive with
ambushed fiends, horned and heavy-limbed, swollen with the
oppressive clumsiness of nightmare. But you are not inexperienced
or weak. You have enough philosophy to wait until the frozen mood
thaws, and the old thrill comes back. That is one of the real
compensations of middle age. When one is young, one imagines that
any depression will be continuous; and one sees the dreary,
uncomforted road winding ahead over bare hills, till it falls to
the dark valley. But later on one can believe that "the roadside