before they can painfully stammer out a sentence that will describe it;
and when they have got it out, how it seems to have just missed the core
of the sensation that gave it birth, and what a poor, weak child it is
of what was perhaps a mighty feeling! I read Goethe on a special seat,
never departed from when he accompanies me, a seat on the south side of
an ice-house, and thus sheltered from the north winds sometimes
prevalent in May, and shaded by the low-hanging branches of a great
beech-tree from more than flickering sunshine. Through these branches I
can see a group of giant poppies just coming into flower, flaming out
beyond the trees on the grass, and farther down a huge silver birch, its
first spring green not yet deepened out of delicacy, and looking almost
golden backed by a solemn cluster of firs. Here I read Goethe--
everything I have of his, both what is well known and what is not; here
I shed invariable tears over Werther, however often I read it; here I
wade through Wilhelm Meister, and sit in amazement before the
complications of the Wahlverwandschaften; here I am plunged in wonder
and wretchedness by Faust; and here I sometimes walk up and down in the
shade and apostrophise the tall firs at the bottom of the glade in the
opening soliloquy of Iphigenia. Every now and then I leave the book on
the seat and go and have a refreshing potter among my flower beds, from
which I return greatly benefited, and with a more just conception of
what, in this world, is worth bothering about, and what is not.

In the evening, when everything is tired and quiet, I sit with Walt
Whitman by the rose beds and listen to what that lonely and beautiful
spirit has to tell me of night, sleep, death, and the stars. This dusky,
silent hour is his; and this is the time when I can best hear the
beatings of that most tender and generous heart. Such great love, such
rapture of jubilant love for nature, and the good green grass, and
trees, and clouds, and sunlight; such aching anguish of love for all