For a long morning I wandered about, dizzied with beauty, gazing, wondering, desiring I knew not what.

Then came the strange thought that this place of dreamful beauty should be in the hands of a few simple ecclesiastical persons; the town is little more than a village; century by century it has lived a little, quiet provincial life.  It has produced, so far as I know, no great man.  This soft air, this humid climate, sheltered from the wind, full of warm sunlight, fed with dew, seems favourable to a long, comfortable, indolent life.  The beauty of the place seems to have had no particular effect upon the people who live there.  It has never been a centre of thought or activity.  It ought, one would have thought, to have produced a certain kind of poetical temper, even though it were a temper of indolent enjoyment rather than of creative force.  But not even a beauty born of murmuring sound—­and the air is full of murmurs—­seemed to have passed into the faces of the simple townsfolk who make it their home.  I could not gather thatthe exquisite loveliness of the place had any particular effect upon the dwellers there, except a mild pleasure in the fact that so many strangers should come to see the place.  I do not exactly grudge strangers the sight of it, though I should like better to think of it all as standing in an enchanted valley hard to penetrate.  But it is difficult to see exactly for whom it all exists.  It seems to be a place that ought to have a dreamful, appreciative, emotional life of its own, a place where a few worthy natures might live in a serene, joyful, impassioned mood; a place where there is nothing that need remind the dweller of ugliness or vulgarity, of progress or statistics; a place for elect souls and fine natures.

One does not want to be fantastic or absurd in such reveries as these; but it is sad to think that scattered about England in mean towns, perhaps in sordid houses, are natures that could live in a place like Wells with a perpetual delight, a constant drinking at the sources of beauty, while most of the actual inhabitants have come there almost by chance, and do not appear to be particularly conscious of their blessings or particularly affected by their surroundings.  It seems indeed a curious wastefulness, that the Power who rules the world should have heaped in this tiny place among the hills such a treasure of delicate beauty, with such an indifference as to whether it should he perceived or discerned by congenial spirits.

The type of ecclesiastic whom I would like to see in a place like this would be a man deeply sensitive to art and music, with a strong mystical sense of wonder and desire; visionary perhaps, and what is called unpractical, believing that religion was not so much a matter of conduct as a matter of mood; in whom conduct would follow mood, as a rush bends in the stream.  I do not say that this is the most vital form of religion.  It is not the spirit of Luther or of John Wesley; it lives more among hopes