We live a very little time.  Before we have reached the middle of our time perhaps, but not long before, we discover the magnitude of our inheritance.  Consider England.  How many men, I should like to know, have discovered before thirty what treasures they may work in her air?  She magnifies us inwards and outwards; her fields can lead the mind down towards the subtle beginning of things; the tiny irridescence of insects; the play of light upon the facets of a blade of grass.  Her skies can lead the mind up infinitely into regions where it seems to expand and fill, no matter what immensities.

It was the wind off the land that made me think of all this possession in which I am to enjoy so short a usufruct.  I sat in my boat holding that tiller of mine, which is not over firm, and is but a rough bar of iron.  There was no breeze in the air, and the little deep vessel swung slightly to the breathing of the sea.  Her great mainsail and her baloon-jib came over lazily as she swung, and filled themselves with the cheating semblance of a wind.  The boom creaked in the goose-neck, and at every roll the slack of the mainsheet tautened with a kind of little thud which thrilled the deck behind me.  I saw under the curve of my headsail the long and hazy line, which is the only frontier of England; the plain that rather marries with than defies her peculiar seas.  For it was in the Channel, and not ten miles from the coastline of my own country, that these thoughts rose in me during the calm at the end of winter, and the boat was drifting down more swiftly than I knew upon the ebb of the outer tide.  Far off to the south sunlight played upon the water, and was gone again.  The great ships did not pass near me, and so I sat under a hazy sky restraining the slight vibration of the helm and waiting for the wind.

In whatever place a man may be the spring will come to him.  I have heard of men in prison who would note the day when its influence passed through the narrow window that was their only communion with their kind.  It comes even to men in cities; men of the stupid political sort, who think in maps and whose interest is in the addition of numbers.  Indeed, I have heard such men in London itself expressing pleasure when a south-west gale came up in April from over the pines of Hampshire and of Surrey and mixed the Atlantic with the air of the fields.  To me this year the spring came suddenly, like a voice speaking, though a low one—­the voice of a person subtle, remembered, little known, and always desired.  For a wind blew off the land.

The surface of the sea northward between me and the coast of Sussex had been for so many hours elastic, smooth, and dull, that I had come to forget the indications of a change.  But here and there, a long way off, little lines began to show, which were indeed broad spaces of ruffled water, seen edgeways from the low free-board of my boat.  These joined and made a surface all the way out towards me, but a surface