and his own home, saying, “I will go no further; for I have seen afar off the last houses of the kings.”  I can understand a man who had only seen in the distance Jerusalem sitting on the hill going no further and keeping that vision for ever.  It would, of course, be said that it was absurd to come at all, and to see so little.  To which I answer that in that sense it is absurd to come at all.  It is no more fantastic to turn back for such a fancy than it was to come for a similar fancy.  A man cannot eat the Pyramids; he cannot buy or sell the Holy City; there can be no practical aspect either of his coming or going.  If he has not come for a poetic mood he has come for nothing; if he has come for such a mood, he is not a fool to obey that mood.  The way to be really a fool is to try to be practical about unpractical things.  It is to try to collect clouds or preserve moonshine like money.  Now there is much to be said for the view that to search for a mood is in its nature moonshine.  It may be said that this is especially true in the crowded and commonplace conditions in which most sight-seeing has to be done.  It may be said that thirty tourists going together to see a tombstone is really as ridiculous as thirty poets going together to write poems about the nightingale.  There would be something rather depressing about a crowd of travellers, walking over hill and dale after the celebrated cloud of Wordsworth; especially if the crowd is like the cloud, and moveth all together if it move at all.  A vast mob assembled on Salisbury Plain to listen to Shelley’s skylark would probably (after an hour or two) consider it a rather subdued sort of skylarking.  It may be argued that it is just as illogical to hope to fix beforehand the elusive effects of the works of man as of the works of nature.  It may be called a contradiction in terms to expect the unexpected.  It may be counted mere madness to anticipate astonishment, or go in search of a surprise.  To all of which there is only one answer; that such anticipation is absurd, and such realisation will be disappointing, that images will seem to be idols and idols will seem to be dolls, unless there be some rudiment of such a habit of mind as I have tried to suggest in this chapter.  No great works will seem great, and no wonders of the world will seem wonderful, unless the angle from which they are seen is that of historical humility.

One more word may be added of a more practical sort.  The place where the most passionate convictions on this planet are concentrated is not one where it will always be wise, even from a political standpoint, to air our plutocratic patronage and our sceptical superiority.  Strange scenes have already been enacted round that fane where the Holy Fire bursts forth to declare that Christ is risen; and whether or no we think the thing holy there is no doubt about it being fiery.  Whether or no the superior person is right to expect the unexpected, it is possible that something may be revealed to him that he really does not expect.  And whatever he may think about the philosophy of sight-seeing, it is not unlikely that he may see some sights.