Day by day I look at the coral buds on the lime-tree.  Something of regret will mingle with my joy when they begin to break.

In the middle years of my life—­those years that were the worst of all—­I used to dread the sound of a winter storm which woke me in the night.  Wind and rain lashing the house filled me with miserable memories and apprehensions; I lay thinking of the savage struggle of man with man, and often saw before me no better fate than to be trampled down into the mud of life.  The wind’s wail seemed to me the voice of a world in anguish; rain was the weeping of the feeble and the oppressed.  But nowadays I can lie and listen to a night-storm with no intolerable thoughts; at worst, I fall into a compassionate sadness as I remember those I loved and whom I shall see no more.  For myself, there is even comfort in the roaring dark; for I feel the strength of the good walls about me, and my safety from squalid peril such as pursued me through all my labouring life.  “Blow, blow, thou winter wind!” Thou canst not blow away the modest wealth which makes my security.  Nor can any “rain upon the roof” put my soul to question; for life has given me all I ever asked—­infinitely more than I ever hoped—­and in no corner of my mind does there lurk a coward fear of death.

XIII.

If some stranger from abroad asked me to point out to him the most noteworthy things in England, I should first of all consider his intellect.  Were he a man of everyday level, I might indicate for his wonder and admiration Greater London, the Black Country, South Lancashire, and other features of our civilization which, despite eager rivalry, still maintain our modern pre-eminence in the creation of ugliness.  If, on the other hand, he seemed a man of brains, it would be my pleasure to take him to one of those old villages, in the midlands or the west, which lie at some distance from a railway station, and in aspect are still untouched by the baser tendencies of the time.  Here, I would tell my traveller, he saw something which England alone can show.  The simple beauty of the architecture, its perfect adaptation to the natural surroundings, the neatness of everything though without formality, the general cleanness and good repair, the grace of cottage gardens, that tranquillity and security which make a music in the mind of him who gazes—­these are what a man must see and feel if he would appreciate the worth and the power of England.  The people which has made for itself such homes as these is distinguished, above all things, by its love of order; it has understood, as no other people, the truth that “order is heaven’s first law.”  With order it is natural to find stability, and the combination of these qualities, as seen in domestic life, results in that peculiarly English product, our name for which—­though but a pale shadow of the thing itself—­has been borrowed by other countries:  comfort.