I cannot close my eyes upon this day without setting down some record of it; yet the foolish insufficiency of words!  At sunrise I looked forth; nowhere could I discern a cloud the size of a man’s hand; the leaves quivered gently, as if with joy in the divine morning which glistened upon their dew.  At sunset I stood in the meadow above my house, and watched the red orb sink into purple mist, whilst in the violet heaven behind me rose the perfect moon.  All between, through the soft circling of the dial’s shadow, was loveliness and quiet unutterable.  Never, I could fancy, did autumn clothe in such magnificence the elms and beeches; never, I should think, did the leafage on my walls blaze in such royal crimson.  It was no day for wandering; under a canopy of blue or gold, where the eye could fall on nothing that was not beautiful, enough to be at one with Nature in dreamy rest.  From stubble fields sounded the long caw of rooks; a sleepy crowing ever and anon told of the neighbour farm; my doves cooed above their cot.  Was it for five minutes, or was it for an hour, that I watched the yellow butterfly wafted as by an insensible tremor of the air amid the garden glintings?  In every autumn there comes one such flawless day.  None that I have known brought me a mind so touched to the fitting mood of welcome, and so fulfilled the promise of its peace.

XIX.

I was at ramble in the lanes, when, from somewhere at a distance, there sounded the voice of a countryman—­strange to say—­singing.  The notes were indistinct, but they rose, to my ear, with a moment’s musical sadness, and of a sudden my heart was stricken with a memory so keen that I knew not whether it was pain or delight.  For the sound seemed to me that of a peasant’s song which I once heard whilst sitting among the ruins of Paestum.  The English landscape faded before my eyes.  I saw great Doric columns of honey-golden travertine; between them, as I looked one way, a deep strip of sea; when I turned, the purple gorges of the Apennine; and all about the temple, where I sat in solitude, a wilderness dead and still but for that long note of wailing melody.  I had not thought it possible that here, in my beloved home, where regret and desire are all but unknown to me, I could have been so deeply troubled by a thought of things far off.  I returned with head bent, that voice singing in my memory.  All the delight I have known in Italian travel burned again within my heart.  The old spell has not lost its power.  Never, I know, will it again draw me away from England; but the Southern sunlight cannot fade from my imagination, and to dream of its glow upon the ruins of old time wakes in me the voiceless desire which once was anguish.