a hillside strewn with stones, an interminable plain
of sand; worst of all, a place would sometimes be
revealed which was full of suffering, anguish, and
hopeless woe, shadowed with fears and sins. From
such prospects I turned with groans unutterable; but
the air of the accursed place would hang about me
for days. These surprises, these strange surmises,
crowded in fast upon me. How different the world
was from what the careless forecast of boyhood had
pictured it! How strange, how beautiful, and
yet how terrible! As life went on the beauty
increased, and a calmer, quieter beauty made itself
revealed; in youth I looked for strange, impressive,
haunted beauties, things that might deeply stir and
move; but year by year a simpler, sweeter, healthier
kind of beauty made itself felt; such beauty as lies
on the bare, lightly washed, faintly tinted hillside
of winter, all delicate greens and browns, so far
removed from the rich summer luxuriance, and yet so
austere, so pure. I grew to love different books
too. In youth one demanded a generous glow, a
fire of passion, a strongly tinged current of emotion;
but by degrees came the love of sober, subdued reflection,
a cooler world in which, if one could not rest, one
might at least travel equably and gladly, with a far
wider range of experience, a larger, if a fainter,
hope. I grew to demand less of the world, less
of Nature, less of people; and, behold, a whole range
of subtler and gentler emotions came into sight, like
the blue hills of the distance, pure and low.
The whole movement of the world, past and present,
became intelligible and clear. I saw the humanity
that lies behind political and constitutional questions,
the strong, simple forces that move like a steady
stream behind the froth and foam of personality.
If in youth I believed that personality and influence
could sway and mould the world, in later years I have
come to see that the strongest and fiercest characters
are only the river-wrack, the broken boughs, the
torn grasses that whirl and spin in the tongue of
the creeping flood, and that there is a dim resistless
force behind them that marches on unheeding and drives
them in the forefront of the inundation. Things
that had seemed drearily theoretical, dry, axiomatic,
platitudinal, showed themselves to be great generalizations
from a torrent of human effort and mortal endeavour.
And thus all the mass of detail and human relation
that had been rudely set aside by the insolent prejudices
of youth under the generic name of business, came slowly
to have an intense and living significance. I
cannot trace the process in detail; but I became aware
of the fulness, the energy, the matchless interest
of the world, and the vitality of a hundred thoughts
that had seemed to me the dreariest abstractions.