Well, I think all that pathetic and mysterious, and beautiful with the beauty that reality has.  I want to know who all the folks were, what they looked like, what they cared about or thought about, how they made terms with pain and death, what they hoped, expected, feared, and what has become of them.  Everyone as urgently and vehemently and interestedly alive as I myself, and yet none of them with the slightest idea of how they got there or whither they were going—­the great, helpless, good-natured, passive army of men and women, pouring like a stream through the world, and borne away on the wings of the wind.  They were glad to be alive, no doubt, when the sun fell on the apple-orchard, and the scent of the fruit was in the air, and the bees hummed round the blossoms, when people smile at each other and say kind and meaningless things; they were afraid, no doubt, as they lay in pain in the stuffy attics, with the night wind blustering round the chimney-stack, and hoped to be well again.  Then there were occasions and treats, the Sunday dinner, the wedding, the ride in the farm-cart to Cambridge, the visit of the married sister from her home close by.  I do not suppose they knew or cared what was happening in the world.  War and politics made little difference to them.  They knew about the weather, they cared perhaps about their work, they liked the Sunday holiday—­all very dim and simple, thoughts not expressed, feelings not uttered, experience summed up in little bits of phrases.  Yet I like to think that they were pleased with the look of the place without knowing why.  I don’t deceive myself about all this, or make it out as idyllic.  I don’t exactly wish to have lived thus, and I expect it was coarse, greedy, dull, ugly, a great deal of it; but though I can think fine thoughts about it, and put my thoughts into musical words, I do not honestly believe that my life, my hopes, my feelings differ very much from the experience of these old people.

Of course I have books and pictures and intellectual fancies and ideas; but that is only an elaborate game that I play, the things I notice and recognise:  but I expect the old hearts and minds were at work, too, noticing and observing and recording; and all my flourish of talk and thought is only a superficial affair.

And what consecrates and lights up the little place for me, touches it with golden hues, makes it moving, touching, beautiful, is the thought of all that strange, unconscious life, the love and hate, the fear and the content, the joy and sorrow, that has surged to and fro among the thatched roofs and apple-orchards so many centuries before I came into being, and will continue when I am trodden into the dust.