Meanwhile the earth and air, as well as the comrades and companions of the pilgrimage, were touched with a different light of beauty.  The beauty was there, and in even fuller measure.  The sun in the hot summer days poured down upon the fragrant garden, with all its bright flower-beds, its rose-laden alleys, its terraced walks, its green-shaded avenues; the autumn mists lay blue and faint across the far pastures, and the hill climbed smoothly to its green summit; or the spring came back after the winter silence with all its languor of unfolding life, while bush and covert wove their screens of dense-tapestried foliage, to conceal what mysteries of love and delight! and the faces or gestures of those about one took on a new significance, a richer beauty, a larger interest, because one began to guess how experience moulded them, by what aims and hopes they were graven and refined, by what failures they were obliterated and coarsened.  But the difference was this, that one was not now for ever trying to make these charms one’s own, to establish private understandings or mutual relations.  It was enough now to observe them as one could, to interpret them, to enjoy them, and to pass by.  The acquisitive sense was gone, and one neither claimed nor grasped; one admired and wondered and went forwards.  And this again seemed a wholesome balance of thought, for, as the desire to take diminished, the power, of interpreting and enjoying grew.

But very gradually a slow shadow began to fall, like the shadow of a great hill that reaches far out over the plain.  I passed one day an old churchyard deep in the country, and saw the leaning headstones and the grassy barrows of the dead.  A shudder passed through me, a far-off chill, at the thought that it must come to this after all; that however rich and intricate and delightful life was—­and it was all three—­the time would come, perhaps with pain and languid suffering, when one must let all the beautiful threads out of one’s hands, and compose oneself, with such fortitude as one could muster, for the long sleep.  And then one called Reason to one’s aid, and bade her expound the mystery, and say that just as no smallest particle of matter could be disintegrated utterly, or subtracted from the sum of things, so, and with infinitely greater certainty, could no pulse or desire or motion of the spirit be brought to nought.  True, the soul lived like a bird in a cage, hopping from perch to perch, slumbering at times, moping dolefully, or uttering its song; but it was even more essentially imperishable than the body that obeyed and enfolded and at last failed it.  So said Reason; and yet that brought no hope, so dear and familiar had life become,—­the well-known house, the accustomed walks, the daily work, the forms of friend and comrade.  It was just those things that one wanted; and reason could only say that one must indeed leave them and begone, and she could not look forwards nor forecast anything; she could but bid one note the crag-faces and the monstrous ledges of the abyss into which the spirit was for ever falling, falling. . . .