Part 31 (1/2)

Another chapter which I believed I was going to write in this book was to be devoted to inscriptions I have always loved the art of the epigraphists, and I wanted to quote so (1) an inscription for a sun-dial, (2) an inscription for astatesmen, (3) another to Williaht and died in the War,--ation impressed me profoundly

Their ashes in a peaceful urn shall rest, Their nah endeavour o

Another Surrey chapter ht have dealt with my activities as Sheriff and ht to have centred in my personal life at Newlands It was at Newlands that ht I saw, as did my doctors, the advance of the penuulf an this book, to put on record a description of how utterly different than is cos of the occupant of the condemned cell I should also like to have recorded certain reflections upon how a serious illness becomes a kind of work of art, a drama or film in real life, in which the patient, the doctors, the nurses, the friends, and the relations all play their appropriate parts, and contribute each in his order to the central the,” a theht so of the Gondolier, for that is too late, but that interval between life and death which the Emperor Diocletian boasted that he had created for himself

Another unwritten chapter on a subject which ht very well have been one of the best, was to be called ”The Consolations of the Classics” It would have told how in his later years new stars had risen for the adventurer in the voyage of life, while many of the planets that were in their zenith in his youth have suffered decline

As a boy, and even in the pri of Racine I now bendof Balzac I now think of hireatest of the analysts of hureat as Shakespeare, but, all the sareat If ever a man fascinates and is intolerable, it is Balzac

I should have liked, but that is not a thing which can be compressed or sandwiched into any chapter, to have written quite frankly and fully about ious beliefs Here, indeed, I had planned with soht other ht to believe ht not to believe in order toto plan” What I wanted to do was to say frankly, fairly, and truthfully what I do believe as a ht not I wanted to record an existing set of actualities, not to write a piece of philosophy or raph h I hope it will not wait very long

If I write such a paper I shall certainly take for my motto Lord Halifax's words to Bishop Burnet: ”I believe as hty will, I aestion of an ostrich”

I will neither be put off on the one side byan effort to express belief in ain, refuse to record ion” because it will not be thought creditable for me, or because certain people will think me superstitious and unreasonable, just as other people will thinkto the demand, ”You cannot possibly believe _this_, when you have just said that you don't believe _that_

The two things ether You cannot pick and choose like this at your fancy”

My answer is, I can, I do, and I will My endeavour is not an atteood or for evil what I do believe I believe that London lies to the Northeast of the place at which I a, and I mean to put down the said fact for what it is worth

Hoish I could write s that have happened to s that I have heard of from other people I don't host-stories to tell All the sas much more impressive because they are soman, a habit which I wish I had not abandoned, to ask everybody I ca, as the oddest thing that had happened in their lives One would have supposed that I should often have got for ant rapier-thrust, or soh, I never found anyone ”shy”

at et ht to record A section of this chapter should deal with accidental conversations and accidental confessions It has been e talk in trains and other public places, and again, by straight questions I have sometimes elicited very crooked answers

For exaentleuely and yet ie, as follows: ”I once saw six ed in a very rustic ree withThe full story, though I cannot tell it here, was quite as good So was the story of Willia Soht with Spanish Pilots in the Bilbao River Of this story, told to me in the broadest Somersetshi+re dialect by a Soht, I cannot resist quoting one passage: ”They were all dressed in white and fighting with their long knives But Williaot hold of the axe ays kept on deck for cutting away the mast if it went in a storm, and he knocked them over with that And as fast as he did knock them over, we did chuck the bodies into the water”

Another of my accidental conversations opened with these words: ”And she never knew till she followed her to her grave that she was her own htly ht well develop like a Greek play

Again, I planned a chapter to describe the four s seen by est of all, and perhapsbeauty in rather a strained sense, was the man alluded to in my dedication,--the man my wife and I saw in the Jews' Garden at Jahoni We were resting in the garden after a very long ride in very hot weather, when there entered a young s On his head was a wide hat of rough straw, and across his shoulder a mattock His face and form could only be described in the famous words, ”Beauty that shocks you” Why his beauty shocked us, and must have shocked any other seers possessed of any sensibility, I cannot say Thinking he was a gardener, we asked our Dragoman to ask him some simple question but he could not, or did not, obtain any inforures of Faunus or Vertumnus, or one of those half-deities or quarter-deities that one sees a the marbles in public collections ”Graeco-Ro a Rural Deity, or God of Spring or Agriculture in the Latin y” Certainly the more decadent side of late Greek or Roain in this a

Far , and far er brother met with in a tram-car outside the Porta del Popolo in Ro why the Italian population had declined in the ood- looks and why one never saw anyone like a Bellini or a Raphael Madonna

And then I looked up after having my ticket clipped and saw the perfect youthfulopposite me A more exquisitely harmonious face and expression were never vouchsafed to my eyes She was a countrywo her first visit to the city accoladly have taken oath at first sight that she was the perfect wife and mother, and yet there was no sentiht told in ss she saw fro ripple with pleasure Happily I cannot here be judged as a sentimental visionary for h, though I think English women, as a whole, far surpass the Italians in their looks, the other perfectly beautiful wo an early walk, with er brother, from Baveno to the summit, or at any rate, to the shoulder of the Monte Moteroni The ti, and the place a se of the land between the open mountain and the cultivated slopes

I looked over the hedge or wall, I forget which, and there was a bare- legged girl of so in the field with her father and her brothers, hoeing potatoes Here, indeed, was soirl in Browning's ”Italian in England, ”--a face gentle, siure worthy of the face

The fourth figure in allery of the visions that the turn of the road took fro a purely prosaic walk in South Kensington Unsuspecting, unperturbed, I was bent on a constitutional, orexpedition, when there suddenly arose before my astonished eyes, out of a man-hole in the middle of the street--I honestly believe it was the Cro work of the face and figure which the Italian painters gradually caain, as in the case of the Madonna of the traht of, the reseh the trained eye ht notice a reseent air showed nothing of the Man of Sorrows

He was just an ordinary Englishures of resplendent beauty--and especially of the to sinister and uncanny about hilishe which I know is soh I am quite unable to find it, in which the Physician Philosopher declares that when he sees specially beautiful persons he desires to say a grace or thanksgiving to Heaven for the joy that has been vouchsafed his told th One is the story of a tiny Indian spindle that spun by itself in the dust, and the other, though it had no , is the story of a chalish mountaineer who told it me, was on a difficult climb Suddenly he saw to his astonish stock- still on a steep glacier She actually let him come so close to her that he could have touched her with his hand, and then he saw the reason The chae of a deep crevasse, and up froonised creature--cries that were answered by the h the ice-bridge and lay some hundred feet or so below and beyond all recovery The narrator was an ordinary table-d'hote S-Room tourist, but he could hardly recount the story without tears He tried, but it was impossible to effect a rescue, and he had to leave the wretchedwhat chamois are, it sounds absolutely incredible that the mother should have been able to overco one I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it She took no uide than if we had been rocks Poor brute!”

Another chapter would have recorded the influence upon reat sculptors, and great ive in detail accounts of erous parts of the earth, but through soes of Africa and Asia As a young es overto h Alps in winter, I was early, so to speak, in the snow-field To this day nothing attracts ht spent in a sledge

I crossed the Splugen by day in the winter, and by ht in the summer I crossed the St Gothard (before the tunnel was e I have crossed the Simplon, and I have many times crossed the Bernina and all the other passes of the Orisons in the snow in mid-winter For those who like, as I do, sharp cold, and ardent sunlight, there is nothing htful, and if as sometimes happens, one can see or hear an avalanche really close, without getting into it, a pleasant spice of danger is added But I did not love the Alps h no expert climber, I was fond of the ot higher than 11,000 feet, or a little over, I had the extre into a crevasse Fortunately I ell held by the rope against the white grey edge of the blue abyss, while s kicked freely in the illi aroused in the grey of dawn by theequal that succession of scenes, the Alpine village in sleepy silence, the pastures and the cultivated land, the inevitable little bridge on the inevitable stream, then the belt of pines, then the zone of rocks and flowers, best and gayest of all gardens, and last the star gentians and the eternal snows?