ing in its
parapets, rising blind and dumb on its green mound, with the hamlet
at its feet; or like the craggy islet, severed by the raging sea from
the towering headland, where the samphire sprouts in the rift, and the
sea-birds roost, at whose foot the surges lap, and over whose head the
landward wind blows swiftly all the day.

XIII

RETROSPECT

But one must not forget that after all memory has another side, too
often a rueful side, and that it often seems to turn sour and
poisonous in the sharp decline of fading life; and this ought not to
be. I would like to describe a little experience of my own which came
to me as a surprise, but showed me clearly enough what memory can be
and what it rightly is, if it is to feed the spirit at all.

Not very long ago I visited Lincoln, where my father was Canon and
Chancellor from 1872 to 1877. I had only been there once since then,
and that was twenty-four years ago. When we lived there I was a small
Eton boy, so that it was always holiday time there, and a place which
recalls nothing but school holidays has perhaps an unfair advantage.
Moreover it was a period quite unaccompanied, in our family life, by
any sort of trouble, illness, or calamity. The Chancery of Lincoln is
connected in my mind with no tragic or even sorrowful event whatever,
and suggests no painful reminiscence. How many people, I wonder, can
say that of any home that has sheltered them for so long?

Of course Lincoln itself, quite apart from any memories or
associations, is a place to kindle much emotion. It was a fine sunny
day there, and the colour of the whole place was amazing--the rich
warm hue of the stone of which the Minster is built, which takes on a
fine ochre-brown tinge where it is weathered, gives it a look of
homely comfort, apart from the matchless dignity of clustered transept
and soaring towers. Then the glowing and mellow brick of Lincoln, its
scarlet roof tiles--what could be more satisfying for instance than
the dash of vivid red in the tiling of the old Palace as you see it on
the slope among its gardens from the opposite upland?--its
smoke-blackened facades, the abundance, all over the hill, of old
embowered gardens, full of trees and thickets and greenery, its grassy
spaces, its creeper-clad houses; the whole effect is one of
extraordinary richness of hue, of age vividly exuberant, splendidly
adorned.

I wandered transported about Cathedral and close, and became aware
the