ne, and a fierce longing to be
somewhere far away. Others are preserved from it by the love of home;
but we, in our poverty of attachment, listen more readily to the
depreciating voice.

I remember how deep had always been my longing to look out upon the sea
from some Greek island, and how one day, when this desire was granted,
and I walked along hills set high above the blue AEgean, I was seized
with an instant yearning to be instead upon Ranmore Common in Surrey.
Yet at that moment a life's ambition was being fulfilled; I stood in a
scene of incomparable beauty, gazing down on those deep azure waters
whose voice is always to me as a lament for wandering Odysseus; the
lower slopes were rich with olive trees, powdering with silver the
tilled lands round a beautiful monastery lying there in its enchanted
rest. Dark cypresses rose amid white walls of villages, by the contrast
of their gloom making all bright colours glorious; away to the left,
where the shore verged westward tracing inimitable curves between field
and sea, lay slumbering a little white town with minarets and walled
gardens and tiny haven--a very place for Argonauts; and yet my thoughts
turned to the chalk downs of England and honeysuckle crowning the
unfruitful hollies. _Sed quia semper abest quod aves praesentia
temnis_;--Such desire has distracted Roman minds; the perversity is very
old; and perhaps only children find no disillusion in the accomplishment
of a dream.

For our feet have one country and our dreams another, and there is no
constancy in us. It is not alone in the bartering of one earthly scene
for its fellow that we suffer the sick thirst of change; but into the
rarest hour of achieved ideal to which hope promised her supreme
satisfaction, the same wayward longing will often find a way; as in a
sacred place amid the purest and most exquisite meditations of the soul,
there will suddenly flit inexplicable shadows of irreverence, with
echoes of incongruous voices from the abandoned world.

But now as the years pass and the penury of human love has made the home
woods and fields more dear, I feel that this unrest is drawing to its
end. For as the seasons pass over the uplands and the meadows, clothing
them with new splendours between the seed-time and the harvest, no
vision rises upon the memory dearer and more beneficent than theirs. As
the lover's fancy dwells upon the image of his beloved in this or that
environment, and thus or thus array