.

When Andrew Falconer stood so unexpectedly on the verge of the steep
descent, he trembled and started back with fright. His son made him sit
down a little way off, where yet we could see into the valley. The sun
was hot, the air clear and mild, and the sea broke its blue floor into
innumerable sparkles of radiance. We sat for a while in silence.

'Are you sure,' I said, in the hope of setting my friend talking, 'that
there is no horrid pool down there? no half-trampled thicket, with
broken pottery and shreds of tin lying about? no dead carcass, or dirty
cottage, with miserable wife and greedy children? When I was a child,
I knew a lovely place that I could not half enjoy, because, although
hidden from my view, an ugly stagnation, half mud, half water, lay in a
certain spot below me. When I had to pass it, I used to creep by with a
kind of dull terror, mingled with hopeless disgust, and I have never got
over the feeling.'

'You remind me much of a friend of mine of whom I have spoken to you
before,' said Falconer, 'Eric Ericson. I have shown you many of his
verses, but I don't think I ever showed you one little poem containing
an expression of the same feeling. I think I can repeat it.

'Some men there are who cannot spare
A single tear until they feel
The last cold pressure, and the heel
Is stamped upon the outmost layer.

And, waking, some will sigh to think
The clouds have borrowed winter's wing--
Sad winter when the grasses spring
No more about the fountain's brink.

And some would call me coward-fool:
I lay a claim to better blood;
But yet a heap of idle mud
Hath power to make me sorrowful.

I sat thinking over the verses, for I found the feeling a little
difficult to follow, although the last stanza was plain enough. Falconer
resumed.

'I think this is as likely as any place,' he said, 'to be free of such
physical blots. For the moral I cannot say. But I have learned, I hope,
not to be too fastidious--I mean so as to be unjust to the whole because
of the part. The impression made by a whole is just as true as the
result of an analysis, and is greater and more valuable in every
respect. If we rejoice in the beauty of the whole, the other is
sufficiently forgotten. For moral ugliness, it ceases to distress
in proportion as we labour to remove it, and regard it in its true
relations to all that surrounds it. There is an old legend which I dare