hidden among trees in yon lovely hollow, lies an old, old hamlet, its
brown roofs decked with golden lichen; I see the low church tower, and
the little graveyard about it. Meanwhile, high in the heaven, a lark
is singing. It descends, it drops to its nest, and I could dream that
half the happiness of its exultant song was love of England...._

That is his little picture of a recollection of summer. And then,
returning to his realities of the moment, this miscalled 'savage'
pessimist and 'pitiless realist' continues thus:

_It is all but dark. For a quarter of an hour I must have been writing
by a glow of firelight reflected on my desk; it seemed to me the sun
of summer. Snow is still falling. I can see its ghostly glimmer
against the vanishing sky. To-morrow it will be thick upon my garden,
and perchance for several days. But when it melts, when it melts, it
will leave the snow-drop. The crocus, too, is waiting, down there
under the white mantle which warms the earth._

But I would not say that even this was well-chosen reading for me--here
in my bush hermitage--any more than is that masterpiece of
Kipling's later concentration, _An Habitation Enforced_, followed by
its inimitable _Recall_:

_I am the land of their fathers,
In me the virtue stays;
I will bring back my children
After certain days.

* * * * *

Till I make plain the meaning
Of all my thousand years--
Till I fill their hearts with knowledge,
While I fill their eyes with tears._

No, nor yet, despite its healing potency in its own place, the same
master craftsman's counsel to the whole restless, uneasy, sedentary
brood among his countrymen:

_Take of English earth as much
As either hand may rightly clutch,
In the taking of it breathe
Prayer for all who lie beneath--
Lay that earth upon your heart,
And your sickness shall depart!
It shall mightily restrain
Over busy hand and brain,
Till thyself restored shall prove
By what grace the heavens do move._

None of these good things are wholly good for me, here and now,
because--because, for example, they recall a prophecy of Mrs.
Oldcastle's, and the grounds upon which she based it.

Who should know better than I, that if my life-long mental
restlessness chances, when I am less well than usual, or darkness is
upon me, to take the form of nostalgia, with clinging, pulling
thoughts of England--never of the London I knew so well, but always of
the ru