army of anonymous desires and
pleasures. Something, we feel, should happen; we know not what, yet we
proceed in quest of it. And many of the happiest hours of life fleet
by us in this vain attendance on the genius of the place and moment.
It is thus that tracts of young fir, and low rocks that reach into
deep soundings, particularly torture and delight me. Something must
have happened in such places, and perhaps ages back, to members of my
race; and when I was a child I tried in vain to invent appropriate
games for them, as I still try, just as vainly, to fit them with the
proper story. Some places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry
aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain
coasts are set apart for shipwreck. Other spots again seem to abide
their destiny, suggestive and impenetrable, 'miching mallecho.' The
inn at Burford Bridge, with its arbours and green garden and silent,
eddying river--though it is known already as the place where Keats
wrote some of his "Endymion" and Nelson parted from his Emma--still
seems to wait the coming of the appropriate legend. Within these ivied
walls, behind these old green shutters, some further business
smoulders, waiting for its hour. The old Hawes Inn at the Queen's
Ferry makes a similar call upon my fancy. There it stands, apart from
the town, beside the pier, in a climate of its own, half inland, half
marine--in front, the ferry bubbling with the tide and the guardship
swinging to her anchor; behind, the old garden with the trees.
Americans seek it already for the sake of Lovel and Oldbuck, who dined
there at the beginning of the "Antiquary." But you need not tell
me--that is not all; there is some story, unrecorded or not yet
complete, which must express the meaning of that inn more fully.... I
have lived both at the Hawes and Burford in a perpetual flutter, on
the heels, as it seemed, of some adventure that should justify the
place; but though the feeling had me to bed at night and called me
again at morning in one unbroken round of pleasure and suspense,
nothing befell me in either worth remark. The man or the hour had not
yet come; but some day, I think, a boat shall put off from the Queen's
Ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty night a horseman, on
a tragic errand, rattle with his whip upon the green shutters of the
inn at Burford."

In this way, the setting may, in many cases, exist as the initial
element of the narrative, and s