many waters, teach me this, if they teach
me nothing else, that peace and beauty are dear to the heart of God;
that he sets them where he can; that we can perceive them and love
them; and that if our life is a learning of some great and dim lesson,
these sweet influences may sustain and comfort us at least as well as
the phantoms which so many of us pursue.

LIII

I am sure that it is an inspiring as well as a pleasant thing to go on
pilgrimage sometimes to the houses where interesting people and great
people have lived and thought and written. It helps one to realise,
that "they were mortal, too, like us," but it makes one realise it
gratefully and joyfully; it is good to feel, as one comes to do by such
visits, that such thoughts, such words, are not unattainable by
humanity, that they can be thought in rooms and fields and gardens like
our own, and written down in chairs and on tables much the same as
others. Tennyson went once to see Goethe's house at Weimar, and was
more transported by seeing a room full of his old boots and
medicine-bottles than by anything else that he saw; and it is a wise
care that keeps dear Sir Walter's old hat and coat and clumsy laced
shoes in a glass case at Abbotsford. Of course one must not go in
search of old boots and bottles, as many tourists do, without caring
much about the hero to whom they belonged. One must have grown familiar
first with every detail of the great man's life, have read his letters
and his biography, and the letters written about him, and his Diary if
possible, and all his books; one must have grown to admire him and
desire his presence, and hate the thought of the grave that separates
him from oneself; until one has come to feel that the place where he
slept and ate and walked and talked and wrote is like the field full of
stones at Luz, where the ladder was set up from heaven to earth, and
where Jacob, shivering in his chilly slumbers, saw, in a moment of
dreamful enlightenment, that the heavenly staircase may be let down in
a moment at any place or hour, and that the angels may descend,
carrying bright thoughts and secret consolations from its cloudy head.

And thus there can be for any one man but a few places to which he owes
such a pilgrimage, because, in the first place, the thing must not be
too ancient and remote; it is of little use to see the ruined shell of
a great house in a forest, because such a scene does not in the least
recall what the