ery cause I repeat them here. For all I know, they may serve to
complete the impression in the mind of the reader, as they were
certainly a part of it for me.

And this happened to me in the place of all others where I liked least
to stay. When I think of it I grow ashamed of my own ingratitude. "Out
of the strong came forth sweetness." There, in the bleak and gusty
North, I received, perhaps, my strongest impression of peace. I saw the
sea to be great and calm; and the earth, in that little corner, was all
alive and friendly to me. So, wherever a man is, he will find something
to please and pacify him: in the town he will meet pleasant faces of men
and women, and see beautiful flowers at a window, or hear a cage-bird
singing at the corner of the gloomiest street; and for the country,
there is no country without some amenity--let him only look for it in
the right spirit, and he will surely find.

VI

AN AUTUMN EFFECT

(1875)

"Nous ne decrivons jamais mieux la nature que lorsque nous nous
efforcons d'exprimer sobrement et simplement l'impression que nous en
avons recue."--M. ANDRE THEURIET, "L'Automne dans les Bois," _Revue
des Deux Mondes_, 1st Oct. 1874, p. 562.[40]

A country rapidly passed through under favourable auspices may leave
upon us a unity of impression that would only be disturbed and
dissipated if we stayed longer. Clear vision goes with the quick foot.
Things fall for us into a sort of natural perspective when we see them
for a moment in going by; we generalise boldly and simply, and are gone
before the sun is overcast, before the rain falls, before the season can
steal like a dial-hand from his figure, before the lights and shadows,
shifting round towards nightfall, can show us the other side of things,
and belie what they showed us in the morning. We expose our mind to the
landscape (as we would expose the prepared plate in the camera) for the
moment only during which the effect endures; and we are away before the
effect can change. Hence we shall have in our memories a long scroll of
continuous wayside pictures, all imbued already with the prevailing
sentiment of the season, the weather, and the landscape, and certain to
be unified more and more, as time goes on, by the unconscious processes
of thought. So that we who have only looked at a country over our
shoulder, so to speak, as we went by, will have a conception of it far
more memorable and articulate than a man who has live