ch day,--the 20th; and very probably due course of
English Spring will bring as wild a May-day by the time this writing
meets anyone's eyes; but at all events, as yet the days are rough, and
as I look out of my fitfully lighted window into the garden, everything
seems in a singular hurry. The dead leaves; and yonder two living ones,
on the same stalk, tumbling over and over each other on the lawn, like a
quaint mechanical toy; and the fallen sticks from the rooks' nests, and
the twisted straws out of the stable-yard--all going one way, in the
hastiest manner! The puffs of steam, moreover, which pass under the
wooded hills where what used to be my sweetest field-walk ends now,
prematurely, in an abyss of blue clay; and which signify, in their
silvery expiring between the successive trunks of wintry trees, that
some human beings, thereabouts, are in a hurry as well as the sticks and
straws, and, having fastened themselves to the tail of a manageable
breeze, are being blown down to Folkestone.

60. In the general effect of these various passages and passengers, as
seen from my quiet room, they look all very much alike. One begins
seriously to question with one's self whether those passengers by the
Folkestone train are in truth one whit more in a hurry than the dead
leaves. The difference consists, of course, in the said passengers
knowing where they are going to, and why; and having resolved to go
there--which, indeed, as far as Folkestone, may, perhaps, properly
distinguish them from the leaves: but will it distinguish them any
farther? Do many of them know what they are going to Folkestone
for?--what they are going anywhere for? and where, at last, by sum of
all the days' journeys, of which this glittering transit is one, they
are going for peace? For if they know not this, certainly they are no
more making haste than the straws are. Perhaps swiftly going the wrong
way; more likely going no way--any way, as the winds and their own
wills, wilder than the winds, dictate; to find themselves at last at the
end which would have come to them quickly enough without their seeking.

61. And, indeed, this is a very preliminary question to all measurement
of the rate of going, this "where to?" or, even before that, "are we
going on at all?"--"getting on" (as the world says) on any road
whatever? Most men's eyes are so fixed on the mere swirl of the wheel of
their fortunes, and their souls so vexed at the reversed cadences of it
w