he
universe? And yet it is not so. The ends for which they give away their
priceless youth, for all they know, may be chimerical or hurtful; the
glory and riches they expect may never come, or may find them
indifferent; and they and the world they inhabit are so inconsiderable
that the mind freezes at the thought.

IV

ORDERED SOUTH

By a curious irony of fate, the places to which we are sent when health
deserts us are often singularly beautiful. Often, too, they are places
we have visited in former years, or seen briefly in passing by, and kept
ever afterwards in pious memory; and we please ourselves with the fancy
that we shall repeat many vivid and pleasurable sensations, and take up
again the thread of our enjoyment in the same spirit as we let it fall.
We shall now have an opportunity of finishing many pleasant excursions,
interrupted of yore before our curiosity was fully satisfied. It may be
that we have kept in mind, during all these years, the recollection of
some valley into which we have just looked down for a moment before we
lost sight of it in the disorder of the hills; it may be that we have
lain awake at night, and agreeably tantalised ourselves with the thought
of corners we had never turned, or summits we had all but climbed: we
shall now be able, as we tell ourselves, to complete all these
unfinished pleasures, and pass beyond the barriers that confined our
recollections.

The promise is so great, and we are all so easily led away when hope and
memory are both in one story, that I daresay the sick man is not very
inconsolable when he receives sentence of banishment, and is inclined to
regard his ill-health as not the least fortunate accident of his life.
Nor is he immediately undeceived. The stir and speed of the journey, and
the restlessness that goes to bed with him as he tries to sleep between
two days of noisy progress, fever him, and stimulate his dull nerves
into something of their old quickness and sensibility. And so he can
enjoy the faint autumnal splendour of the landscape, as he sees hill and
plain, vineyard and forest, clad in one wonderful glory of fairy gold,
which the first great winds of winter will transmute, as in the fable,
into withered leaves. And so too he can enjoy the admirable brevity and
simplicity of such little glimpses of country and country ways as flash
upon him through the windows of the train;