s all his own--an estate out of which he had been kept
unjustly, and which he was now to receive in free and full possession.
Even those who have never been there before feel as if they had been;
and everybody goes comparing, and seeking for the familiar, and finding
it with such ecstasies of recognition, that one would think they were
coming home after a weary absence, instead of travelling hourly farther
abroad.

It is only after he is fairly arrived and settled down in his chosen
corner, that the invalid begins to understand the change that has
befallen him. Everything about him is as he had remembered, or as he had
anticipated. Here, at his feet, under his eyes, are the olive gardens
and the blue sea. Nothing can change the eternal magnificence of form of
the naked Alps behind Mentone; nothing, not even the crude curves of the
railway, can utterly deform the suavity of contour of one bay after
another along the whole reach of the Riviera. And of all this, he has
only a cold head-knowledge that is divorced from enjoyment. He
recognises with his intelligence that this thing and that thing is
beautiful, while in his heart of hearts he has to confess that it is not
beautiful for him. It is in vain that he spurs his discouraged spirit;
in vain that he chooses out points of view, and stands there, looking
with all his eyes, and waiting for some return of the pleasure that he
remembers in other days, as the sick folk may have awaited the coming of
the angel at the pool of Bethesda. He is like an enthusiast leading
about with him a stolid, indifferent tourist. There is some one by who
is out of sympathy with the scene, and is not moved up to the measure of
the occasion; and that some one is himself. The world is disenchanted
for him. He seems to himself to touch things with muffled hands, and to
see them through a veil. His life becomes a palsied fumbling after notes
that are silent when he has found and struck them. He cannot recognise
that this phlegmatic and unimpressionable body with which he now goes
burthened, is the same that he knew heretofore so quick and delicate and
alive.

He is tempted to lay the blame on the very softness and amenity of the
climate, and to fancy that in the rigours of the winter at home, these
dead emotions would revive and flourish. A longing for the brightness
and silence of fallen snow seizes him at such times. He is homesick for
the hale rough weather; for the tracery of the frost upon hi