s
window-panes at morning, the reluctant descent of the first flakes, and
the white roofs relieved against the sombre sky. And yet the stuff of
which these yearnings are made is one of the flimsiest: if but the
thermometer fall a little below its ordinary Mediterranean level, or a
wind come down from the snow-clad Alps behind, the spirit of his fancies
changes upon the instant, and many a doleful vignette of the grim wintry
streets at home returns to him, and begins to haunt his memory. The
hopeless, huddled attitude of tramps in doorways; the flinching gait of
barefoot children on the icy pavement; the sheen of the rainy streets
towards afternoon; the meagre anatomy of the poor defined by the
clinging of wet garments; the high canorous note of the North-easter on
days when the very houses seem to stiffen with cold: these, and such as
these, crowd back upon him, and mockingly substitute themselves for the
fanciful winter scenes with which he had pleased himself a while before.
He cannot be glad enough that he is where he is. If only the others
could be there also; if only those tramps could lie down for a little in
the sunshine, and those children warm their feet, this once, upon a
kindlier earth; if only there were no cold anywhere, and no nakedness
and no hunger; if only it were as well with all men as it is with him!

For it is not altogether ill with the invalid, after all. If it is only
rarely that anything penetrates, vividly into his numbed spirit, yet,
when anything does, it brings with it a joy that is all the more
poignant for its very rarity. There is something pathetic in these
occasional returns of a glad activity of heart. In his lowest hours he
will be stirred and awakened by many such; and they will spring perhaps
from very trivial sources; as a friend once said to me, the "spirit of
delight" comes often on small wings. For the pleasure that we take in
beautiful nature is essentially capricious. It comes sometimes when we
least look for it; and sometimes, when we expect it most certainly, it
leaves us to gape joyously for days together, in the very home-land of
the beautiful. We may have passed a place a thousand times and one; and
on the thousand and second it will be transfigured, and stand forth in a
certain splendour of reality from the dull circle of surroundings; so
that we see it "with a child's first pleasure," as Wordsworth saw the
daffodils by the lake-side. And if this falls out capriciously wi