SURREY 119 



white-curtained shadowy room, and in it a table with 

 white cloths and gleaming metal and glass laid thereon, 

 and nobody has yet come down to open the letters. It all 

 seems to be the work of spirit hands. It is beautiful and 

 calm and celestial, and is a profound pleasure tinged by 

 melancholy to see. It gives a sense of fitness for what? 

 For something undivined, imperfectly known, guessed at, 

 or hoped for, in ourselves; for a wider and less tainted 

 beauty, for a greater grace. Or it may not be a house at 

 all, but a hill-top five miles off, up which winds a white 

 road in two long loops between a wood and the turf. 

 The grass is smooth and warm and bright at the summit 

 in the blue noon; or in the horizontal sunbeams each stem 

 is lit so that the hill is transmuted into a glowing and 

 insubstantial thing; and then, at noon or evening, some- 

 thing in me flies at the sight and desires to tread that holy 

 ground. It is an odd world where everything is fleeting 

 yet the soul desires permanence even for fancies so 

 unprofitable as this. 



And so these thoughts at the sight of the great houses 

 mingle with the thoughts that grow at twilight and fade 

 gradually away in the windless night when the sky is soft- 

 ridged all over with white clouds and in the dark vales 

 between them are the stars. Then, for it is Saturday, 

 follows another pleasure of the umbrageous white country 

 roads at night the high contented voices of children 

 talking to father and mother as they go home from the 

 market town. The parents move dark-clothed, silent, 

 laden; the children flit about them with white hats or 

 pinafores. Their voices travel far and long after they 

 are invisible in the mist that washes over the fields in long 

 white firths, but die away as the misty night blots out 



