2g8 THE LAND OF THE LION 



that dear blue slope of curving Irish mountain land and take 

 myself and my patient reader across the Quasi Nyiro and 

 so back to the civilization of Nairobi and the iron road to a 

 distant coast. 



I have lingered so long at the foot of Kenia that I have 

 come to feel as though this great mountain was henceforth 

 to be a part of me. It makes one sad to turn one's back on 

 it, as I must, to-day. I think it is Kenia whose majesty 

 and wonder are responsible for the dreaming in which I 

 have again seen so clearly those dear Irish sea-girdled hills 

 that are a real part of myself. 



Arthur Hugh Clough says somewhere: 



" Oh ye whose eyes with constant toil are tired, 

 Come rest them on the wideness of the sea." 



Sea has never rested me as have the mountains. The 

 seas to me always seems relentless, cruel, estranging, as 

 Matthew Arnold calls it, while the mountains carry me back 

 and make me live over again the transfigured days of 

 boyhood. 



Then, somehow, mountains seem to call forth anew the 

 hopes and yearnings which, if we did but speak out the whole 

 truth, if we resisted the slavery of convention, we all should 

 confess are woefully apt to suffer abatement and decay, and 

 yet are more precious to us than any mere earthly possession. 



Brown has put what I want to say into beautiful verse. 

 His peasant muses: 



" I suppose it is God that makes when He wills 

 Them beautiful things, with the lift of His hills 

 And the waft of His winds; His calms and His storms 

 And His work and the rest " 



So true men, wearied in the unending battle, have in all 

 the ages turned, as did the Psalmist of old, "to the hills 

 whence cometh our help." Bedford gaol wall could not 

 shut out from John Bunyan's eyes those "delectable moun- 

 tains" which he'has helped millions to see, and Wordsworth 



