i30 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



never see the flowers and scarlet-stained foliage of herb- 

 robert growing out of old stone-heaps by the wayside 

 without a feeling of satisfaction not explained by a long 

 memory of the contrast between the plant and the raw 

 flint; so also with the drenched lilac-bloom leaning out 

 over high walls of unknown gardens; and inland cliffs, 

 covered with beech, jutting out westward into a bottom- 

 less valley in the mist of winter twilights, in silence and 

 frost. Something in me belongs to these things, but I 

 hardly think that the mere naming of them will mean 

 anything except to those — many, perhaps — who have 

 experienced the same. A great writer so uses the words 

 of every day that they become a code of his own which 

 the world is bound to learn and in the end take unto 

 itself. But words are no longer symbols, and to say 

 " hill " or " beech " is not to call up images of a hill or 

 a beech-tree, since we have so long been in the habit of 

 using the words for beautiful and mighty and noble things 

 very much as a book-keeper uses figures without seeing 

 gold and power. I can, therefore, only try to suggest 

 what I mean by the significance of the plant in the stone- 

 heap, the wet lilac, the misty cliff, by comparing it with 

 that of scenes in books where we recognize some power 

 beyond the particular and personal. All of Don Quixote's 

 acts have this significance; so have the end of Mr. Con- 

 rad's story of Youth and the opening of Mr. Hudson's 

 El Ombu — the old man sitting on a summer's day under 

 the solitary tree to tell the history "of a house that had 

 been." Malory's Morte d'* Arthur is full of scenes like this. 

 For ten centuries, from the battle of Badon to the writ- 

 ing of Morte d* Arthur^ these stories were alive on the lips 

 of many kinds of men and women in many lands, from 



