the continual agitation round and round the
trivial--an agitation so great that the trivial becomes colossal--at last
rob life of anything resembling _dolce far niente_ mid country lanes and
in the shadow of some country church. In fact, it seems to me that the
emotion which we seek--the emotion of strange wonderplaces, the emotion
of utter restfulness which falls upon the soul like a benediction--do
come to us from time to time, but at the most unexpected moments and in
the most unlikely places. They come--and we hug them in our memory like
precious thoughts. And sometimes we try to reproduce them artificially,
only to discover that "never anything twice" is one of the lessons of
life--and quite the last one we ever learn, even if we ever do learn
it--which is doubtful.

_Backward and Forward_

Thus for the most part, things look most beautiful when we anticipate
them, or as we look back upon them in memory over the fireside. For
distance lends enchantment, not only to most views, but also to memories
and love. As, metaphorically, we stand on the Mount of Olives gazing
down at the city of Jerusalem, thinking of all that tiny corner of the
earth has meant to men and women, we forget--as we look back--the beastly
little mosquito which bit us on the nose, the interruption or our
companion who wondered what the stones might tell us if they could only
speak. So (also metaphorically), as we set our faces towards the Holy
City, filled with the anticipation of those sublime thoughts and emotions
which would surge through our souls when we eventually arrived there, we
were happy in our ignorance of the fact that, when we did arrive, we felt
unutterably dirty and our head ached, and the corn on our little toe felt
more like a cancer than a corn! Meanwhile, the emotion of the soul,
which we expected to find upon the Mount of Olives, has sometimes come to
us quite unexpectedly while standing in the middle of Clapham Common in
the moonlight; and that glorious spirit of adventure, which to us means
"travel," we have felt riding on a motor-bike through the New Forest at
nightfall when the forest seemed full of pixies and the fading sunset was
red and grey and golden like the transformation scene of a pantomime.
But alas! the next day we found the forest unromantic, and Clapham Common
looked indescribably common in the morning sunlight. Our mood had
vanished, and although we tried to reproduce the same uplifting emotion