of the Muses,
from which the pleasant things of Italy had been but derivative; to
brave the difficulties in the way of leaving home at all, the
difficulties also of access to Greece, in the present condition of the
country.

At times the fancy came that he must really belong by descent to a
southern race, that a physical cause might lie beneath this strange
restlessness, like the imperfect reminiscence of something that had
passed in earlier life. The aged ministers of heraldry were set to
work (actually prolonging their days by an unexpected [134] revival of
interest in their too well-worn function) at the search for some
obscure rivulet of Greek descent--later Byzantine Greek, perhaps,--in
the Rosenmold genealogy. No! with a hundred quarterings, they were as
indigenous, incorruptible heraldry reasserted, as the old yew-trees
asquat on the heath.

And meantime those dreams of remote and probably adventurous travel
lent the youth, still so healthy of body, a wing for more distant
expeditions than he had ever yet inclined to, among his own wholesome
German woodlands. In long rambles, afoot or on horseback, by day and
night, he flung himself, for the resettling of his sanity, on the
cheerful influences of their simple imagery; the hawks, as if asleep on
the air below him; the bleached crags, evoked by late sunset among the
dark oaks; the water-wheels, with their pleasant murmur, in the
foldings of the hillside.

Clouds came across his heaven, little sudden clouds, like those which
in this northern latitude, where summer is at best but a flighty
visitor, chill out the heart, though but for a few minutes at a time,
of the warmest afternoon. He had fits of the gloom of other
people--their dull passage through and exit from the world, the
threadbare incidents of their lives, their dismal funerals--which,
unless he drove them away immediately by strenuous exercise, settled
into a gloom more properly his own. Yet at such times [135] outward
things also would seem to concur unkindly in deepening the mental
shadow about him, almost as if there were indeed animation in the
natural world, elfin spirits in those inaccessible hillsides and dark
ravines, as old German poetry pretended, cheerfully assistant
sometimes, but for the most part troublesome, to their human kindred.
Of late these fits had come somewhat more frequently, and had
continued. Often it was a weary, deflowered face that his favourite
mirrors reflected.