with dark evenings had given
place to more dreary winter with light evenings. Thaws had ended in
rain, rain in wind, wind in dust. Showery days had come--the period of
pink dawns and white sunsets...._

That (with a quarter of a century, the writing of many books, and the
building up of a justly great and world-wide reputation between the
two writings) strikes me as a singular, and, in a way, pleasing
literary coincidence; singular, as a freak of subconscious memory for
words, pleasing, as a verification in mature life of the writer's
comparatively youthful observations of natural phenomena. I wonder if
the author, or any others among his almost innumerable readers, have
chanced to light upon this particular coincidence!

Another writer of fiction, whose bent of mind, if sombre, was far from
devoid of ironical humour, has occupied a deal of my leisure here--George
Gissing. I rank him very high among the Victorian novelists.
His work deserves a higher place than it is usually accorded by the
critics. He was a fine story-teller, and for me (though their
topographical appeal is not, perhaps, very obvious) his books are very
closely packed with living human interest. But again, for such an one
as myself, so situated, I would not say that a course of Gissing
formed particularly wholesome or digestible reading. Here, for
example, is a passage associated in my recollection with a night which
was among the worst I have spent in this place:

_He thought of the wretched millions of mankind to whom life is so
barren that they must needs believe in a recompense beyond the grave.
For that he neither looked nor longed. The bitterness of his lot was
that this world might be a sufficing Paradise to him, if only he could
clutch a poor little share of current coin...._

No, for such folk as I, that was not good reading. But--and let this
be my tribute to an author who won my very sincere esteem and
respect--when morning had come, after a bad night, and I had had my dawn
lesson from Nature, and my converse with Punch, I turned me to another
volume of Gissing, and with a quieter mind read this:

_Below me, but far off, is the summer sea, still, silent, its ever
changing blue and green dimmed at the long limit with luminous noon-tide
mist. Inland spreads the undulant vastness of the sheep-spotted
downs; beyond them the tillage and the woods of Sussex weald, coloured
like to the pure sky above them, but in deeper tint. Near by, all but