son why Syracuse
moved me by its acquired beauty, and not for its historical
associations, was because I felt convinced that Thucydides, who gives so
picturesque a description of the sea-fight, can never have set eyes on
the place, and must have embroidered his account from scanty hearsay.
But, on the other hand, there are few things in the world more
profoundly moving than to see a place where great thoughts have been
conceived and great books written, when one is able to feel that the
scene is hardly changed. The other day, as I passed before the
sacred gate of Rydal Mount, I took my hat off my head with a sense of
indescribable reverence. My companion asked me laughingly why I did so.
"Why?" I said. "From natural piety, of course! I know every detail here
as well as if I had lived here, and I have walked in thought a hundred
times with the poet, to and fro in the laurelled walks of the garden, up
the green shoulder of Nab Scar, and sat in the little parlour, while
the fire leapt on the hearth, and heard him 'booing' his verses, to be
copied by some friendly hand."

I thrill to see the stately rooms of Abbotsford, with all their sham
feudal decorations, the little staircase by which Scott stole away
to his solitary work, the folded clothes, the shapeless hat, the ugly
shoes, laid away in the glass case; the plantations where he walked with
his shrewd bailiff, the place where he stopped so often on the shoulder
of the slope, to look at the Eildon Hills, the rooms where he sat, a
broken and bereaved man, yet with so gallant a spirit, to wrestle with
sorrow and adversity. I wept, I am not ashamed to say, at Abbotsford, at
the sight of the stately Tweed rolling his silvery flood past lawns and
shrubberies, to think of that kindly, brave, and honourable heart, and
his passionate love of all the goodly and cheerful joys of life and
earth.

Or, again, it was a solemn day for me to pass from the humble tenement
where Coleridge lived, at Nether Stowey, before the cloud of sad habit
had darkened his horizon, and turned him away from the wells of poetry
into the deserts of metaphysical speculation, to find, if he could, some
medicine for his tortured spirit. I walked with a holy awe along the
leafy lanes to Alfoxden, where the beautiful house nestles in the
green combe among its oaks, thinking how here, and here, Wordsworth and
Coleridge had walked together in the glad days of youth, and planned,
in obscurity and secluded joy,