crept along tinder the
Downs to Bramber and so to Shoreham, where he took ship and was free. I
take it, therefore, that when he came back in 1660 he must have been in
the thirties, more or less, but how far in the thirties I dare not
affirm.
Now, in 1659, the year before Charles II came back, Mazarin signed the
treaty with Spain. At that time Louis XIV must have been quite a young
man. Again, he died about thirty years after Charles II, and he was
seventy something when he died.
I am increasingly certain that Charles II was older than Louis XIV.... I
affirm it. I feel no hesitation....
Lord! How dependent is mortal man upon books of reference! An editor or
a minister of the Crown with books of reference at his elbow will seem
more learned than Erasmus himself in the wilds. But let any man who
reads this (and I am certain five out of six have books of reference by
them as they read), I say, let any man who reads this ask himself
whether he would rather be where he is, in London, on this August day
(for it is August), or where I am, which is up in Los Altos, the very
high Pyrenees, far from every sort of derivative and secondary thing and
close to all things primary?
I will describe this place. It is a forest of beech and pine; it grows
upon a mountain-side so steep that only here and there is there a ledge
on which to camp. Great precipices of limestone diversify the wood and
show through the trees, tall and white beyond them. One has to pick
one's way very carefully along the steep from one night's camp to
another, and often one spends whole hours seeking up and down to turn a
face of rock one cannot cross.
It seems dead silent. There are few birds, and even at dawn one only
hears a twittering here and there. Swirls of cloud form and pass beneath
one in the gorge and hurry up the opposing face of the ravine; they add
to this impression of silence: and the awful height of the pines and the
utter remoteness from men in some way enhance it. Yet, though it seems
dead silent, it is not really so, and if you were suddenly put here from
the midst of London, you would be confused by the noise which we who
know the place continually forget--and that is the waterfalls.
All the way down the gorge for miles, sawing its cut in sheer surfaces
through the rock, crashes a violent stream, and all the valley is full
of its thunder. But it is so continuous, so sedulous, that it becomes
part of oneself. One does not lose it a
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