at first, in a strange land of fierce
sun, hunger, glittering spar, ancient plutonic rock, and very Adam
himself. But once you are acclimatized, and know the language--it takes
time--there is no more London after dark, till, a wanderer returned
from a forgotten land, you emerge from the interior of Arabia on the
Red Sea coast again, feeling as though you had lost touch with the
world you used to know. And if that doesn't mean good writing I know of
no other test.

Because once there was a father whose habit it was to read with his
boys nightly some chapters of the Bible--and cordially they hated that
habit of his--I have that Book too; though I fear I have it for no
reason that he, the rigid old faithful, would be pleased to hear about.
He thought of the future when he read the Bible; I read it for the
past. The familiar names, the familiar rhythm of its words, its
wonderful well-remembered stories of things long past,--like that of
Esther, one of the best in English,--the eloquent anger of the prophets
for the people then who looked as though they were alive, but were
really dead at heart, all is solace and home to me. And now I think of
it, it is our home and solace that we want in a bed-book.

V. Transfiguration

There it is, thirty miles wide between the horns of the land, a bay
opening north-west upon the Atlantic, with a small island in the midst
of the expanse, a heap of sundered granite lying upon the horizon like
a faint sunken cloud, like the floating body of a whale, like an area
of opalescent haze, like an inexplicable brightness at sea when no
island can be seen. The apparition of that island depends upon the
favour of the sun. The island is only a ghost there, sometimes
invisible, sometimes but an alluring and immaterial fragment of the
coast we see far over the sea in dreams; a vision of sanctuary, of the
place we shall never reach, a frail mirage of land then, a roseous spot
which is not set in the sea, but floats there only while the thought of
a haven of peace and secure verities is still in the mind, and while
the longing eye projects it on the horizon.

The sun sets behind the island. On a clear day, at sundown, the island
behaves so much like a lump of separated earth, a piece of the black
world we know, that I can believe it is land, something to be found on
the map, a place where I could get ashore, after toil and adventures.
At sundown a low yellow planet marks its hiding-place.

I