The Project Gutenberg eBook, Dreamthorp, by Alexander Smith

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Title: Dreamthorp
A Book of Essays Written in the Country

Author: Alexander Smith

Release Date: April 9, 2006 [eBook #18135]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DREAMTHORP***

E-text prepared by Al Haines

DREAMTHORP

A Book of Essays Written in the Country

by

ALEXANDER SMITH

London
George Routledge & Sons, Limited
New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.
First Edition (in this series), July 1905
Reprinted November, 1907
Reprinted April, 1912

Contents

DREAMTHORP
ON THE WRITING OF ESSAYS
OF DEATH AND THE FEAR OF DYING
WILLIAM DUNBAR
A LARK'S FLIGHT
CHRISTMAS
MEN OF LETTERS
ON THE IMPORTANCE OF A MAN TO HIMSELF
A SHELF IN MY BOOKCASE
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
BOOKS AND GARDENS
ON VAGABONDS

DREAMTHORP

It matters not to relate how or when I became a denizen of Dreamthorp;
it will be sufficient to say that I am not a born native, but that I
came to reside in it a good while ago now. The several towns and
villages in which, in my time, I have pitched a tent did not please,
for one obscure reason or another; this one was too large, t'other too
small; but when, on a summer evening about the hour of eight, I first
beheld Dreamthorp, with its westward-looking windows painted by sunset,
its children playing in the single straggling street, the mothers
knitting at the open doors, the fathers standing about in long white
blouses, chatting or smoking; the great tower of the ruined castle
rising high into the rosy air, with a whole troop of swallows--by
distance made as small as gnats--skimming about its rents and
fissures;--when I first beheld all this, I felt instinctively that my
knapsack might be taken off my shoulders, that my tired feet might
wander no more, that at last, on the planet, I had found a home. From
that evening I have dwelt here, and the only journey I am like now to
make, is the very inconsiderable one, so far at least as distance is
concerned, from the house in which I live to the graveyard beside the
ruined castle. There, with the f