nderful force of expression, as if at any moment these slight words
and fancies might pierce very far into the deeper soul of things. In
his writing, as in his [122] life, that quiet is not the low-flying of
one from the first drowsy by choice, and needing the prick of some
strong passion or worldly ambition, to stimulate him into all the
energy of which he is capable; but rather the reaction of nature, after
an escape from fate, dark and insane as in old Greek tragedy, following
upon which the sense of mere relief becomes a kind of passion, as with
one who, having narrowly escaped earthquake or shipwreck, finds a thing
for grateful tears in just sitting quiet at home, under the wall, till
the end of days.

He felt the genius of places; and I sometimes think he resembles the
places he knew and liked best, and where his lot fell--London,
sixty-five years ago, with Covent Garden and the old theatres, and the
Temple gardens still unspoiled, Thames gliding down, and beyond to
north and south the fields at Enfield or Hampton, to which, "with their
living trees," the thoughts wander "from the hard wood of the
desk"--fields fresher, and coming nearer to town then, but in one of
which the present writer remembers, on a brooding early summer's day,
to have heard the cuckoo for the first time. Here, the surface of
things is certainly humdrum, the streets dingy, the green places, where
the child goes a-maying, tame enough. But nowhere are things more apt
to respond to the brighter weather, nowhere is there so much difference
between rain and sunshine, nowhere do the [123] clouds roll together
more grandly; those quaint suburban pastorals gathering a certain
quality of grandeur from the background of the great city, with its
weighty atmosphere, and portent of storm in the rapid light on dome and
bleached stone steeples.

1878.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE

[124] ENGLISH prose literature towards the end of the seventeenth
century, in the hands of Dryden and Locke, was becoming, as that of
France had become at an earlier date, a matter of design and skilled
practice, highly conscious of itself as an art, and, above all,
correct. Up to that time it had been, on the whole, singularly
informal and unprofessional, and by no means the literature of the "man
of letters," as we understand him. Certain great instances there had
been of literary structure or architecture--The Ecclesiastical Polity,
The Leviathan--but for the most part tha