rode one day, in the height of summer, for miles across the fenland.
To left and right lay the huge plain with its wide fields, its solitary
trees; to his left, between grassy flood-banks, ran the straight reedy
river, full to-day of the little yellow water-lily, golden stars rising
from the cool floating leaves; far ahead ran a low wooded ridge, with
house-roofs clustering round a fantastic church tower, with a crown of
pinnacles. Cattle grazed peacefully, and the whole scene was brimful
of sweet passionless life, ineffable content. If he could only have
shared it! Yet the sight of it all filled him with a sweet
hopefulness; he travelled on, a lonely pilgrim, eager and wistful,
desiring knowledge and love and serenity. He felt that they were
waiting, certainly waiting; that they were tenderly and wisely
withheld. That was the nearest that he could come to his heart's
desire.

XIV

Dreariness--Romance--The Choice of Work--Dulness--A Creed

It was always a great pleasure to Hugh to explore an unfamiliar
countryside, and the same pleasure was derivable to a certain extent
from railway travelling, though the vignettes that one saw from the
windows of a swiftly-rolling train were so transitory and so numerous,
that one had soon the same sense of fatigue that comes from turning
over a book of photographs, or from visiting a picture-gallery. If one
explored the country in a leisurely manner it was less fatiguing,
because one could taste the savour of a sight at one's ease. Hugh came
to the conclusion, as life advanced, that he preferred a landscape on
which humanity had set its mark to a landscape of a pure, natural
wildness, though that indeed had a beauty of its own, a more solemn
beauty, though not so near to the heart. But the great red-brick
house, peering through its sun-blinds, among the flower-beds, with a
rookery behind in the tall trees of a grove, and the cupola of
stable-buildings among the shrubberies, that one saw in a flash as the
train emerged from the low cutting; or the tiled roofs of houses, with
an old mouldering church-tower peering out above them, in a gap between
green downs; or a quiet manor-house among pastures, seen at the close
of day when the shadows began to lengthen, gave him a sense of the long
succession of peaceable lives--the boy returning from school to the
familiar home, or the old squire, after a life of pleasant activities,
walking among the well-known fields, and know