elop themselves before you, now as a laughable farce, and now
grave and beautiful like an old tale.

*****

It is almost as if the millennium were arrived, when we shall throw our
clocks and watches over the housetops, and remember time and seasons no
more. Not to keep hours for a lifetime is, I was going to say, to live
for ever. You have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly long
is a summer's day that you measure out only by hunger, and bring to an
end only when you are drowsy.

*****

I know a village where there are hardly any clocks, where no one knows
more of the days of the week than by a sort of instinct for the fete on
Sundays, and where only one person can tell you the day of the month,
and she is generally wrong; and if people were aware how slow Time
journeyed in that village, and what armfuls of spare hours he gives,
over and above the bargain, to its wise inhabitants, I believe there
would be a stampede out of London, Liverpool, Paris, and a variety of
large towns, where the clocks lose their heads, and shake the hours out
each one faster than the other, as though they were all in a wager. And
all these foolish pilgrims would each bring his own misery along with
him, in a watch-pocket!

*****

The bed was made, the room was fit,
By punctual eve the stars were lit;
The air was still, the water ran;
No need there was for maid or man,
When we put us, my ass and I,
At God's green caravanserai.

*****

To wash in one of God's rivers in the open air seems to me a sort of
cheerful solemnity or semi-pagan act of worship. To dabble among dishes
in a bedroom may perhaps make clean the body; but the imagination takes
no share in such a cleansing.

*****

I own I like definite form in what my eyes are to rest upon; and if
landscapes were sold, like the sheets of characters of my boyhood, one
penny plain and twopence coloured, I should go the length of twopence
every day of my life.

*****

There should be some myth (but if there is, I know it not) founded on
the shivering of the reeds. There are not many things in nature more
striking to man's eye. It is such an eloquent pantomime of terror; and
to see such a number of terrified creatures taking sanctuary in every
nook along the shore is enough to infect a silly human with alarm.
Perhaps they are only a-cold, and no wonder, standing waist deep in the
stream. Or, perhaps, they have never got a