OVERTURE

Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself— do these things go out with life?

I

LAMB.

YOU may wonder how it will feel, to find you are old, and able to travel no more. Perhaps

Y

to sit out, with your legs up, in an invalid chair on a lawn when the warm weather comes, and to finger a book of time-tables for trains, and to think how at this hour the day express from Paris is probably nearing Mulhouse and the evening freshness of air that has blown across snow is coming in at the windows; soon the train will be slowing to clank into the station at Bâle just when the first lamps are lit in the town and look gay in the twilight. How the Rhine must be swishing along, a plashing, glimmering coolness heard more than seen, below the balconied windows of rooms at the Three Kings Hotel, where the blest, who have just come from England, are giving a sigh of content as they throw their dusty gloves down on a bed.

Perhaps to lie awake, as the old do, through English August dawns, remembering many past awakenings in trains when day was breaking over Delémont or Porrentruy, and houses half seen through the blenching windows

seemed to have taken wide eaves upon themselves during the night; brooks, silent all across France, had begun to make little jovial noises, and clouds had come down from the sky to tumble about on the fields. To live with dim ghosts quite kindly ghosts, but dim-of the warmblooded hours of old autumn journeys to Italy, up to meet the bleaching chill that creeps in October from Goeschenen down to Lucerne; and then the plunge into the tunnel's murmurous darkness under the very hub, the middle boss of all Europe, the rocky knot in which all her stone sinews are tied at their ends into one central bunch; and then the emergence, translating you out of a Teuton into a Latin world, from grizzled wintry tonelessness to burnished lustre, all the lingering opulence of sun-fed brown and yellow, purple and crimson and rose-Airolo, Bellinzona, Lugano, all aglow and deephearted, like rubies or wine, in that Giorgionian champaign of olive and mulberry.

II

The blasphemies that have been written and talked! I do not mean so much the irreligious rubbish about a Hell after this life. Man, as a whole, has learnt reverence enough to withdraw that grossest of all the slurs which he put, in his moody, ignorant youth, on the goodness of God. Much of his talk about Heaven itself has been sacrilegious enough. When the Claudio of Measure for Measure, the poor little gluttonous sheep that had fatted himself for the butcher, was wriggling and swerving away from the knife, his bleating was all