in the least. I mean that it ought to be possible and delightful
for people to live lives full of activity and perception and
kindliness and joy, on very simple lines indeed; to take up their
work day by day with an agreeable sense of putting out their
powers, to find in the pageant of nature an infinite refreshment,
and to let art and poetry lift them up into a world of hopes and
dreams and memories; and thus life may become a meal to be eaten
with appetite, with a wholesome appreciation of its pleasant
savours, rather than a meal eaten in satiety or greediness, with a
peevish repining that it is not more elaborate and delicate.

I do not claim to live my own life on these lines. I started, as
all sensitive and pleasure-loving natures do, with an expectation
of finding life a much more exciting, amusing, and delightful thing
than I have found it. I desired to skip from peak to peak, without
troubling to descend into the valleys. But now that I have
descended, partly out of curiosity and partly out of inefficiency,
no doubt, into the low-lying vales, I have found them to be
beautiful and interesting places, the hedgerows full of flower and
leaf, the thickets musical with the voices of birds, the orchards
loaded with fruit, the friendly homesteads rich with tranquil life
and abounding in quiet friendly people; and then the very peaks
themselves, past which my way occasionally conducts me, have a
beautiful solemnity of pure outline and strong upliftedness, seen
from below, which I think they tend to lose, seen from the summit;
and if I have spoken of the quieter joys, it is--I can say this
with perfect honesty--because I have been pleased with them, as a
bird is pleased with the sunshine and the berries, and sings, not
that the passers-by may admire his notes, but out of simple joy of
heart; and, after all, it is enough justification, if a pilgrim or