I gratefully acknowledge the constant presence of an element in my life which for want of a better name I will call the sense of beauty. I mean by that the unaccountable thrill of emotion by which one is sometimes surprised, often quite suddenly and unexpectedly; this sense of wonder, which darts upon the mind with an almost physical sensation, seems to come in two different ways. With some, the majority I believe, it originates entirely in personal relations with other human beings and is known as love; with others it arises over a larger region, and is inspired by a sudden perception of some incommunicable beauty in a flower, a scent, a view, a picture, a poem. Those in whom the latter sense predominates are, I think, less apt to be affected by human relationships, but pass through the world in a certain solitary and wistful mood, with perhaps more wide and general sources of happiness but less liable to be stirred to the depths of their being by a friendship or a passion. To take typical examples of such a class I conceive that Wordsworth and William Morris were instances. Wordsworth derived, I believe, his highest inspiration from the solemn dignities of nature, in her most stupendous and majestic forms; while to Morris belonged that power, which amounted in him to positive genius, for seeing beauty in the most homely and simple things.

I was myself haunted from a very early date by the sense of beauty and mystery, though not for many years could I give it a name; but I have found in my case that it originated as a rule in some minute effect of natural things. I have seen some of the wildest and most astounding natural prospects in Europe; I have climbed high rocky peaks and threaded mountain solitudes, but some overshadowing of horror and awe has robbed emotion of its most intimate joy; and I have always found myself more thrilled by some tranquil vignette—the moon rising through a forest glade, a red sunset between the boughs of pines, the crisping wave of some broken eddy, the “green-dense and dim-delicious” depth of a woodland pool, the weathered gables of an ancient manor, an orchard white with the snows of spring—than I have ever been by the sight of the most solemn mountain-head or the furious breakers of some uncontrolled tide.

Two or three of these sacred sights I may venture to describe, taking them at random out of the treasure-house of memory; two belong to my schooldays. I was a pupil at a big suburban school; the house which we inhabited had once been the villa of a well-known statesman, and had large and dignified grounds, where with certain restrictions, we were allowed to ramble. They were bounded on one side by a high paling, inaccessible to small limbs, and a vague speculation as to what was behind the fence long dwelt with me. One day, however, I found that I could loose a portion of a broken paling, and looking through I saw a quiet place, the tail of a neglected shrubbery; the spot seemed quite unvisited; the laurels grew thickly about, and tall elms gave an austere gloom to the little glade; the ground was pathless, and thickly overgrown with periwinkles, but in the centre were three tiny grave-mounds, the graves, I have since reflected, of dogs, but which I at the time supposed to be the graves of children. I gazed with a singular sense of mystery, and strange dream-pictures rose instinctively in my mind, weaving themselves over the solitary and romantic spot. It is strange how often in dreams and gentle reveries I have visited the place.

The next is a later vision. Near the public school where I was educated lay a forest to which we had free admittance. I found that by hard walking it was just possible to reach a wooded hill which was a conspicuous feature of the distant landscape, but the time at my disposal between two school engagements never sufficed to penetrate farther. From the top of this hill it was possible to get a view of a large tract of forest ground, an open grassy glade, with large trees of towering greenness standing sentinel on either side; the bracken grew luxuriantly in places, and at the end of the glade was a glint of water in the horn of some forest pool. This place was to me a veritable “magic casement”; beyond lay the enchanted land into which I could not penetrate, the blue hills on the horizon seen over the tree-tops. I never dreamt of them as inhabited by human beings like myself, but as some airy region, with leagues of dreaming woods and silent forest spaces. At times a deer would slowly cross the open vale, and stand to sniff the breeze; the very cooing of the doves in their leafy fastnesses had a richer and drowsier sound.

But the home of incommunicable dreams, beyond all others, is to me a certain mill—Grately Mill—that is not many miles from my present home. My mother had an old aunt who lived in a pleasant house in the neighbourhood, and we used to go there when I was a child to spend a few weeks of the early summer.

A little vague lane led to it: a lane that came from nowhere in particular, and took you nowhere; meandering humbly among the pastures wherever it was convenient to them to permit it, like a fainthearted Christian. Hard by was a tall, high-shouldered, gabled farm of red brick, with a bell perched on the roof in a white pavilion of its own. Down the lane on hot summer days we used to walk—my mother and I: my mother whom I revered as a person of unapproachable age and dim experience, though she had been in the schoolroom herself but a year or two before my birth; I trotting by her side with a little fishing-rod in a grey holland case, to fish for perch in the old pond at the Hall.

The lane grew sandier and damper: a rivulet clucked in the ditch, half-hidden in ragged-robin with its tattered finery, and bright varnished ranunculus; the rivulet was a mysterious place enough ever since the day when we found it full of waving clusters of strange dark creatures, more eel than fish, which had all appeared with miraculous unanimity in a single night—lamperns, the village naturalist called them, and told us that in ancient days they were a delicacy; while I, in my childish mind, at once knew that it was this which had gone to the composition of that inexplicable dish, a surfeit of lampreys, as the history had it, of which some greedy monarch died.

Once, too, a bright-coloured eel had been seen at a certain point, who had only just eluded the grasp of hot little fingers. How many times I looked for master eel, expecting to meet him at the same place, and was careful to carry a delightful tin box in my pocket, in which he might travel home in my pocket, and live an honoured life in a basin in the night nursery. Poor eel! I am glad now that he escaped, but then he was only a great opportunity missed—an irreparable regret.

Then the poor lane, which had been getting more like a water-course every moment, no longer made any pretence, and disappeared into a shallow sheet of clear water—the mill at last! The scene, as I remember it, had a magical charm. On the left, by the side of the lane, rose a crazy footpath of boards and posts with a wooden handrail, and a sluice or two below. Beyond, the deep mill-pool slept, dark and still, all fringed with trees. On the right the stream flowed off among the meadows, disappearing into an arch of greenery; in summer the banks and islets were all overgrown with tall rich plants, comfrey, figwort, water-dock. The graceful willow-herb hung its pink horns; the loosestrife rose in sturdier velvet spires. On the bank stood the shuttered, humming mill, the water-wheel splashing and thundering, like a prisoned giant, in a penthouse of its own. It was a fearful joy to look in and see it rise dripping, huge and black, with the fresh smell of the river water all about it. All the mill was powdered with the dust of grain; the air inside was full of floating specks; the hoppers rattled, and the gear grumbled in the roof, while the flour streamed merrily into the open sack. The miller, a grave preoccupied man, all dusted over, like a plum, with a thin bloom of flour, gave us a grave nod of greeting, which seemed to make us free of the place. I dare say he was a shy mild man, with but little of the small change of the mind at his disposal; but he seemed to me then an austere and statesmanlike person, full to the brim of grave affairs. Beyond the mill, a lane of a more determined character led through arches of elms to the common. And now, on secular days, the interests of the chase took precedence of all else; but there were Sundays in the summer when we walked to attend Grately Church. It seems to me at this lapse of time to have been almost impossibly antique. Ancient yews stood by it, and it had a white boarded spire with a cracked bell. Inside, the single aisleless nave, with ancient oak pews, was much encumbered in one place by a huge hand-organ, with a forest of gold pipes, turned by a wizened man, who opened a little door in the side and inserted his hand at intervals to set the tune. The clergyman, an aged gentleman, wore what was, I suppose, a dark wig, though at the time I imagined it to be merely an agreeable variety on ordinary hair; another pleasant habit he had of slightly smacking his lips, at every little pause, as he read, which gave an air of indescribable gusto to the service:—“Moab—tut—is my washpot—tut—; over Edom—tut—will I cast out my shoe—tut—; upon Philistia—tut—will I triumph.”

In the vestry of the church reposed a curious relic—a pyx, I believe, is the correct name. It was a gilded metal chalice with a top, into which, if my memory serves me, were screwed little soldiers to guard the sacred body; these were loose, and how I coveted them! In the case were certain spikes and branches of crystal, the broken remains, I believe, of a spreading crystal tree which once adorned the top. How far my memory serves me I know not, but I am sure that the relic which may still survive, is a most interesting thing; and I can recollect that when a high dignitary of the Church stayed with us, it was kindly brought over by the clergyman for his inspection, and his surprise was very great.

The Hall lay back from the common, sheltered by great trees. The house itself, a low white building, was on those summer days cool and fragrant. The feature of the place was the great fish-ponds—one lay outside the shrubbery; but another, formerly I believe a monastic stew-pond, was a long rectangle just outside the windows of the drawing-room, and only separated from it by a gravel walk: along part of it ran an ancient red-brick wall. This was our favourite fishing-place; but above it, brooded over by huge chestnuts, lay a deeper and stiller pond, half covered with water-lilies—too sacred and awful a place to be fished in or even visited alone.

Upon the fishing hours I do not love to dwell; I would only say that of such cruelties as attended it I was entirely innocent. I am sure that I never thought of a perch as other than a delightful mechanical thing, who had no grave objection to being hauled up gasping, with his black stripes gleaming, and prickling his red fins, to be presently despatched, and carried home stiff and cold in a little basket.

The tea under the tall trees of the lawn; the admiring inspection of our prey; the stuffed dog in the hall with his foot upon a cricket-ball—all these are part of the dream-pictures; and the whole is invested for me with the purpureal gleams of childhood.

The other day I found myself on a bicycle near enough to Grately to make it possible to go there; into the Hall grounds I did not venture, but I struck across the common and went down the lane to the mill. I was almost ashamed of the agitation I felt, but the sight of the common, never visited for nearly thirty years, induced a singular physical distress. It was not that everything had grown smaller, even changed the places that they occupy in my mental picture, but a sort of homesickness seemed to draw tight bands across my heart. What does it mean, this intense local attachment, for us flimsy creatures, snapped at a touch, and with so brief a pilgrimage? A strange thought! The very intensity and depth of the feeling seems to confer on it a right to permanence.

The lane came abruptly to an end by the side of a commonplace, straight-banked, country brook. There were no trees, no water-plants; the road did not dip to the stream, and in front of me lay a yellow brick bridge, with grim iron lattices. Alas! I had mistaken the turn, and must retrace my steps. But stay! what was that squat white house by the waterside? It was indeed the old mill, with its boarded projections swept away, its barns gone, its garden walled with a neat wall. The old high-timbered bridge was down; some generous landlord had gone to great expense, and Grately had a good convenient road, a sensible bridge, and an up-to-date mill. Probably there was not a single person in the parish who did not confess to an improvement.

But who will give me back the tall trees and the silent pool? Who will restore the ancient charm, the delicate mysteries, the gracious dignity of the place? Is beauty a mere trick of grouping, the irradiation of a golden mood, a chance congeries of water and high trees and sunlight? If beauty be industriously hunted from one place by ruthless hands, does she spread her wings and fly? Is the restless, ceaseless effort of nature to restore beauty to the dismal messes made by man, simply broken off and made vain? Or has she leisure to work harder yet in unvisited places, patiently enduring the grasp of the spoiling hand?

It was with something like a sob that I turned away. But of one thing no one can rob me, and that is the picture of Grately Mill, glorified indeed by the patient worship of years, which is locked into some portfolio of the mind, and can be unspread in a moment before the gazing eye.

And for one thing I can be grateful—that the still spirit of sweet and secret places, that wayward nymph who comes and goes, with the wind in her hair and the gleam of deep water in her eyes—she to whom we give many a clumsy name—that she first beckoned to me and spoke words in my ear beneath the high elms of Grately Mill. Many times have we met and spoken in secret since, my Egeria and I; many times has she touched my shoulder, and whispered a magic charm. That presence has been often withdrawn from me; but I have but to recall the bridge, the water-plants, the humming mill, the sunlight on the sandy shallows, to feel her hand in mine again.

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