I love also travel, change and adventure. I love the Botticellis, the Fra Angelicos and the Leonardo of our own princely National Gallery, not the less, but the better for an occasional ramble in the Louvre, or among the galleries of Holland or Italy. I love the life, the stir and bustle of our London streets; but I love, too, the old-world rest and repose of Bruges or of Berne; and many a time have I lingered the long day through in the antique streets of Antwerp, listening to the sweet uproar and silvern wrangling that ripples, cloud-borne and wind-wafted, from where the stately belfry soars lark-like above the world. To me to have been happy once is to establish a claim upon happiness thenceforward, and it is for this reason, I suppose, that I love so to re-live the past, and to dwell on the memory of former sights and scenes. It is true, as Frederick Robertson says, that the "first time never returns," and shall I ever forget the exultation of the moment when, after repeated failures, I first set foot on that inaccessible mountain-height which I had risked my life to scale? Even now, lying here in this sunny English meadow, I seem to re-live that moment, and to see that scene again. Before me rises one wild and wasteful world of white--a white on which the fierce rays of the sun beat and burn with blinding, blazing, intolerable brilliance. Above, swimming and soaring away into unfathomable azure, spreads the silent heaven, but around, about, beneath, all is white, deathly-white, save only where the vast angles of ice-crag or column deepen into a lustrous turquoise, or where a blue mist broods athwart the mouth of yawning crevasse or cavern. Below me and afar--so far that it seems as if I were cut off from it for ever,--lies the sunny village that I left so many toilsome hours ago, just visible, a wee white dot upon the green. There the air is sweet with the breath of flowers and of the clover-fields, there, too, are the bees, and the butterflies, and the music of rushing water. But here, where the wasteful snows writhe and wreathe around in arch and cave and column, vast and wonderful to behold--above, the shining zenith, below, the sheer abyss and the treacherous descent--here in the solemn solitude and silence of this whited wilderness, I can scarcely believe that I am still on the earth, and of it, and that the dazzling dome on which I am standing is but the white and swelling bosom of the Great Mother from whom we all sprang.