I remember how deep had always been my longing to look out upon the sea from some Greek island, and how one day, when this desire was granted, and I walked along hills set high above the blue AEgean, I was seized with an instant yearning to be instead upon Ranmore Common in Surrey. Yet at that moment a life's ambition was being fulfilled; I stood in a scene of incomparable beauty, gazing down on those deep azure waters whose voice is always to me as a lament for wandering Odysseus; the lower slopes were rich with olive trees, powdering with silver the tilled lands round a beautiful monastery lying there in its enchanted rest. Dark cypresses rose amid white walls of villages, by the contrast of their gloom making all bright colours glorious; away to the left, where the shore verged westward tracing inimitable curves between field and sea, lay slumbering a little white town with minarets and walled gardens and tiny haven--a very place for Argonauts; and yet my thoughts turned to the chalk downs of England and honeysuckle crowning the unfruitful hollies. _Sed quia semper abest quod aves praesentia temnis_;--Such desire has distracted Roman minds; the perversity is very old; and perhaps only children find no disillusion in the accomplishment of a dream. For our feet have one country and our dreams another, and there is no constancy in us. It is not alone in the bartering of one earthly scene for its fellow that we suffer the sick thirst of change; but into the rarest hour of achieved ideal to which hope promised her supreme satisfaction, the same wayward longing will often find a way; as in a sacred place amid the purest and most exquisite meditations of the soul, there will suddenly flit inexplicable shadows of irreverence, with echoes of incongruous voices from the abandoned world. But now as the years pass and the penury of human love has made the home woods and fields more dear, I feel that this unrest is drawing to its end. For as the seasons pass over the uplands and the meadows, clothing them with new splendours between the seed-time and the harvest, no vision rises upon the memory dearer and more beneficent than theirs. As the lover's fancy dwells upon the image of his beloved in this or that environment, and thus or thus arrayed, so I see the woods and fields in the various glories of the year and know not in which garb I love them best. They have heard my laments, my confidences, all my broken resolves: they are bound to me by so pure and intimate an affection that all those grander wonders of the world should never draw me again from this allegiance. Not for the vision of Himalaya piercing the heaven, or the sunsets of Sienna, or the moonlight on the Taj Mahal, or for any other beauty or any wonder shall I weary of the cornfields framed in elms or the great horses turning in the furrow against the evening sky.