“The hushing rain, from a windless sky, falls in sheets of silver on gray, gray on violet, violet on smouldering purple, and anon makes whole what it had hardly riven: the veil spun of nameless analogic tints, which brings up the perspective of every road, the tapestry of sun-shot mist which Théophile Gautier admired once with all his eyes. . . . At the angles of the grimiest places, choked with trade, we stumble on little old bearded graveyards, pools of ancestral sleep; or low-lying leafy gardens where monks and guildsmen have had their dream: closes inexpressibly pregnant with peace, the cæsural pauses of our loud to-day.” In her ecstatic browsings, her rapt withdrawal into old centuries, she was the best Londoner of them all. And here is her gay tribute to English weather: “The mannerly, vertical showers . . . fall sudden and silent, like unbidden tears, while you look forth from the wild purple coast of Ireland at the slant and tawny fishing sails, or lean against the wall of a ruined abbey in the fold of the Mendip Hills. Always at your side is this gentle, fickle, sun-shot rain, spinning itself out of an undarkened sky, and keeping the grass immortal and the roads pure of dust. You reach, before long, to a full sympathy and comprehension of what good Bishop Jeremy Taylor had before him when he drew his simile of ‘a soft slap of affectionate rain.’ It is the rain of the Plantagenets, Tudors, Stuarts, and Hanoverians, the immemorial law-giver, and the oldest inhabitant of the isles. Wheresoever it descends, there are perpetual freshness and peace.” To walk with her was to add day to storied day in a calendar rubricated from end to end. “Nor ever can those trees be bare.” Still living in the English landscape is that alert figure, rapt yet ready for the absurdities of the moment, silent in understanding withdrawals and, in her own words of another, “almost as good company as a dog.” This was a masterpiece of praise by inversion, and “those spectacles” gleamed over it prodigiously. One remembers her by the crested blue of Devon and Cornish seas, subdued into stillness and then breaking out in a wild hail of the “cruel, crawling foam!” One remembers her on a Midland road, sticking a pheasant’s feather in her hat and swaggering rakishly, or walking into Shrewsbury, so disheveled from the rain and dust of varied weathers, that landladies looked askance, and one, more admittedly curious than the rest, queried: “Is there a play to-night?” For the two wayfarers did look the ancient part of rogues and vagabonds, no less.