But it is not only nor indeed even chiefly through meeting new types of people that we can arrive at that angle of detachment. We need an entire change of setting. It would be hard to overrate the subconscious influence on us of our surroundings. A sudden sensation of taste and smell will recall to us a cycle of associated memoirs. The glimpse through a railway-carriage window of a gabled roof, a square church tower, a particular shade of sunlight on red brick will open the pages of a chapter whose existence we had almost forgotten; will reveal in relief, in perspective--with an objective reality that at the time it did not hold for us--a facet of the past. The obvious, the superficial reflection on such occurrences would be an expression of surprise that so trivial an affair as the taste of cocoa, the smell of wet stone, the glimpse of a square-towered church, should become a window opening on childhood. But probably nearer to the truth would be the assumption that these moments of sight and taste of which, at the time, we hardly more than recognised the existence, and to which we attached no value, were an essential part of the framework of our thoughts, and our hopes, and our actions, and that it was from them that what we have come to regard in our lives as personal and important drew its nourishment, its colour, and its direction. As the novels of Alphonse Daudet are steeped in the sunshine of the south and the simple, lazy kindliness that it engenders, so are Maupassant’s stories children of the mud, the lights, the rain, the gallantries of Paris. And so over the poetry and novels of Thomas Hardy lies the deep shadow of the Wessex countryside. And among these many influences that tend, unknown to us, to make our lives gay or sombre, deep or shallow, or it would be more true perhaps to say that tend to accentuate in us those characteristics that are gay or sombre, deep or shallow, there are few that touch us more surely or more closely than that of the nature of the buildings, the streets, the shops, the churches among which we live.