All that June the weather was very lovely. In the busy streets the air grew heavy and stifling, full of dust and the vile fumes of motor buses. They were like prisons. But by the river there was always a sense of freshness and freedom; and when the great tide swept up in the evenings a gentle breeze came in light breaths from the west and fingered and fondled the urgent water, making it into a patchwork of rippled places and smooth places, where there swam for a little in a fugitive glow of amber and rose the small clouds over the Richmond Hills. Then it was cool and strengthening to sit in a small boat and drink the breeze, and Stephen always, when the tide was up, would row out into the ripples to see the big sun go down behind Hammerton Church. And while the boat rocked gently on the wash of tugs, he would sit motionless, trying to store the sunset in his mind. He would look at the lights in the water, the unimaginable pattern and colouring of the clouds, fretted like the sand when the sea goes out, consciously realizing, consciously memorizing, thinking, "I must remember how that looked!" For he was not naturally observant, and often, he knew, made up for his lack of observation by his power of imagining. But the critics said he was observant, and observant he was determined to be. Or he would row across to the eastern end of the Island and tie his boat to the single willow tree that stood there. From this point, looking eastward, you saw the whole of the splendid reach, curving magnificently away to Hammersmith Bridge. You saw the huddled, irregular houses beside it glowing golden in the last sunlight, with here and there a window that blazed at you like a furnace; you saw the fine old trees on the southern bank and the tall chimneys and the distant church that had something of the grace of Magdalen Tower, and you saw the wide and exuberant stream with an impression of bigness and dignity which could never be commanded from the bank; and you saw it rich with colour and delicate lights--with steel-blue and gold--with copper and with rose. You knew that it was a thick and muddy stream, that most of the houses were squalid houses, and many of the buildings were ugly buildings. But they were all beautiful in the late sun, and Stephen loved them. And while he sat there, the poem hovered always in the background of his mind. Everything he saw he saw as material which might somehow take its place in the poem. Sometimes half-consciously he was shaping ahead the scheme of what he had next to do, the general form and sequence of it; and sometimes there was a line that would not come right, a word or a phrase that would not surrender itself, and this problem would be always busy in his head, the alternatives chasing each other in a tumbling perpetual circle. Sometimes he would go into the house again in a vague depression, simply because this difficulty had not yet resolved itself.