But even in days of rain life had its pleasures. However bad the weather might be there were few days when we could not be abroad for some hours, and none when the mountains had not some peculiar beauty to reveal. At the end of a day of rain there were often splendid half-hours, just before sunset, when the mountains glowed with richest colour; when through the rift of thinning clouds some vast peak named like a torch, and the mist blew out like purple banners, and the watercourses sparkled like ropes of brilliants hung on the scarred rocks, and the air was fresh and fragrant with all the perfume of health. Fog we seldom had, and when it came, it rarely lasted beyond midday. And then there were the warm delights of winter evenings, when the wood fire blazed upon the hearth, and the gale roared against the windows. I have already remarked that books read in the solitude of the country always make a deeper impression on my mind than books read in the uneasy leisure of towns. I found this doubly true when I came to live in the country. I came to my books with a keener and healthier brain. The great masters of literature resumed their sway over me; Scott, Shakespeare, Cervantes, long-neglected, took powerful hold upon my mind. It is not to dwellers in the town that great writers ever make their full appeal. They are too occupied with the trivial dramas of life among a crowd, too disturbed by the eddy and rush of the life around them. But for the dweller in solitude these great writers erect a theatre, which is the only theatre he knows. He is able to attend to the drama presented to him, and to be absorbed by it. He discusses the actors and their doings as though they were real personages. Effie Deans and Varley, Ophelia and Don Quixote, were for us creatures whom we knew. It was the same with later writers. Byron's poetry once more appealed to me by its revolutionary note, Shelley was interpreted afresh to me by these mountains which he would have loved. One incident I recollect which may serve to illustrate this new hold which imaginative literature took upon me. I opened one evening _Great Expectations_, and began to read it aloud. The next morning, at five o'clock, my two boys were contending for the book. For a month Pip sat beside our hearth, and Joe Gargery winked at us, and 'that ass' Pumblechook mouthed his solemn platitudes. We were continually reminding each other never to forget 'them as brought us up by hand.' Could any book have laid hold of us after this fashion if it had been read in the hurried leisure of a city life? It was the very absence of incident in our quiet lives that made these imaginary incidents delightful. We lingered over the books we read, extracting from them all their charm, all their wisdom, and there was more good talk, more discriminating criticism heard in my cottage in a month than would be heard in a London drawing-room in a year. And the explanation is simple.