No. Those houses are castles in Spain. They are fantastic architecture. We have made them out of our spirit stuff and have set our souls to roam their corridors and look out of their casements upon the sea or the mountains or the clouds. It is because they are accessible only to the everywhere wandering irresistible and immortal part of us that they are beautiful. There is no need for them to be large or costly or antique. The poorest house can do us a like service. In a town, for example, and in a suburb, I have had the same yearning when, on a fine still morning of May or June, in streets away from the traffic, I have seen through the open windows a cool white-curtained shadowy room, and in it a table with white cloths and gleaming metal and glass laid thereon, and nobody has yet come down to open the letters. It all seems to be the work of spirit hands. It is beautiful and calm and celestial, and is a profound pleasure--tinged by melancholy--to see. It gives a sense of fitness--for what? For something undivined, imperfectly known, guessed at, or hoped for, in ourselves; for a wider and less tainted beauty, for a greater grace. Or it may not be a house at all, but a hill-top five miles off, up which winds a white road in two long loops between a wood and the turf. The grass is smooth and warm and bright at the summit in the blue noon; or in the horizontal sunbeams each stem is lit so that the hill is transmuted into a glowing and insubstantial thing; and then, at noon or evening, something in me flies at the sight and desires to tread that holy ground. It is an odd world where everything is fleeting yet the soul desires permanence even for fancies so unprofitable as this. And so these thoughts at the sight of the great houses mingle with the thoughts that grow at twilight and fade gradually away in the windless night when the sky is soft-ridged all over with white clouds and in the dark vales between them are the stars. Then, for it is Saturday, follows another pleasure of the umbrageous white country roads at night--the high contented voices of children talking to father and mother as they go home from the market town. The parents move dark-clothed, silent, laden; the children flit about them with white hats or pinafores. Their voices travel far and long after they are invisible in the mist that washes over the fields in long white firths, but die away as the misty night blots out the hills, the clouds, the stars, the trees, and everything but the branches overhead and the white parsley flowers floating along the hedge. There is no breath of wind. The owls are quiet. The air is full of the scent of holly flower and may and nettles and of the sound of a little stream among the leaves. CHAPTER VIII JUNE--HAMPSHIRE--THE GOLDEN AGE--TRAHERNE HAMPSHIRE.