Some of these scenes, whether often repeated or not, come to have a rich symbolical significance; they return persistently and, as it were, ceremoniously--on festal days--but meaning I know not what. For example, I never see the flowers and scarlet-stained foliage of herb-robert growing out of old stone-heaps by the wayside without a feeling of satisfaction not explained by a long memory of the contrast between the plant and the raw flint; so also with the drenched lilac-bloom leaning out over high walls of unknown gardens; and inland cliffs, covered with beech, jutting out westward into a bottomless valley in the mist of winter twilights, in silence and frost. Something in me belongs to these things, but I hardly think that the mere naming of them will mean anything except to those--many, perhaps--who have experienced the same. A great writer so uses the words of every day that they become a code of his own which the world is bound to learn and in the end take unto itself. But words are no longer symbols, and to say “hill” or “beech” is not to call up images of a hill or a beech-tree, since we have so long been in the habit of using the words for beautiful and mighty and noble things very much as a book-keeper uses figures without seeing gold and power. I can, therefore, only try to suggest what I mean by the significance of the plant in the stone-heap, the wet lilac, the misty cliff, by comparing it with that of scenes in books where we recognize some power beyond the particular and personal. All of Don Quixote’s acts have this significance; so have the end of Mr. Conrad’s story of _Youth_ and the opening of Mr. Hudson’s _El Ombu_--the old man sitting on a summer’s day under the solitary tree to tell the history “of a house that had been.” Malory’s _Morte d’Arthur_ is full of scenes like this. For ten centuries, from the battle of Badon to the writing of _Morte d’Arthur_, these stories were alive on the lips of many kinds of men and women in many lands, from Connemara to Calabria. Many of these men and women survive only in the turns which their passionate hearts gave to these ghostly, everlastingly wandering tales. Artists have worked upon them. Bards have sung them, and the sound of their harping is entangled in the words that have reached us to-day. This blending of many bloods is suggested by the Saracen in the _Morte d’Arthur_ who was descended from Hector and Alexander and Joshua and Maccabæus; by Taliesin, whose “original country is the region of the summer stars,” who was with Noah and Alexander and at the birth of Christ. And thus has the tale become so full in the ear of humanity, so rich in scenes designed to serve only an immediate purpose, yet destined by this grace to move all kinds of men in manifold ways. Such is the chess-playing in _The Dream of Rhonabwy_; the madness of Tristram when he ran naked in the wood many days, but was lured by the music of a damsel playing on his