And all
these foolish pilgrims would each bring his own misery
along with him, in a watch-pocket!
*
The bed was made, the room was fit,
By punctual eve the stars were lit;
The air was still, the water ran;
No need there was for maid or man,
When we put us, my ass and I,
At God's green caravanserai.
*
To wash in one of God's rivers in the open air seems to me
a sort of cheerful solemnity or semi-pagan act of worship.
To dabble among dishes in a bedroom may perhaps make
clean the body; but the imagination takes no share in
such a cleansing.
*
I own I like definite form in what my eyes are to rest
upon; and if landscapes were sold, like the sheets of
characters of my boyhood, one penny plain and twopence
coloured, I should go the length of twopence every day of
my life.
*
There should be some myth (but if there is, I know it not)
founded on the shivering of the reeds. There are not many
things in nature more striking to man's eye. It is such an
eloquent pantomime of terror; and to see such a number of
terrified creatures taking sanctuary in every nook along
the shore is enough to infect a silly human with alarm.
Perhaps they are only a-cold, and no wonder, standing waist
deep in the stream. Or, perhaps, they have never got
accustomed to the speed and fury of the river's flux, or
the miracle of its continuous body.
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