The Four Men quotes

he would, if he could, preserve his land in the flesh, and keep it there as it is, forever. But since he knows he cannot do that, “at least,” he says, “I will keep her image, and that shall remain.”

And as a man will paint with a peculiar passion a face which he is only permitted to see for a little time, so will one passionately set down one’s own horizon and one’s fields before they are forgotten and have become a different thing.

Therefore it is that I have put down in writing what happened to me now so many years ago, when I met first one man and then another, and we four bound ourselves together and walked through all your land, Sussex, from end to end.

You are upon some business that takes you far, not even for ambition or for adventure, but only to earn. And you will cross the sea and earn your money, and you will come back and spend more than you have earned.

But all the while your life runs past you like a river, and the things that are of moment to men you do not heed at all.

”

“

What you are doing is not worth while, and nothing is worth while on this unhappy earth except the fulfilment of a man’s desire.

Consider how many years it is since you saw your home, and for how short a time, perhaps, its perfection will remain. Get up and go back to your own place if only for one day;

“I know these also,” and then he went on. “

A man is more himself if he is one of a number; so let us take that road together, and, as we go, gather what company we can find.

”

… last regained his own land, where he was received as such a man should be, with bells ringing and guns firing, little boys cheering, and all ducks, hens, and pigs flying from before his approach to the left and to the right of the road.

Ever since that day it has been held a singular honour and one surpassing all others to be a squire of Brightling, but no honour whatsoever to be a member of the Commons House.

He spent all his great fortune upon the poor of Sussex and of his own parish, bidding them drink deep and eat hearty as being habits the best preservative of life, until at last he also died.

Ever since that day it has been held a singular honour and one surpassing all others to be a squire of Brightling, but no honour whatsoever to be a member of the Commons House.

He spent all his great fortune upon the poor of Sussex and of his own parish, bidding them drink deep and eat hearty as being habits the best preservative of life, until at last he also died.

There is the story of Fuller of Brightling, and may we all deserve as well as he.”

But you shall not reply to them.

Only come westward with us and be our companion until we get to the place where the sun goes down, and discover what makes it so glorious.

”

Myself. “Poet! That shall be understood between us! And you shall order what you will. You shall not feel constrained.

It is in the essence of good fellowship that the poor man should call for the wine, and the rich man should pay for it.

”

The Sailor. “I never yet thanked my parents for anything in my life, but now I thank them for that which hitherto has most distressed me, that they set me to the hard calling of the sea.

For if I had not been apprenticed, Bristol fashion, when I was a child to a surly beast from Holderness, I might have been a Poet, by the wrath of God.

”

… your choice how Sussex shall be destroyed, for you must know that I have the power and the patent to do this thing, and there is no gainsaying me, only it is granted to your people to know the way by which they should perish.”

And indeed this is the Devil’s way, always to pretend that he is the master, though he very well knows in his black heart that he is nothing of the kind.

Now St. Dunstan was not the fool he looked, in spite of his round face, and round tonsure, and round eyes, and he would have his sport with the Devil before he had done with him, so he answered civilly enough:—

Secundo, et valde fortior, in Mayfield, for anyone to handle and to see, the very tongs wherewith the thing was done.

And if you find the story long be certain that the Devil found it longer, for there is no tale in the world that can bore a man as fiercely as can hot iron.

So back to Heathfield.

But Grizzlebeard, from where he lay on the broad bench with rugs about him, and his head resting on his hand, denied this too, speaking in a deep voice with wisdom. “You are neither of you right,” he said. “

The worst thing in the world is the passing of human affection.

No man who has lost a friend need fear death,” he said.

Grizzlebeard (solemnly). “You talk lightly as though you were a younger man than you are. The thing of which I am speaking is the gradual weakening, and at last the severance, of human bonds.

It has been said that no man can see God and live. Here is another saying for you, very near the same: No man can be alone and live.

None, not even in old age.”

“When friendship disappears then there is a space left open to that awful loneliness of the outside which is like the cold of space between the planets. It is an air in which men perish utterly.

Absolute dereliction is the death of the soul; and the end of living is a great love abandoned.

”

Grizzlebeard (still more solemnly). “

All wounds heal in those who are condemned to live, but in the very process of healing they harden and forbid renewal.

The thing is over and done.”

But with loving it is not so; for the comprehension by one soul of another is something borrowed from whatever lies outside time: it is not under the conditions of time.

Then if it passes, it is past⁠—it never grows again; and we lose it as men lose a diamond, or as men lose their honour.

”

The Sailor (still contemptuously). “I thought not! If you had you would write better verse.

It is your innocence of the great emotions that makes your verse so dreadful⁠—in the minor sense of that word.

”

But that decay of what is living in the heart, and that numbness supervening, and that last indifference—oh! these are not to be compared for unhappiness with any other ill on this unhappy earth.

And all day long and in every place, if you could survey the world from a height and look down into the hearts of men, you would see that frost stealing on.

”

These are violent things. But it is when youth has ripened, and when the slow processes of life begin that the danger or the certitude of this dreadful thing appears: I mean of the passing of affection.

For the mind has settled as the waters of a lake settle in the hills; it is full of its own convictions, it is secure in its philosophy; it will not mould or adapt itself to the changes of another.

And, therefore, unless communion be closely maintained, affection decays. Now when it has decayed, and when at last it has altogether passed, then comes that awful vision of which I have spoken, which is the worst thing in the world.”

Grizzlebeard. “ ‘Estranged’ is the word: I was looking for that word.

Estrangement is the saddest thing in the world.

”

But in this there is nothing noble. It has not even horror nor doom to enhance it; it is an end, and it is an end without fruition. It is an end which leaves no questions and no quest.

It is an end without adventure, an end complete, a nothingness; and there is no matter for art in the mortal hunger of the soul.

”

“Yes, I meant something of the kind,” said Grizzlebeard in answer, sighing. “

I was thinking of the light that shines through the horn, and how when the light is extinguished the horn thickens cold and dull. I was thinking of irrevocable things.

”

… or for barren victories, and the painting of pictures for the rich blind, and the singing of songs for the wealthy deaf, and the living of all life to the profit of others, and the begetting of children who may perpetuate all that same round.

The more I think of it the more I see that the digging of holes and the filling of them up again is the true end of man and his felicity.

”

Myself. “

Yes, indeed, for consider how we drink to thirst again, and eat to hunger again, and love for disappointment, and journey in order to return.

And consider with what elaborate care we cut, clip, shave, remove and prune our hair and beard, which none the less will steadfastly regrow, and how we earn money to spend it, and black boots before walking in the mire, and do penance before sinning, …

The Poet. “

It is a mixture wherein should be compounded and intimately mixed great wads of unexpected money, new landscapes, and the return of old loves.

”

Grizzlebeard. “

All you young men talk folly. The best thing in the world is sleep.

”

… morning was not as the night had been, full of wind and hurrying clouds, but it was the morning after a gale, in which, on these high hills and among these lifting trees, the air was ambassadorial, bringing a message of life from the sea.

But it was a halted air. It no longer followed in the procession of the gale, but was steady and arrived.

So that the sky above us was not clouded, and had in it no sign of movement, but was pale with a wintry blue.

The Sailor. “

Certainly we are bound for Arun, which, when a man bathes in it, makes him forget everything that has come upon him since his eighteenth year⁠—or possibly his twenty-seventh.

”

The Poet. “

There is always some holiness in the rising of rivers, and a great attachment to their springs.

”

So we went on southward towards Henfield, and as we went, Grizzlebeard, who was striding strongly, reminded us that it was All-Halloween.

On this night of all nights in the year there is most stir and business among the things that are not seen by men, and there is a rumour in all the woods; and very late, when men are sleeping, all those who may not come to earth at any other time, come and hold their revels.

The Little People who are good for the most part, dance this night in the meadows and undergrowth, and move in and out of the reeds along the river bank, and twine round and round in rings holding hands upon the flat pastures, the water …

Grizzlebeard. “So it may be for those who have the great misfortune to see the Little People, but, as I told you, I have never seen them, and with me it has been the other way about.

Year after year have I picked up the dead leaves, until all the leaves of my life were dead, and year after year I have found between my hands gold and more gold.

”

But when you came out into man’s-world and tasted the upper air, then, as all your hearers and your readers know, this verse turned out to be the light and worthless matter of dead leaves. Oh, do not shake your head!

We know that verse of youth which the fairies give us in mockery; only we, when we grow up, are too wise to cherish the bag-full.

We leave it for the wind to scatter, for it is all dead leaves.

Myself. “

They told me I should never get home, and I never have.

”

and all that valley of Adur was a great and solemn sight to see as we went forward upon our adventure that led nowhere and away.

To us four men, no one of whom could know the other, and who had met by I could not tell what chance, and would part very soon forever, these things were given.

All four of us together received the sacrament of that wide and silent beauty, and we ourselves went in silence to receive it.

To us four men, no one of whom could know the other, and who had met by I could not tell what chance, and would part very soon forever, these things were given.

All four of us together received the sacrament of that wide and silent beauty, and we ourselves went in silence to receive it.

And so when it was full dark we came to Henfield, and determined that it was time for bread, and for bacon, and for ale—a night meal inspired by the road and by the tang of the cold.

… men ride), and that even that most-perfectly-fitting creature and manifestly-adapted-to-man, that hale four-footed one, the Hog, was but an accident, and is not an end in himself for us, but may, in the change of human affairs, be replaced by some other more suitable thing.

All things are made for an end, but who shall say what end?

”

“

When all this is over your half pig is as stiff as a prude, and as salt as sorrow, and as incorruptible as a lawyer, and as tough as Tacitus.

Then may you lift it up all of one piece, like a log, and put it to smoke over a wood fire, as the giants did in old time, or you may pack it between clean layers of straw, as the Germans do to this …

we will not go and walk in the woods whence all the laurels have been cut away, nor will we return to emotions which in their day were perhaps but vaguely divine, but which the lapse of time has rendered sacred.

It is the most perilous of human endeavours, is this attempt to return to the past; should it fail, it breeds the most woeful of human woes.

I know as well as you the gardens of Bramber, and I, too, have sat there eating and drinking upon summer evenings between the last light and the dark. I, too, have watched a large star that began to show above Buttolph Combe;

The Sailor. “

There is not upon earth so good a thing as an inn; but even among good things there must be hierarchy.

The angels, they say, go by steps, and I am very ready to believe it. It is true also of inns. It is not for a wandering man to put them in their order;

but round the inn at Bramber, my companions, there hangs a very different air. Memory bathes it and the drift of time, and the perpetual obsession of youth. So let us leave it there.

I will put up the picture of an early love; I will hear with mixed sorrow and delight the songs that filled my childhood; but I will not deliberately view that which by a process of sanctification through time has come to be hardly of this world.

I will not go sleep in the inn at Bramber—the gods forbid me.

the fast and inviolable—the forbidden stops of resurrection and of accomplished loving.

For no man may relive his youth, nor is love fruitful altogether to man.

”

… old man goes for silence and repose, to another a younger man for adventure or for isolation, to a third a poet for no reason save to lay up a further store of peevish impotence, which is the food upon which these half-men commonly feed.

So also there are inns coquettish, inns brutal, inns obvious, inns kindly, and inns strong⁠—each is for a mood.

But as in every life there is one emotion which may not be touched and to which the common day is not sufficient, so with inns. For me one is thus sacred, which is that inn at Bramber.

The Sailor (sitting down near the fire and pouring out the ale). “It is better so! Let us have no filling up of gaps.

Beware of perfection. It is a will-o’-the-wisp.

It has been the ruin of many.”

But I was still wakeful, all alone, remembering All-Hallows and what dancing there was in the woods that night, though no man living might hear the music, or see the dancers go.

I thought the fire-lit darkness was alive.

So I slipped to the door very quietly, covering the latch with my fingers to dumb its noise, and I went out and watched the world.

When I had seen all this I went back within doors, as noiselessly as I had come out, and I picked through the sleepers to my own place, and I wrapped myself in my cloak before the fire.

Sleep came at last to me also; but that night dead friends visited me in dreams.

Sorely against their will!

For there is no fight in a man until it is past nine o’clock, and even so he is the better for coffee or for soup.

But today there is no fighting, but only trudging, so let us make our breakfast thus and be off.”

They were none of them content, but since I would have it so and since there was no help for it, they drank that stale beer, a mug each, with wry faces, and nibbled a little at the stale bread.

Then we left the rest of the loaf and the cheese for the mice, who keep house for me there when I am away, and frighten off newcomers by pretending that they are the spirits of the dead.

So we went out through the door and across the little green to a wobble road that is there, and by a way across the fields to Steyning, where we should find the high road to Washington and Storrington and Amberley Bridge, and so over …

Grizzlebeard. “Do you not know, Poet, that by all these anti-belly tricks of yours you would canalise mankind into the trench that leads to hell?

For there is nothing that cannot be made to serve the Master of Evil by abuse, nor anything which cannot by a just and reasonable enjoyment be made to glorify God.

Have you any lack of pleasure in this rush of the clouds above us. Or does he seem to you a niggler, the fellow that rides the southwest wind?”

… the Sailor, the Poet, Grizzlebeard, and I, we were not a little annoyed to see in a corner of the room, crouched up against the fire in a jolly old easy-chair, which little suited his vile and scraggy person, a being of an unpleasant sort.

He had a hump which was not his fault, and a sour look which was.

He was smoking a long churchwarden pipe through his sneering lips. There was very little hair upon his face, though he did not shave, and the ear turned towards us, the left ear, had been so broken that it looked pointed, and made one shudder.

The Sailor. “Yes, Ninny-lad, most certainly!

What else were roads made for but to give a man hard going over wet land?

”

“

It is a day of rest, and there is no labour like shaving.

It is a day of dignity, and there is no grimacing, sour-faced, donnish occupation like that of shaving. So I say: ‘There is a day for everything, and everything has its lucky time except burial.’ ”

and when Washington the Virginian, a general overseas, was worriting his army together a long time ago, men hearing his name would say: ‘Washington? … Washington? … I know that name.’ Then would they remember the inn at Washington, and smile.

For fame is of this character. It goes by the sound of names.

”

‘Till one eternal moment stops his powers: Time being past then all time past is ours.’

It is indeed good beer; and when we leave our valleys we will all drink it together in Paradise.

”

… and not at all on account of that other skirmish with the Normans, in which we so thoroughly defeated them also, that they turned their backs to the Weald, and ran off as best they could to Dover and the mean places of the East.

For we would never have William for our king, and we never did.

But he is Duke William for us, and Duke William only now and forever. Amen!”

The Sailor. “

And may it never rain again, for while it rains we sit here in inns and hear nothing but interminable stories.

”

It was a slow sort of sidling gait that the noise betrayed as it fainted into the distance.

If he had suffered from horses that morning, that afternoon he was having his revenge; it was the horse that suffered.

As we stood there in the stable yard talking, a very short ostler of a hard appearance, with the straw of ages in his teeth, came up, and, believing us to be wealthy, hit his forehead hard with the forefinger of his right hand.

… do not speak of it so from any common affection, no, nor from any affection which is merely deep, but because it is our own country, and because the sight of one’s own country after many years is the one blessed thing of this world.

There is nothing else blessed in this world, I think, and there is nothing else that remains.

”

The Sailor. “I cannot tell you, Grizzlebeard, whether a man can find completion in his home or no.

You are a rich man, and you have travelled as rich men do, for pleasure⁠—which rich men never find.

”

The Poet. “Nevertheless we know it in dreams.

There are dreams in which men do attain to a complete satisfaction, reaching the home within the home and the place inside the mind.

And such a man it was, remembering such dreams, who wrote that he had forgotten the name of his own country and could not find his way to it.

Myself. “For my part I think you are very ungrateful or very mystical; or perhaps you have got religion. But at any rate it is your business and not mine.

I say for my part, if I can get back to that country which lies between Lavant and Rother and Arun, I will live there as gratefully as though I were the fruit of it, and die there as easily as a fruit falls, and be buried in it and mix with it forever, and leave myself and all I had to it for an inheritance.

”

“

Then at last I knew what briar it was that had taken root within me.

“In her absence—during the long nights especially—there returned to me the drooping of her eyes: their slow and generous glances. Waking and far off from her, when I saw in some stranger that same rare lowering of the lids I was troubled.

So that to hear it attached even to another or to see it written or printed on a page everything within me stirred, and it was as though a lamp had been lit suddenly in my soul.

Then, indeed, I understood how truly there are special words of witchcraft and how they bind and loose material things.

”

“

A veil was torn right off the face of the world and my own spirit, and I saw reality all bare, original, evil and instinct with death.

Nor would I eat and drink, but at last I cried out loud, mourning like a little child;

“

When spirits fall it is not as when bodies fall; they are not killed or broken; but I had fallen in those moments from an immeasurable height, and the rest of my way so long as I might live was to be passed under the burden to which we all are doomed.

Then strong, and at last (at such a price) mature, I noted the hour and went towards the doors through which she had entered perhaps an hour ago in the company of the man with whose name she had mingled her own.”

“But we chatted together merrily enough all three until she went to bed. Then I sat up for some hours talking with the jolly master of the house of politics and of lard.

For I had found in my travels and in my new acquaintance with men that every man is most willing and most able to speak of his own trade.

And let me tell you that this man had everything in him which can make a good citizen and a worthy and useful member of the State.

“

But that first woman still sits upon her throne. Not even in death, I think, shall I lose her.

”

He shook his head and answered: “It was not for lack of them, great or small. There have been hundreds … but let us say no more! There was some foreigner who put it well when he said, ‘

Things do not come at all, or if they come, they come not at that moment when they would have given us the fullness of delight.

’ ”

The Poet was now thoroughly annoyed, not being so companionable a man (by reason of his trade) as he might be.

For men become companionable by working with their bodies and not with their weary noddles, and the spinning out of stuff from oneself is an inhuman thing.

So I said to him to soothe him:

The Poet. “It is all very well, but that verse of yours is not yours at all.

It is Elizabethan and water, and let me tell you that the Elizabethan manner can be diluted about as successfully as beer.

Mix your ale with water half and half, and give me news of it. So with Elizabethan when you moderns think that you have tapped the barrel.”

“He was delighted to find, in the main room, a gathering; it was of peasants who were discussing a point of difficulty.

They respectfully saluted him upon his entrance, for he always dressed with care, and the constant exercise of bullying men who could not reply had given him a commanding manner.

“He stood before the fire surveying them in a kindly but authoritative way, and listened closely while they discussed the matter before them;

“Now was not that a fine full-fed judge and worthy of being remembered as he is throughout this valley for that famous decision?”

When I had told them all this we took the road again, thinking about lawyers and talking of them, and from that the conversation came by an easy stage to moneylenders, and from them again to traitors, and so we passed in review all the principal activities of mankind in the space of about one mile, until we had exhausted every matter, and there was no more to be said.

After this we all fell silent and tailed off, Grizzlebeard going ahead and getting further and further from us in great thoughtful strides, and the Poet about halfway between;

which signifies that work is noble, and prayer its equal, but that drinking good ale is a more renowned and glorious act than any other to which man can lend himself.

And on this account it is that you have a God of Wine, and of various liquors sundry other Gods, that is, Imaginations of men or Demons, but in the matter of ale no need for symbol, only that it is King.

But when we came up to the house, and turned into it, we found that Grizzlebeard, who had gone in already before us, was in that short time deeply engaged with a Stranger who, maugre Heaven, was drinking tea!

The Sailor (to the Poet and Myself). “

Let us go hence, my children, and drink in the bar with common men, for the Devil will very soon come in by the window and fly away with these philosophers.

Let us be apart in some safe place when the struggle begins.”

a thing never yet discovered save through the Bastonnade. But come, let us rout them out!

I know this philosophy: when men are at it they chain themselves down for hours.

”

Also they have made for this same game as infernal a set of barbaric words as ever were blathered and stumbled over by Attila the king when the Emperor of Constantinople’s Court Dentist pulled out his great back teeth for the enlargement of his jaw.

Now this kind of man can be cured only by baptism, which is of four kinds, by water, by blood, and by desire: and the fourth kind is of beer.

So watch me and what I will do.”

… how good housewives, running from their doors, best stop the noisome noise and drown it altogether by slop, bang, douches of cold wet from a pail, which does dis-spirit the empty disputants, and, causing them immediately to unclinch, humps them off to more useful things?

So it is with philosophers, who will snarl and yowl and worry the clean world to no purpose, not even intending a solution of any sort or a discovery, but only the exercise of their vain clapper and clang.

Also they have made for this same game as infernal a set of barbaric words as ever were blathered and stumbled over by Attila the king when the Emperor of Constantinople’s Court Dentist pulled out his great back teeth for the enlargement of his jaw.

The Sailor. “The worst, perhaps, though I’m not so sure of it, but the easiest, oh no! And I say I am not so sure it is the worst.

For one never sells anything unless one is hard up, and hard-up men are never really wicked; it is the rich that are wicked.

At least so I have always been told by the poor, who are not only the great majority of men and therefore likely to be right, but also have no interest to serve in saying what they say. … But easy, no!

And I say I am not so sure it is the worst. For one never sells anything unless one is hard up, and hard-up men are never really wicked; it is the rich that are wicked.

At least so I have always been told by the poor, who are not only the great majority of men and therefore likely to be right, but also have no interest to serve in saying what they say.

… But easy, no! Do not tell me it is easy, so long as there stands for a dreadful example the story of Peter the Politician, which all the world should hear.”

“

And that is why some people go about saying that he has lost his soul, for he certainly never sold it; and this should teach you that it is not easy to sell one’s soul, though it is exceedingly easy to lose it or to give it away.

”

Grizzlebeard. “No, not on that account; it is immoral because it makes out that souls are of different sizes and values.

Now it is well known that souls are exactly equal, and that when you weigh them one against the other they do not differ by a grain of sand, and when you measure them there is not a hundredth of an inch between two of them.

And that in value they are all precisely the same. This has been laid down at no less than 572 Synods, three Decisions of the Holy Office, and one Ecumenical Council.”

“My friends,” said I, “all men before death make a feast if they can. It is an ancient custom, and one well approved by time.

Feast before battle if you can, and before death which may come in battle.

All such death as comes to men in health, it is well to feast before it. Now, with tomorrow morning we shall come to the end of this little journey of ours, all along the County, all the way from end to end.

“My friends,” said I, “all men before death make a feast if they can. It is an ancient custom, and one well approved by time. Feast before battle if you can, and before death which may come in battle.

All such death as comes to men in health, it is well to feast before it.

Now, with tomorrow morning we shall come to the end of this little journey of ours, all along the County, all the way from end to end. Thus we shall attain, as you may say, the death of our good time.

The Sailor. “

Then now you may have the reward of charity and starve.

”

Myself. “

No, no, there is a way out of these matters which is quite unknown to children and to savages, but open to men of intelligence and culture as are we. It is to do things by way of paper instead of metal.

A fund shall be formed, each one shall pay into the fund a piece of paper on which shall be written, ‘I will meet one-quarter of the bill,’ and each man shall sign.

Myself. “And, undoubtedly, Poet, you acquired in other counties a habit of eating that Gorgonzola cheese, which is made of soap in Connecticut; and Stilton, which is not made at Stilton; and Camembert, and other outlandish things.

But in Sussex, let me tell you, we have but one cheese, the name of which is Cheese.

It is One; and undivided, though divided into a thousand fragments, and unchanging, though changing in place and consumption.

and Stilton, which is not made at Stilton; and Camembert, and other outlandish things. But in Sussex, let me tell you, we have but one cheese, the name of which is Cheese.

It is One; and undivided, though divided into a thousand fragments, and unchanging, though changing in place and consumption.

There is in Sussex no Cheese but Cheese, and it is the same true Cheese from the head of the Eastern Rother to Harting Hill, and from the sea-beach to that part of Surrey which we gat from the Marches with sword and with bow.

There is in Sussex no Cheese but Cheese, and it is the same true Cheese from the head of the Eastern Rother to Harting Hill, and from the sea-beach to that part of Surrey which we gat from the Marches with sword and with bow.

In colour it is yellow, which is the right colour of Cheese.

It is neither young nor old. Its taste is that of Cheese, and nothing more. A man may live upon it all the days of his life.”

In colour it is yellow, which is the right colour of Cheese. It is neither young nor old.

Its taste is that of Cheese, and nothing more. A man may live upon it all the days of his life.

”

But I will drink port, and if I taste in it the jolly currant wine of my county, black currants from the little bushes which I know so well, then I shall give praise to God.

For I would rather drink that kind of port which is all Sussex from vine to vat, and brewed as the Sussex Men brew, than any of your concoctions of the Portuguese, which are but elderberry, liquorice, and boiled wine.

”

As we thus decided upon the nature of the feast, the last of the light, long declined, had faded upon the horizon behind the latticework of bare branches.

The air was pure and cold, as befitted All-Hallows, and the far edges of the Downs toward the Hampshire border had level lines of light above them, deeply coloured, full of departure and of rest.

There was a little mist upon the meadows of the Rother, and a white line of it in the growing darkness under the edges of the hills.

I woke and shuddered.

For in my dream I had come to a good place, the place inside the mind, which is all made up of remembrance and of peace.

Here I had seemed to be in a high glade of beeches, standing on soft, sweet grass on a slope very high above the sea; the air was warm and the sea was answering the sunlight, very far below me.

It was such a place as my own Downs have made for me in my mind, but the Downs transfigured, and the place was full of glory and of content, height and great measurement fit for the beatitude of the soul.

Nor had I in that dream any memory of loss, but rather a complete end of it, and I was surrounded, though I could not see them, with the return of all those things that had ever been my own.

But this was in the dream only; and when I woke it was to the raw world and the sad uncertain beginnings of a little winter day.

Nor had I in that dream any memory of loss, but rather a complete end of it, and I was surrounded, though I could not see them, with the return of all those things that had ever been my own.

But this was in the dream only; and when I woke it was to the raw world and the sad uncertain beginnings of a little winter day.

Grizzlebeard, who had woken me, said gravely: