When the soul is seized with such sudden and
positive conviction of the substantial past it is overwhelmed; and
Europe is full of such ghosts.
As you take the road to Paradise, about halfway there you come to an
inn, which even as inns go is admirable. You go into the garden of it,
and see the great trees and the wall of Box Hill shrouding you all
around. It is beautiful enough (in all conscience) to arrest one without
the need of history or any admixture of the pride of race; but as you
sit there on a seat in that garden you are sitting where Nelson sat when
he said goodbye to his Emma, and if you will move a yard or two you will
be sitting where Keats sat biting his pen and thinking out some new line
of his poem.
What has happened? These two men with their keen, feminine faces, these
two great heroes of a great time in the great story of a great people of
this world, are not there. They are nowhere. But the site remains.
Philosophers can put in formulae the crowd of suggestions that rush into
the mind when one's soul contemplates the perpetual march and passage of
mortality. But they can do no more than give us formularies: they cannot
give us replies. What are we? What is all this business? Why does the
mere space remain and all the rest dissolve?
There is a lonely place in the woods of Chilham, in the County of Kent,
above the River Stour, where a man comes upon an irregular earthwork
still plainly marked upon the brow of the bluff.
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