It took me, as Heaven ordained, to a common great
railway, and that common great railway took me through the night to the
town of Dieppe, which I have known since I could speak and before, and
which was about as much of Fairyland to me as Piccadilly or Monday
morning.
Thus ended those two days, in which I had touched again the unknown
places--and all that heaven was but two days, and cost me not fifty
shillings.
Excuse the folly of this.
The Tide
I wish I had been one of those men who first sailed beyond the Pillars
of Hercules and first saw, as they edged northward along a barbarian
shore, the slow swinging of the sea. How much, I wonder, did they think
themselves enlarged? How much did they know that all the civilization
behind them, the very ancient world of the Mediterranean, was something
protected and enclosed from which they had escaped into an outer world?
And how much did they feel that here they were now physically caught by
the moving tides that bore them in the whole movement of things?
For the tide is of that kind; and the movement of the sea four times
daily back and forth is a consequence, a reflection, and a part of the
ceaseless pulse and rhythm which animates all things made and which
links what seems not living to what certainly lives and feels and has
power over all movement of its own. The circuits of the planets stretch
and then recede.
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