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Dear old Biddy! Whodoesknow anything? It seems to me that we can none of us know anything about anything but the past. I hardly know whether we are most ignorant of the things that shall be or the things that are. Old Biddy is the last of the old-world folk that fascinated me so muchwith their legends and traditions and reminiscences when first I settled among them—it seems but yesterday. Old Biddy has told me all she has to tell, the gossip and the experiences of days that were not as our days. With her will pass away all that is left of a generation that was the generation of our fathers. If I leave her with a smile upon the wrinkled old face there is more often a shade of sadness that passes over my own. Other faces rise up before me; other voices seem to sound; the touch of the vanished hand—gone—gone! As I turn homeward with bowed head in the grey twilight, and muse upon those ten years that have rushed by so peacefully, and yet which have remorselessly levied their tribute and left me beggared of some who were dearer than all the jewels of themine—
The farm-smokes, sweetest sight on earth,Slow through the winter air a-shrinking,Seem kind o’ sad, and round the hearthOf empty places set me thinking.
The farm-smokes, sweetest sight on earth,Slow through the winter air a-shrinking,Seem kind o’ sad, and round the hearthOf empty places set me thinking.
The farm-smokes, sweetest sight on earth,Slow through the winter air a-shrinking,Seem kind o’ sad, and round the hearthOf empty places set me thinking.
That, however, is not because Arcady is Arcady, but because life is life.
Such as we have long ago found the secret of contentment, and something more. Shall I tell you what that secret is? Will you promise to take it as the rule of your own life if I do? Here itis, then, wrapped up in a very short and pithy aphorism—“The man who does not like the place hehas to live inis a fool.” Ponder it well, you people who are never tired of prescribing “a change” as absolutely necessary to endurable existence. Banished to the sweetest village in England, how dazed and forlorn you’d be!Wecould accommodate ourselves to your life as easily as we could put on a new suit of clothes.Youcould never accommodate yourselves to ours. You would mope and pine. Your only solace would be in droning forth a new version of theTristia, which would not be half as melodious as Ovid’s.
This poor Shepherd and his Lady Shepherd will never see the Alps again—never take a boat on Lugano’s lake in the summer evening, never see Rome or Florence, never again stand before the Sistine Madonna, hearing their hearts beat. Ravenna will remain for them unvisited, and Munich will be welcome to keep its acres of splashes, which Britain’s young men and maidens are told with some insistence are genuine works of Rubens, every one of them. These are joys of the past. But if you assume that two old fogies like usmustbe longing for a change, fidgeting and hankering after it, and that wemustbe getting rusty, dull, and morose for lack of it, that we are eating our hearts out with aquerulous whimpering, instead of brimming over with thankfulness all day and every day—then you do us grievous wrong. What, sir! Do you take us for a couple of babies floundering in a tub, and puling for a cake of Pears’ Soap? Arcady or Athens is much the same to us. Where our home must be, there are our hearts.