atmosphere of Italy.  It was glorious spring weather; a few white clouds floated amid the blue, and the earth had an intoxicating fragrance.  Then first did I know myself for a sun-worshipper.  How had I lived so long without asking whether there was a sun in the heavens or not?  Under that radiant firmament, I could have thrown myself upon my knees in adoration.  As I walked, I found myself avoiding every strip of shadow; were it but that of a birch trunk, I felt as if it robbed me of the day’s delight.  I went bare-headed, that the golden beams might shed upon me their unstinted blessing.  That day I must have walked some thirty miles, yet I knew not fatigue.  Could I but have once more the strength which then supported me!

I had stepped into a new life.  Between the man I had been and that which I now became there was a very notable difference.  In a single day I had matured astonishingly; which means, no doubt, that I suddenly entered into conscious enjoyment of powers and sensibilities which had been developing unknown to me.  To instance only one point:  till then I had cared very little about plants and flowers, but now I found myself eagerly interested in every blossom, in every growth of the wayside.  As I walked I gathered a quantity of plants, promising myself to buy a book on the morrow and identify them all.  Nor was it a passing humour; never since have I lost my pleasure in the flowers of the field, and my desire to know them all.  My ignorance at the time of which I speak seems to me now very shameful; but I was merely in the case of ordinary people, whether living in town or country.  How many could give the familiar name of half a dozen plants plucked at random from beneath the hedge in springtime?  To me the flowers became symbolical of a great release, of a wonderful awakening.  My eyes had all at once been opened; till then I had walked in darkness, yet knew it not.

Well do I remember the rambles of that springtide.  I had a lodging in one of those outer streets of Exeter which savour more of country than of town, and every morning I set forth to make discoveries.  The weather could not have been more kindly; I felt the influences of a climate I had never known; there was a balm in the air which soothed no less than it exhilarated me.  Now inland, now seaward, I followed the windings of the Exe.  One day I wandered in rich, warm valleys, by orchards bursting into bloom, from farmhouse to farmhouse, each more beautiful than the other, and from hamlet to hamlet bowered amid dark evergreens; the next, I was on pine-clad heights, gazing over moorland brown with last year’s heather, feeling upon my face a wind from the white-flecked Channel.  So intense was my delight in the beautiful world about me that I forgot even myself; I enjoyed without retrospect or forecast; I, the egoist in grain, forgot to scrutinize my own emotions, or to trouble my happiness by comparison with others’ happier fortune.  It was a healthful time; it gave me a new lease of life, and taught me—­in so far as I was teachable—­how to make use of it.