secret of the shrine be apprehended.  It is of little use to survey a landscape, unless one has an overpowering desire to spend the remainder of one’s days there; because it is the life of the place, and not the sight of it, in which one desires to have a part.  Above all, one must not let one’s memories sleep as in a dusty lumber-room of the mind.  In a quiet firelit hour one must draw near, and scrutinise them afresh, and ask oneself what remains.  As I write, I open the door of my treasury and look round.  What comes up before me?  I see an opalescent sky, and the great soft blue rollers of a sapphire sea.  I am journeying, it seems, in no mortal boat, though it was a commonplace vessel enough at the time, twenty years ago, and singularly destitute of bodily provision.  What is that over the sea’s rim, where the tremulous, shifting, blue line of billows shimmers and fluctuates?  A long, low promontory, and in the centre, over white clustered houses and masts of shipping, rises a white dome like the shrine of some celestial city.  That is Cadiz for me.  I dare say the picture is all wrong, and I shall be told that Cadiz has a tower and is full of factory chimneys; but for me the dome, ghostly white, rises as though moulded out of a single pearl, upon the shifting edges of the haze.  Whatever I have seen in my life, that at least is immortal.

Or again the scene shifts, and now I stumble to the deck of another little steamer, very insufficiently habited, in the sharp freshness of the dawn of a spring morning.  The waves are different here—­not the great steely league-long rollers of the Atlantic, but the sharp azure waves, marching in rhythmic order, of the Mediterranean; what is the land, with grassy downs and folded valleys falling to grey cliffs, upon which the brisk waves whiten and leap?  That is Sicily; and the thought of Theocritus, with the shepherd-boy singing light-heartedly upon the headland a song of sweet days and little eager joys, comes into my heart like wine, and brings a sharp touch of tears into the eyes.  Theocritus!  How little I thought, as I read the ugly brown volume with its yellow paper, in the dusty schoolroom at Eton ten years before, that it was going to mean that to me, sweetly as even then, in a moment torn from the noisy tide of schoolboy life, came the pretty echoes of the song into a little fanciful and restless mind!  But now, as I saw those deserted limestone crags, that endless sheep-wold, with no sign of a habitation, rising and falling far into the distance, with the fresh sea-breeze upon my cheek—­there came upon me that tender sorrow for all the beautiful days that are dead, the days when the shepherds walked together, exulting in youth and warmth and good-fellowship and song, to the village festival, and met the wandering minstrel, with his coat of skin and his kind, ironical smile, who gave them, after their halting lays, a touch of the old true melody from a master’s hand.  What do all those old and sweet dreams mean for me,