a hillside strewn with stones, an interminable plain of sand; worst of all, a place would sometimes be revealed which was full of suffering, anguish, and hopeless woe, shadowed with fears and sins.  From such prospects I turned with groans unutterable; but the air of the accursed place would hang about me for days.  These surprises, these strange surmises, crowded in fast upon me.  How different the world was from what the careless forecast of boyhood had pictured it!  How strange, how beautiful, and yet how terrible!  As life went on the beauty increased, and a calmer, quieter beauty made itself revealed; in youth I looked for strange, impressive, haunted beauties, things that might deeply stir and move; but year by year a simpler, sweeter, healthier kind of beauty made itself felt; such beauty as lies on the bare, lightly washed, faintly tinted hillside of winter, all delicate greens and browns, so far removed from the rich summer luxuriance, and yet so austere, so pure.  I grew to love different books too.  In youth one demanded a generous glow, a fire of passion, a strongly tinged current of emotion; but by degrees came the love of sober, subdued reflection, a cooler world in which, if one could not rest, one might at least travel equably and gladly, with a far wider range of experience, a larger, if a fainter, hope.  I grew to demand less of the world, less of Nature, less of people; and, behold, a whole range of subtler and gentler emotions came into sight, like the blue hills of the distance, pure and low.  The whole movement of the world, past and present, became intelligible and clear.  I saw the humanity that lies behind political and constitutional questions, the strong, simple forces that move like a steady stream behind the froth and foam of personality.  If in youth I believed that personality and influence could sway and mould the world, in later years I have come to see that the strongest and fiercest characters are only the river-wrack, the broken boughs, the torn grasses that whirl and spin in the tongue of the creeping flood, and that there is a dim resistless force behind them that marches on unheeding and drives them in the forefront of the inundation.  Things that had seemed drearily theoretical, dry, axiomatic, platitudinal, showed themselves to be great generalizations from a torrent of human effort and mortal endeavour.  And thus all the mass of detail and human relation that had been rudely set aside by the insolent prejudices of youth under the generic name of business, came slowly to have an intense and living significance.  I cannot trace the process in detail; but I became aware of the fulness, the energy, the matchless interest of the world, and the vitality of a hundred thoughts that had seemed to me the dreariest abstractions.