Non-Fiction > Books > London, 1887 - Virginibus Puerisque, and other papers

134 Ordered South
he remembers in other days, as the sick folk
may have awaited the coming of the angel at
the pool of Bethesda. He is like an enthu-
siast leading about with him a stolid, indiffer-
ent tourist. There is some one by who is
out of sympathy with the scene, and is not
moved up to the measure of the occasion ;
and that some one is himself. The world is
disenchanted for him. He seems to himself
to touch things with muffled hands, and to
see them through a veil. His life becomes a
palsied fumbling after notes that are silent
when he has found and struck them. He
cannot recognise that this phlegmatic and
unimpressionable body with which he now
goes burthened, is the same that he knew
heretofore so quick and delicate and alive.
He is tempted to lay the blame on the
very softness and amenity of the climate, and
to fancy that in the rigours of the winter at
home, these dead emotions would revive and
flourish. A longing for the brightness and
silence of fallen snow seizes him at such times.
He is homesick for the hale rough weather ;