Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 11, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume III

ORDERED SOUTH
beautiful nature is essentially capricious. It comes
sometimes when we least look for it ; and sometimes,
when we expect it most certainly, it leaves us to
gape joylessly for days together, in the very home-
land of the beautiful. We may have passed a place
a thousand times and one ; and on the thousand and
second it will be transfigured, and stand forth in a
certain splendour of reality from the dull circle of
surroundings ; so that we see it ' with a child's first
pleasure,' as Wordsworth saw the daffodils by the
lake-side. And if this falls out capriciously with the
healthy, how much more so with the invalid ! Some
day he will find his first violet, and be lost in plea-
sant wonder, by what alchemy the cold earth of the
clods, and the vapid air and rain, can be transmuted
into colour so rich and odour so touchingly sweet.
Or perhaps he may see a group of washerwomen
relieved, on a spit of shingle, against the blue sea, or
a meeting of flower-gatherers in the tempered day-
light of an olive-garden ; and something significant
or monumental in the grouping, something in the
harmony of faint colour that is always characteristic
of the dress of these southern women, will come
home to him unexpectedly, and awake in him that
satisfaction with which we tell ourselves that we are
the richer by one more beautiful experience. Or it
may be something even slighter : as when the
opulence of the sunshine, which somehow gets lost
and fails to produce its effect on the large scale, is
suddenly revealed to him by the chance isolation —
as he changes the position of his sunshade — of a yard
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