And after all, though we shelter our lives and seclude them as we may,
we have all of us a heavy burden to bear. These mouldering walls, these
soaring towers, the voice of many waters, teach me this, if they teach
me nothing else, that peace and beauty are dear to the heart of God;
that he sets them where he can; that we can perceive them and love
them; and that if our life is a learning of some great and dim lesson,
these sweet influences may sustain and comfort us at least as well as
the phantoms which so many of us pursue.
LIII
I am sure that it is an inspiring as well as a pleasant thing to go on
pilgrimage sometimes to the houses where interesting people and great
people have lived and thought and written. It helps one to realise,
that "they were mortal, too, like us," but it makes one realise it
gratefully and joyfully; it is good to feel, as one comes to do by such
visits, that such thoughts, such words, are not unattainable by
humanity, that they can be thought in rooms and fields and gardens like
our own, and written down in chairs and on tables much the same as
others. Tennyson went once to see Goethe's house at Weimar, and was
more transported by seeing a room full of his old boots and
medicine-bottles than by anything else that he saw; and it is a wise
care that keeps dear Sir Walter's old hat and coat and clumsy laced
shoes in a glass case at Abbotsford.
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