XII. ROSLYN CHAPEL 219

Yorkshire;¹ and there the feeling came back to me-as it could never return more.

It is a feeling only possible to youth, for all care, regret, or knowledge of evil destroys it; and it requires also the full sensibility of nerve and blood, the conscious strength of heart, and hope; not but that I suppose the purity of youth may feel what is best of it even through sickness and the waiting for death; but only in thinking death itself God’s sending.

245. In myself, it has always been quite exclusively confined to wild, that is to say, wholly natural places, and especially to scenery animated by streams, or by the sea. The sense of the freedom, spontaneous, unpolluted power of nature was essential in it. I enjoyed a lawn, a garden, a daisied field, a quiet pond, as other children do; but by the side of Wandel, or on the downs of Sandgate, or by a Yorkshire stream under a cliff, I was different from other children, that ever I have noticed: but the feeling cannot be described by any of us that have it. Wordsworth’s “haunted me like a passion”² is no description of it, for it is not like, but is, a passion; the point is to define how it differs from other passions,-what sort of human, preeminently human, feeling it is that loves a stone for a stone’s sake, and a cloud for a cloud’s. A monkey loves a monkey for a monkey’s sake, and a nut for the kernel’s, but not a stone for a stone’s. I took stones for bread, but not certainly at the Devil’s bidding.³

I was different, be it once more said, from other children even of my own type, not so much in the actual nature of

¹ [The MS. has an additional passage here:-

“... Yorkshire. Neither foolish vanity nor wasted love could there any more degrade or darken the recovered joy in Heaven and Earth. Inexplicable, infinite, sacred: the sense of an awful life in all things, an awful harmony; man made for Earth and Sky, and these for him;-no mere sense of receiving kindness, nor of perceiving wisdom, but of all things being naturally blessed and good, and all creatures with them. It is a feeling ...”]

² [Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey: “The sounding cataract haunted me like a passion.”]

³ [Matthew iv. 3.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]