Ceres' Runaway, and Other Essays

								

neither England nor Italy can rival it.  But there needed also the senses
of the French--those senses of which they say far too much in every
second-class book of their enormous, their general second-class, but
which they have matched in their time with some inimitable words.  Perhaps
that matching was done at the moment of the full literary consciousness
of the senses, somewhere about the famous 1830.  For I do not think
ensoleille to be a much older word--I make no assertion.  Whatever its
origin, may it have no end!  They cannot weary us with it; for it seems
as new as the sun, as remote as old Provence; village, hill-side,
vineyard, and chestnut wood shine in the splendour of the word, the air
is light, and white things passing blind the eyes--a woman's linen, white
cattle, shining on the way from shadow to shadow.  A word of the sense of
sight, and a summer word, in short, compared with which the paraphrase is
but a picture.  For ensoleille I would claim the consent of all
readers--that they shall all acknowledge the spirit of that French.  But
perhaps it is a mere personal preference that makes le jour
s'annonce also sacred.
If the hymn, "Stabat Mater dolorosa," was written in Latin, this could be
only that it might in time find its true language and incomparable phrase
at last--that it might await the day of life in its proper German.  I
found it there (and knew at once the authentic verse, and knew at once
for what tongue it had been really destined) in the pages of the prayer-
book of an apple-woman at an Innsbruck church, and in the accents of her
voice.

THE SEA WALL

A singular love of walls is mine.  Perhaps because of childish
association with mountain-climbing roads narrow in the bright shadows of
grey stone, hiding olive trees whereof the topmost leaves prick above
into the blue; or perhaps because of subsequent living in London, with
its too many windows and too few walls, the city which of all capitals
takes least visible hold upon the ground; or for the sake of some other
attraction or aversion, walls, blank and strong, reaching outward at the
base, are a satisfaction to the eyes teased by the inexpressive peering
of windows, by that weak lapse and shuffling which is the London "area,"
and by the helpless hollows of shop-fronts.
I would rather have a wall than any rail but a very good one of wrought-
iron.  A wall is the safeguard of simplicity.  It lays a long level line
among the indefinite chances of the landscape.  But never more majestic
than in face of the wild sea, the wall, steadying its slanting foot upon
the rock, builds in the serried ilex-wood and builds out the wave.  The
sea-wall is the wall at its best.  And fine as it is on the strong coast,
it is beautiful on the weak littoral and the imperilled levels of a
northern beach.
That sea wall is low and long; sea-pinks grow on the salt grass that
passes away into shingle at its foot.  It is at close quarters with the