Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/242

216 216 THE ART OF MRS. MEYNELL distances unfold unlooked-for wings and take an even flight. You are but a man lifting his weight upon the upward road, but as you climb, the circle of the world goes up to face you. It is the law whereby the eye and the horizon answer one another that makes the way uphill so full of universal movement. All the landscape is on pilgrimage. The town gathers itself closer, and its inner harbours literally come to light ; the headlands repeat themselves ; little cups within the treeless hills open and show their farms. In the sea are many regions. A breeze is at play for a mile or two, and the surface is turned. There are roads and curves in the blue and in the white. Not a step of your journey up the height that has not its replies in the steady motion of land and sea. Things rise together like a flock of many- feathered birds. Partly, I dare say, I pick that passage first, to spread before you and win your admiration, because it is an old favourite of my own, one I fell irrecover- ably in love with years ago — and one, therefore, no doubt, that has had far more to do than I can measure with forming my ideas of perfect prose. I know every curve, pause, and glide in those two verbal " movements " (the movements that open the essay called The Horizon,) as well as I know the cadences of the Grecian Urn or Kuhla Khan — better, in fact, because prose has always meant more to me than verse — I can approach the former with a frankness and an eagerness which the latter, to some extent, oppresses and confounds. And to re-read it is accordingly to feel, perhaps factitiously, that I am seeing my ideals being line for line ful- filled. The pleasure which I take to be the joy of beholding my dreams of certain technical perfections coming true may be only the lazy pleasure one takes in familiar things, the easygoing content of recog- nition. It is only honest to own that. But, just as honestly, I don't believe it is anything of the kind. Making large allowance for this bias, I still find