I have often thought that the last chapter of St John’s Gospel is one of the most bewildering and enchanting pieces of literature I know. I suppose Robert Browning must have thought so, because he makes the reading of it, in that odd rich poem, Bishop Blougram’s Apology, the sign, together with testing a plough, […]

I heard read the other morning, in a quiet house-chapel, a chapter which has always seemed to me one of the most perfectly beautiful things in the Bible. And as it was read, I felt, what is always a test of the highest kind of beauty, that I had never known before how perfect it […]

I was staying the other day in a large old country-house. One morning, my host came to me and said: “I should like to show you a curious thing. We have just discovered a cellar here that seems never to have been visited or used since the house was built, and there is the strangest […]

I read a terrible letter in the newspaper this morning, a letter from a clergyman of high position, finding fault with a manifesto put out by certain other clergymen; the letter had a certain volubility about it, and the writer seemed to me to pull out rather adroitly one or two loose sticks in his […]

Here is a story which has much occupied my thoughts lately. A man in middle life, with a widowed sister and her children depending on him, living by professional exertions, is suddenly attacked by a painful, horrible, and fatal complaint. He goes through a terrible operation, and then struggles back to his work again, with […]

I had so strange a dream or vision the other night, that I cannot refrain from setting it down; because the strangeness and the wonder of it seem to make it impossible for me to have conceived of it myself; it was suggested by nothing, originated by nothing that I can trace; it merely came […]

There sometimes falls upon me a great hunger of heart, a sad desire to build up and renew something–a broken building it may be, a fading flower, a failing institution, a ruinous character. I feel a great and vivid pity for a thing which sets out to be so bright and beautiful, and lapses into […]

I stop sometimes on a landing in an old house, where I often stay, to look at a dusky, faded water-colour that hangs upon the wall. I do not think its technical merit is great, but it somehow has the poetical quality. It represents, or seems to represent, a piece of high open ground, down-land […]

The essay which stands next in this volume, “Herb Moly and Heartsease,” was the subject of a curious and interesting experiment. It seemed to me, when I first thought of it, to be a suggestive subject, a substantial idea. One ought not to write a commentary on one’s own work, but the underlying theme is […]