November - Page 2

worried and the children that disturbed, took only their sins
with them, and turning their backs on their obligations,
set out with that sole burden, and perhaps a cheerful heart.
How cheerful my heart would have been, starting on a fine morning,
with the smell of the spring in my nostrils, fortified by
the approval of those left behind, accompanied by the pious
blessings of my family, with every step getting farther from
the suffocation of daily duties, out into the wide fresh world,
out into the glorious free world, so poor, so penitent,
and so happy! My dream, even now, is to walk for weeks
with some friend that I love, leisurely wandering from place
to place, with no route arranged and no object in view,
with liberty to go on all day or to linger all day, as we choose;
but the question of luggage, unknown to the simple pilgrim,
is one of the rocks on which my plans have been shipwrecked,
and the other is the certain censure of relatives, who, not fond
of walking themselves, and having no taste for noonday naps
under hedges, would be sure to paralyse my plans before they
had grown to maturity by the honest horror of their cry,
"How very unpleasant if you were to meet any one you know!"
The relative of five hundred years back would simply have said,
"How holy!"

My father had the same liking for pilgrimages--indeed, it is evident
that I have it from him--and he encouraged it in me when I was little,
taking me with him on his pious journeys to places he had lived in as a boy.
Often have we been together to the school he was at in Brandenburg, and spent
pleasant days wandering about the old town on the edge of one of those lakes
that lie in a chain in that wide green plain; and often have we been
in Potsdam, where he was quartered as a lieutenant, the Potsdam pilgrimage
including hours in the woods around and in the gardens of Sans Souci,
with the second volume of Carlyle's Frederick under my father's arm;
and often did we spend long summer days at the house in the Mark, at the head
of the same blue chain of lakes, where his mother spent her young years,
and where, though it belonged to cousins, like everything else that was
worth having, we could wander about as we chose, for it was empty,
and sit in the deep windows of rooms where there was no furniture,
and the painted Venuses and cupids on the ceiling still smiled irrelevantly
and stretched their futile wreaths above the emptiness beneath.
And while we sat and rested, my father told me, as my grandmother
had a hundred times told him, all that had happened in those rooms
in the far-off days when people danced and sang and laughed through life,
and nobody seemed ever to be old or sorry.

There was, and still is,