the huge dream-sorcery of the mysterious and immortal river.
It was what he had always known it to be in his visions as a child, and he came to it with a sense of wonder and of glorious discovery, but without surprise, as one who for the first time comes into his father’s country, finding it the same as he had always known it would be, and knowing always that it would be there.
And finally the whole design of that earth, with the casual and powerful surveys of its great fields, its dense still woods of moveless silence ringing with the music of the birds, its far-off hills receding into time as haunting as a dream, and the central sorcery of its shining river—that enchanted thread which ran through all, from which all swept away, and towards which all inclined—was unutterably the language of all he had ever thought or felt or known of America: the great plantation of the earth abundant to the sustenance of mighty men, and enriching all its glamorous women with the full provender of its huge compacted sweetness, an America that was so casual and rich and limitless and free, and so haunted by dark time and magic, so aching in its joy with all the bitter briefness of our days, so young, so old, so everlasting, and so triumphantly the place of man’s good earth, his ripe fulfilment and of the most fortunate, good, and happy life that any man alive had ever known.
It changed, it passed, it swept around him in all its limitless surge and sweep and fold and passionate variety, and it was more strange in all its haunting loveliness than magic or a dream, and yet more near than morning and more actual than noon.
It was a hot day: the two young men walked along with their coats flung back across their shoulders: towards five o’clock as they were coming home again, and coming down into the wooded hollow where Mr. Joel lived, Joel turned, and with a slight flush of embarrassment on his gaunt face, said:
“Look—do you mind wearing your coat when we go by Grandfather’s house?—you can take it off again when we get out of sight.”
He said nothing, but silently did as his friend requested, and thus correctly garmented they passed the old man’s great white house and crossed the little wooden bridge and stared up again out of the hollow, taking a foot-path through the woods that would lead them out into the road near Miss Telfair’s house: she had invited them to tea.
And curiously, inexplicably, of all that they had said and talked about together on that walk, these two things were later all he could remember:—
