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A MOUNTAIN BANQUET 93 Let me pay my tribute to all of them—in especial, I think, to Catullus, to Shelley, and Matthew Arnold. It is only at moments like these that one feels all they have done for one. Then, looking around the mind's temple, one sees that on every column they have hung an unwithering chaplet. It takes some time to describe all this, but it took less to experience it, for, as Hobbes says, ' thought is quick.' I had stopped my brute of a mule, in order to enjoy my feelings ; and I now suggested to Mr. Adam that this would be a good place for our luncheon. He assented. We seated ourselves on some tufts of aromatic herbage, and a grey stone was our table. Our food—for even eating at times has a poetry in it which touches the imagination— seemed to be full of the taste of the world's youth. There was meat, bread, figs, and primitive cream cheese, wrapped carefully in cool, fresh plantain leaves. It was a repast that might have been eaten without surprise by Abraham—all but some slices of excellent cold plum-pudding, which he, no doubt, would have kept, in order that he might show them to Sarah. Across the leaves, between the silvery boulders, between tufts of broom, and the bells of fine wild anemones, my eyes, as I reposed nryself, kept turning towards the sea ; and it invaded my mind with a new train of reflections. As I looked and looked, there seemed to be a heavy voluptuous bloom on it, which held some passionate secret. One sail, far

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