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Grizzlebeard. “Tell me, Sailor, when you say that thus, coming home, you will be satisfied, are you so
sure? For my part, I have travelled very widely, especially in Eastern places (which are the most different
from our own), and, one time and another—altogether forty times—I have come back to the flats of my
own countiy, eastward of the Vale of Glynde. I have seen once more the heavy clouds of home fresh before
the wind over the Level, and I have smelt, from the saltings and the innings behind Pevensey, the nearness
of the sea. Then indeed I have each time remembered my boyhood, and each time I have been glad to come
home. But I never found it to be a final gladness. After a little time I must be off again, and find new
places. And that is also why in this short journey of ours I came along with you all, westward into those
parts of the county which are not my own.”

The Sailor. “I cannot tell you, Grizzlebeard, whether a man can find completion in his home or no.
You are a rich man, and you have travelled as rich men do, for pleasure—which rich men never find.”

Grizzlebeard. “Nor poor men either ”

The Sailor. “Well, poor men do not seek it, so they are not saddened, but rich men, anyhow, travel to
find it and never find it; then if they return to find it in their homes, why of course they will not find it there
either, for a man must come back home very weary and after labour, or some journeying to which he was
compelled, if he is to taste home.

...Grizzlebeard, "for, as you know, I am not one of those belated heretics who
hold such tilings sacred, believing as I do that that only is sacred which attaches directly to the Faith. ...
Nevertheless ... to remember that great time, and how securely I was held, and in what a port lay the vessel
of my soul. I do feel upon me something that should silence a man.”

"By what moorings were you held?” said I.

"By three.” he answered. "Her eyelids, her voice, and her name.” Then after a little pause he went on
"She was past her youth. Her twenty-fifth year was upon her. Her father and her mother were dead.
She was of great wealth.

"She had one brother, who lived away in some great palace or other in the north, and one sister who
was married far off in Italy. She herself had inherited an ancient house of stone set in her own valley, which
was that of the river Brede. and most dear to her; for it was there that she had lived as a child, and there
would she pass her womanhood.

"Into this house I was received, for she was much older than I, and when I first knew her I was not yet
a man. Thither perpetually in the intervals of study I returned. Insensibly my visits grew most natural; I
passed the gates which are the beginning of a full life, and constantly I found myself, in spite of a more
active bearing and a now complete possession of my youth, alone in her companionship.
Her many servants knew me as a part of their household her grooms who first had taught me to ride, her keepers with whom I had first shot, her old nurse, a pensioner, who favoured this early friendship. The priest also called me by my name.

“We walked together in long avenues the lawns of four hundred years were a carpet for us. We paced
her woods slowly together and often watched together in the frosty season of the year the early setting of
the sun behind bare trees. At evening by her vast and regal fires we sat side by side, speaking in that light
alone to each other of dead poets and of the wars and of tilings seen and of small domestic memories grown
to be pictures clear and lovable.

“Then at last I knew what briar it was that had taken root within me.

“In her absence—during the long nights especially—there returned to me the drooping of her eyes
their slow and generous glances. Waking and far off from her. when I saw in some stranger that same rare
lowering of the lids I was troubled.

“Her voice, because it was her very self, so moved me, that whenever I heard it upon my way to her
doors, whenever I heard it speaking even in the distance no matter what things to another, I trembled.

“Her name, which was not Mary nor Catherine, but was as common and simple a name, was set above
the world and was given power over my spirit. So that to hear it attached even to another or to see it written
or printed on a page everything within me stirred, and it was as though a lamp had been lit suddenly in my
soul. Then, indeed, I understood how truly there are special words of witchcraft and how they bind and
loose material things.”

“Do not ask me whether I contemplated this or that, union or marriage, or the mere continuance of
what I knew, for I was up in a world where no such tilings are considered. There was no time. No future
threatened me, no past could be remembered. I was high above all these tilings.

"By an accident of fortune I was called away, and in a distant town over seas had alien work put before
me. and I mixed with working men. I faithfully curry-combed lean horses, and very carefully greased the
axles of heavy wheels, till, after nineteen months, I could come home, and returning I made at once for the
Valley.

"It was not for lack of them, great or small. There have been
hundreds . . . but let us say no more There was some foreigner who put it well when he said, ‘Things do
not come at all, or if they come, they come not at that moment when they would have given us the fullness
of delight

Highlander wrote: ↑Tue Feb 10, 2026 10:07 pm I commend your interest and persistence in outre literature; I have similar interests. However, for me, the sentence structure and direction of the narrative is off-putting. It seems a bit archaic.

Irenaeus wrote: ↑Fri Mar 13, 2026 8:05 pm...moved from Manhattan recently to Jersey City, NJ, just across the Hudson River from where I work in lower Manhattan. Jersey City is one of the most ethnically diverse places in the US and has a large population of Arabs, including many Copts.