And a capon for the sinner,
You shall find ready when you’re up,
And your horse shall have his sup:
Welcome, welcome, shall fly round,
And I shall smile, though underground.”
I like the inn, but the spider loves it, and his webs bar the door against all but ghostly travellers. The barn, again, with its doorway opening upon the summer night, has a life of its own. The two figures at the door are utterly dwarfed by its ancientness, its space, and the infinite silence without.
The picture in which there is most humanity is that of a high wall, ruinous and overgrown. The deep gap in it is tragical. But even here I am not sure that it is a wall that was raised by hand of mason, and as to the inhabitants who left it desolate I feel more doubtful still, I believe it was built in a dream, long ago lost in some victory gained by the forest over men, and quite forgotten until this artist thought it would be a happy lair for a faun. He has not shown us the faun—I wish he had; he ought to know what it was like—but that gap is its gateway out from the forest into the dew of the river lawns.
It induces an awful sense of the infinite variety of human character to think of the love of earth first in this man and then in that cowman old. I wonder tolerance is not deeper as well as wider than it is.