At the moment, I am like a man of the hills held in fee: I am willing to keep my bond, to earn my wage, to hold to the foreseen: and yet any moment a kestrel may fly overhead, mocking me with a rock-echo, where only sun and wind and bracken live—or an eddy of wind may have the sough of a pine in it—and then, in a flash—there’s my swift brain-dazzle in answer, and all the rapid falling away of these stupid half-realities, and only a wild instinct to go to my own....
It was in this mood that he wrote to a friend:
... but then, life is just like that. It is glad only ‘in the open,’ and beautiful only because of its dreams. I wish I could live all my hours out of doors: I envy no one in the world so much as the red deer, the eagle, the sea-mew. I am sure no kings have so royal a life as the plovers and curlews have. All these have freedom, rejoice continually on the wind’s wing, exalt alike in sun and shade: to them day is day, and night is night, and there is nothing else.
His sense of recovery was greatly heightened by a delightful little wander in Holland in May, with Mr. Thomas A. Janvier, a jovial, breezy companion. Of all he saw the chief fascination proved to be Eiland Marken, as he wrote to me:
We are now in the south Zuyder Zee, with marvellous sky effects, and low lines of land in the distance. Looking back at Eiland Marken one sees six clusters of houses, at wide intervals, dropped casually into the sea.
We had a delightful time in that quaintest of old world places, where the women are grotesque, the men grotesquer, and the children grotesquest—as for the tubby, capped, gorgeous-garbed, blue-eyed, yellow-haired, imperturbable babies, they alone are worth coming to see....
The following is a letter from his other self:
23d July, 1898.
My dear Mr. Rhys,
On my coming to Edinburgh for a few days I find the book you have so kindly sent to me. It is none the less welcome because it comes as no new acquaintance: for on its appearance a friend we have in common sent it to me. Alas, that copy lies among the sea-weed in a remote Highland loch; for the book, while still reading in part, slipped overboard the small yacht in which I was sailing, and with it the MS. of a short story of mine appropriately named “Beneath the Shadow of the Wave”! The two may have comforted each other in that solitude: or the tides may have carried them southward, and tossed them now to the Pembroke Stacks, now to the cliffs of Howth. Perhaps a Welsh crab may now be squeaking (they do say that crabs make a whistling squeak!) with a Gaelic accent, or the deep-sea congers be reciting Welsh ballads to the young-lady-eels of the Hebrides. Believe me, your book has given me singular pleasure. I find in it the indescribable: and to me that is one of the tests, perhaps the supreme test (for it involves so much) of imaginative literature. A nimble air of the hills is there; the rustle of remote woods; the morning cry, that is so ancient, and that still so thrills us.