It was one of those perfect days when the sun shines from an unclouded sky and the wind that raves without ceasing at last falls asleep and the whole world sleeps in the warm, brilliant light, albeit with eyes wide open like a basking snake. I was abroad early, and after wandering over a good many miles of moor and climbing several hills I arrived at my destination, tired and very hungry, and the first thing I did was to lunch heartily on bread and cheese and beer at the inn which you find at a short distance from the promontory. Naturally after my meal and an hour's scramble over the rough rocks of the headland I felt disposed to take a good rest before setting out on my return, and I soon found a suitable spot—a slab of stone lying with a slope to the sea on the edge of the crag. It was like a table-top with a rich cloth of grey and orange-coloured lichen covering it, and was very warm in the sun, and to make it more comfortable I rolled up my waterproof and put it under my head, so that lying there at full length I could still look at the sea and the gulls and gannets passing and repassing before me.
[Original]
In a very few minutes I began to grow drowsy. So much the better, I thought; for never is sleep more sweet and refreshing to a tired man than when it comes to him under the wide sky on a warm day. The sensation of being overcome is itself very delightful, so I did not resist but welcomed it, albeit quite conscious that it was there in me and would soon have me in its power. In a vague way I even felt interested and amused at the process: I could imagine that the spirit of sleep was there in person, kneeling on the rock behind my head and making her passes, until the wide sea and wide sky began to seem all of one colour and the figures of the gulls and gannets to grow vaguer as they passed before me. Presently I was in that state when the mind ceases to think, when the place of thought is taken by pictures from memory, which come, as it were, floating before us to pass away and be succeeded by others and still others without any connection. They are not "suggestions of contiguity" nor even of "analogy": they are not suggestions at all, and come we know not how or why.
Now among these visions or pictures of things seen or heard or read of there was one described in a poem called "The Hunter's Vision," which had been lying for years unknown or forgotten in some dusty lumber-room of the brain. I read it first in my early years, and though it was poor poetry it powerfully affected me, partly because I was a hunter myself in those days, although only a boy hunter, and often wandered far into lonely places, and sometimes when faint with heat and fatigue I rested and even fell asleep in the shadow of a bush or of my own horse. The poem relates how the tired hunter at noon sat down to rest on a jutting crag on the steep mountain side where he had been climbing, and how when gazing before him the burning heavens and vast plains of earth, scorched brown by the summer sun, grew misty and dim to his sight, then gradually changed to a vision of his early home. He knew it well—the old familiar scene—and those who were assembled there to welcome him; how could he but know them—his long dead and long lost; they were there gazing at him and some were coming with outstretched arms towards him, their faces shining with joy. The very words of the poem came back to me with the picture:
Forward with fixed and eager eyes
The hunter leaned in act to rise.
But he leaned too far in his eagerness and slipped from the crag and woke, if he ever woke at all, to know for one brief, bitter moment that he was lost for ever.
It is a story to be told, whether in verse or prose, in the simplest, directest manner; for is there a more poignant grief than that of the lonely, weary man, especially in some solitary place, who remembers his loneliness, that he is divided by death and change and absence from his own kin who were dearer than all the world to him? And just as his thought is the saddest, so the dream of a return to and reunion with the lost ones is assuredly the most blissful he can know.