Above all, one must not let one's memories sleep as in a
dusty lumber-room of the mind. In a quiet firelit hour one must
draw near, and scrutinise them afresh, and ask oneself what
remains. As I write, I open the door of my treasury and look round.
What comes up before me? I see an opalescent sky, and the great
soft blue rollers of a sapphire sea. I am journeying, it seems, in
no mortal boat, though it was a commonplace vessel enough at the
time, twenty years ago, and singularly destitute of bodily
provision. What is that over the sea's rim, where the tremulous,
shifting, blue line of billows shimmers and fluctuates? A long, low
promontory, and in the centre, over white clustered houses and
masts of shipping, rises a white dome like the shrine of some
celestial city. That is Cadiz for me. I dare say the picture is all
wrong, and I shall be told that Cadiz has a tower and is full of
factory chimneys; but for me the dome, ghostly white, rises as
though moulded out of a single pearl, upon the shifting edges of
the haze.
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