Page 597 - swanns-way

coasts, beside churches as rugged and precipitous as cliffs,
in whose towers the sea-birds would be wailing; suddenly,
effacing them, taking away all their charm, excluding them
because they were its opposite and could only have weak-
ened its effect, was substituted in me the converse dream of
the most variegated of springs, not the spring of Combray,
still pricking with all the needle-points of the winter’s frost,
but that which already covered with lilies and anemones the
meadows of Fiesole, and gave Florence a dazzling golden
background, like those in Fra Angelico’s pictures. From that
moment, only sunlight, perfumes, colours, seemed to me to
have any value; for this alternation of images had effected a
change of front in my desire, and—as abrupt as those that
occur sometimes in music,—a complete change of tone in
my sensibility. Thus it came about that a mere atmospheric
variation would be sufficient to provoke in me that mod-
ulation, without there being any need for me to await the
return of a season. For often we find a day, in one, that has
strayed from another season, and makes us live in that oth-
er, summons at once into our presence and makes us long
for its peculiar pleasures, and interrupts the dreams that we
were in process of weaving, by inserting, out of its turn, too
early or too late, this leaf, torn from another chapter, in the
interpolated calendar of Happiness. But soon it happened
that, like those natural phenomena from which our comfort
or our health can derive but an accidental and all too mod-
est benefit, until the day when science takes control of them,
and, producing them at will, places in our hands the power
to order their appearance, withdrawn from the tutelage and

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