Unfolding the South

❝ So why should the past be charming ? Perhaps merely because of its being the one free place for our imagination. For, as to the future, it is either empty or filled only with the cast shadows of ourselves and our various machineries. The past is the unreal and the yet visible; it has the fascination of the distant hills, the valleys seen from above; the unreal, but the unreal whose unreality, unlike that of the unreal things with which we cram the present, can never be forced on us. There is more behind; thre may be anything. This sense which makes us in love with all intricacies of things and feelings, roads which turn, views behind views, trees behind trees, makes the past so rich in possibilities.❞

Vernon Lee, 'In Praise of Old houses' in Limbo and Other Essays, 1897

Marie Spartali Stillman, The Enchanted Garden Of Messer Ansaldo, 1889

❝ The places for which we feel such love are fashioned, before we see them, by our wishes and fancy; we recognise rather than discover them in the world of reality; and his power of shaping, or at least seeing, things to suit our heart's desire come not of facility and surfeit, but of repression and short commons.❞

Vernon Lee, 'On modern Travelling' in Limbo and Other Essays, 1897

Marie Spartali Stillman, Love's Messenger, c.1885