the midday sun
Yet there was an idea of fatality implied in the simile of the winged seeds which did not altogether suit Kenyon 's fancy ; for , if you look closely into the matter , it will be seen that whatever appears most vagrant , and utterly purposeless , turns out , in the end , to have been impelled the most surely on a preordained and unswerving track . Chance and change love to deal with men 's settled plans , not with their idle vagaries . If we desire unexpected and unimaginable events , we should contrive an iron framework , such as we fancy may compel the future to take one inevitable shape ; then comes in the unexpected , and shatters our design in fragments . The travellers set forth on horseback , and purposed to perform much of their aimless journeyings under the moon , and in the cool of the morning or evening twilight ; the midday sun , while summer had hardly begun to trail its departing skirts over Tuscany , being still too fervid to allow of noontide exposure . For a while , they wandered in that same broad valley which Kenyon had viewed with such delight from the Monte Beni tower . The sculptor soon began to enjoy the idle activity of their new life , which the lapse of a day or two sufficed to establish as a kind of system ; it is so natural for mankind to be nomadic , that a very little taste of that primitive mode of existence subverts the settled habits of many preceding years . Kenyon 's cares , and whatever gloomy ideas before possessed him , seemed to be left at Monte Beni , and were scarcely remembered by the time that its gray tower grew undistinguishable on the brown hillside .