The Book of Months by E.F. Benson

I am come back again to the level uneventfulness of these pleasant days with a great sense of having ‘come home' continually with me. This little stuccoed house with its little garden has become to me my _angulus terre_; the deep vibration of ‘home,' incommunicable, and to many unmeaning, is here; I can no longer imagine myself permanently anywhere else. All day long I continually find, as it were, intimate glances: the line of the downs, a group of trees, or a corner of my own room catches my eye as one catches the eye of a friend across a roomful of acquaintances.

That glance says nothing in particular -- it only means ‘I am I, you are you' -- but it is only between friends that such a glance can ever pass; soul beckons to soul with gesture invisible to others, and a smile answers it, for it is friends who are our anchor in this swift-rushing stream of days and years: secure there, though time eddies in froth and flying spray about our bows, it does not whirl us away, straw and flotsam, down the racing flood. And above us, when we look up from our anchorage through the flying wrack of storm-cloud and torn fringes of wind-swept vapour, there glimmer the steadfast and immutable stars.