Wherever You Went Warm
Valleys And High Trees And Pleasant Villages Should Compass You
About; And Light Fellowships Should Take You By The Arm, And Walk
With You An Hour Upon Your Way.
You may see from afar off what it
will come to in the end - the weather-beaten red-nosed vagabond,
consumed by a fever of the feet, cut off from all near touch of
human sympathy, a waif, an Ishmael, and an outcast.
And yet it
will seem well - and yet, in the air of the forest, this will seem
the best - to break all the network bound about your feet by birth
and old companionship and loyal love, and bear your shovelful of
phosphates to and fro, in town country, until the hour of the great
dissolvent.
Or, perhaps, you will keep to the cover. For the forest is by
itself, and forest life owns small kinship with life in the dismal
land of labour. Men are so far sophisticated that they cannot take
the world as it is given to them by the sight of their eyes. Not
only what they see and hear, but what they know to be behind, enter
into their notion of a place. If the sea, for instance, lie just
across the hills, sea-thoughts will come to them at intervals, and
the tenor of their dreams from time to time will suffer a sea-
change. And so here, in this forest, a knowledge of its greatness
is for much in the effect produced.
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