§ 33
Curiously enough, I had hardly reached the confines of the town which I was leaving before I fell in with a youth apparently possessed of the same motive as myself—namely, to enjoy to the full the delights of the country after a year's inclusion in a thronged city; and, in order the better to do so, to use as means of locomotion his own two legs, and a stout stick. I say "apparently," for very short converse with him revealed the fact that he was utterly blind to the charms of Nature. He was nice-mannered and polite to a degree; but as a companion to aid in discovering rural beauty he was simply worse than none at all. His two negative or denominatorial eyes and ears completely cancelled, made useless, and altogether put out of existence my two positive or numeratorial senses. I was prepared to take infinite delight in the most trivial and insignificant of Nature's works, to extol her most commonplace manifestations, to find the longest sermons in the tiniest pebbles; but to do this by the side of the most antipathetic of, to all intents and purposes, blind and deaf of fellow-pedestrians—it was out of the question. I nothing extenuate nor set down aught in malice when I say that that utterance of his most pregnant with observation of the passing scene was contained in the words, "That's a potato-patch!" The early morning sun fought its way between dense grey clouds, and fell in cheering light on the tops of the trees, and in silver showers on the gleaming lake below; the rich green meadows caught the rays, the very air seemed laden with treasures of sunlight; young and graceful maples, in crimson autumn tints, like Mænads at vintage-time, flung flaming torches towards the sky, unmindful of the morn; the sumach and the gorgeous virginia-creeper were ablaze with beauty; yet of all this he saw nothing; a brown potato-patch by the highway rim a brown potato-patch was to him, and it was nothing more. Yes, by the by, it was something more: it was an appreciable piece of property, a prospective town lot at so much per foot frontage, one-third cash down and the balance in half-yearly instalments to suit the purchaser, all local improvements paid by.... At least some such jargon caught my inattentive ear. Real estate is, I gladly grant, a topic of (often too) absorbing interest; but one does not exactly wish to be confronted with intricate monetary calculations, connected with barter and commerce, when engaged in the not very kindred and decidedly delicate task of wooing Nature. Barter and commerce when Wordsworth is ringing in one's ears, incorporated companies and syndicates when bird and bush ask your attention—these things, in the language of the pharmacopœia, are incompatibles.