If only Wordsworth had written oftener in that strain of higher mood! To me this passage, even with just such narrow meaning as one not worthy to call himself a Wordsworthian can read into it, has been invaluable. In the mass of that hidden, cloudy, inner signification with which (I think it is Mr Ruskin who insists that) all poetry should be instinct, these lines are marvellous. They more nearly reach the goal of that "struggle to conceive the inconceivable, to utter the unutterable, that longing after the Infinite, that love of God," which Professor Max Müller describes as the basis of all religions, than all the creeds such religions have constructed.

Wordsworth saw, as perhaps no one before him ever quite so clearly saw, the Spiritual Unity underlying those two things:—the one called External Nature; the other, this spark of life called the Human Soul—the product of, and burning in, that External Nature, as a flame feeds upon the air which it illumines.—But to return to my walk.

§ 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.

§ 34

I had thus two causes of complaint against my companion. So I left him: I took a bypath; he kept to the highway. Nor was I sorry. It is pleasant now and again for short periods to get away from one's fellow-men. Familiarity breeds contempt, it is said; perhaps it is as true of aggregations of men as of individuals. At all events, one comes back from a temporary seclusion with a sweeter temper, a more kindly and tolerant regard for those about one. Nor was I sorry. The main road contained too many curious starers. To walk for pleasure was a thing wholly outside the limits of their comprehension. "'Tisn't 'cause 'tis cheaper?" asked one irrepressible inquirer (always this matter of money!); and he was still more puzzled at the explanation that hotel bills largely exceeded railway fare....

§ 35

Yet one seeks entertainment when travelling long alone. The mind becomes overfull, it gathers from every sight and sound and scent, and craves another mind as depositary for the surplus, as sharer of the spoils. In time also it wearies of constant observation, and would give much for a companion. In lieu of a concrete one, I found myself quite unconsciously imitating Macaulay, and substituting an abstract one by quoting Milton; and never did his ponderous yet marvellously poised lines sound to me so grand as when rolled ore rotundo to the accompaniment of Ontario's rolling wave. M. Henri Cochin, Matthew Arnold tells us, speaks of "the majestic English iambic." It is to Milton surely that the English iambic owes the praise of majesty. To me, I confess, the exceeding beauty of much of Milton's verse is a snare—as is also much of Mr Ruskin's prose: the ear is so captivated by the sound that the mind strays from the sense.

§ 36

Toronto was my starting point, and my course lay eastwards on the northern shore of great Lake Ontario by what is always known as the Kingston Road, one of the oldest in the country, the precursor of the Grand Trunk Railway, the track of which, indeed, it closely follows. The country through which it runs varies but little in scenery, being a great undulating stretch of fertile land thickly settled with farms and orchards, and as thickly wooded with pine, maple, larch, elm, fir, beech, hickory, and other trees common in Canada. Here and there a small river runs to the lake, and here and there the shore rises into cliffs of eighty or a hundred feet. Cows and sheep, and pigs and poultry, meet one all along the road, showing us the occupations of the inhabitants; as do also the fields of barley and wheat, and the great orchards gay with the unrivalled Canadian apple, which gleams at us from the boughs with every hue and size. The Kingston Road is a king's highway with a vengeance; hard, well-travelled, and dotted, I should say, along its whole length, with comfortable, often elaborate, habitations standing in the midst of fields and trees. At every ten, fifteen, twenty, or thirty miles these habitations cluster into villages or towns; sometimes where road and railway intersect, when there spring up factories and warehouses; sometimes down by the shore, when there rise elevators and wharves. I cannot pretend to say that these are interesting. They consist for the most part each of one straggling main street, itself a part of the Kingston Road, and differentiated from it only by the unkempt habitations that line its length, and by the inevitable wooden pavements, broad in the central portions, but narrowing to a single plank in the outskirts—where, no doubt, it was in reality, if not in name, the "Lovers' Walk." They were not quaint, no ancient and few historical traditions clung to them, neither did they appear to me to possess any distinguishing characteristics.