Here, if anywhere in this poor old England of ours, generally over-populated and sorted over, raked about, and turned inside out, there is quiet and solitude. No recent manifestations of the way the world wags, no advertisement hoardings, no gasometers or mean suburbs intrude upon the inviolable heath. No one has yet suspected coal beneath the shaggy frieze coat of this remote vestige of an earlier age, and its vitals have therefore not been probed and dragged forth. A railway skirts it, ’tis true, but only on the way otherwhere, and no network of sidings has yet made a gridiron of its unexploited waste. Elsewhere trim hedges or fences of barbed-wire restrain the explorer, but here he is free to roam, and may so roam until he has fairly lost himself.
It is a land wholly antithetic from the bubbling superficial feelings of cities, and has the introspective, self-communing air of the solitary. A town-bred man,
“Heart-halt and spirit-lame,
City-opprest,”
and wearied with the weariful reek of the streets, the jostling of the pavements, and the intolerable numbers of his kind, might come to a spell of recluse life in a farm on Egdon, and there rid him of that supersaturation of humanity; returning at last to his streets with a new spirit, a brisker step, and a revived hope in the right ordering of the world. So much Egdon can do for such an one.
I know just such a farm, in the dip of the yellow road, its thatched roofs and the near trees taking on a homely, comfortable look when night closes down upon the wild, when its windows are lit with a welcome ray as the sun goes down, in an angry glory in the west. This is, to me, the heart of the Hardy Country, and its surroundings seem most closely to fit his imaginings. The place has just that personality he gives his farmsteads, and the wastes near it wear sometimes just that cold indifference to humanity, and at others precisely that ogreish hostility, he in his pagan way describes.
Halting here, as the sun goes down, and the landscape changes from its daylight browns and purples to an irradiated orange, and through the siennas and umbers of an etching, to the blackness of night, I feel that here resides the genius loci, the Spirit of the Heath.
CHAPTER XVI
DORCHESTER TO CROSS-IN-HAND, MELBURY, AND YEOVIL