"What a God! Where will it lead you?"
"I cannot tell; yet I trust. Nature is more than the mere art of God, as men have called it. That is why I must live with it, why I cannot mew myself in bricks and mortar. Here's God's best in this sort—the dearest sort I know—the Moor—spread out for me to see and hear and touch and tread all the days of my life. This is more than His expression—it is Him. Nothing can be greater—not high mountains, or eternal snows, or calling oceans. Nothing can be greater to me, because I too am of all this—spun of it, born of it, bred on it, a brother of the granite and the mist and the lonely flower. Do you understand?"
"I understand that this desert is no desert to you, Myles. Yet what a faith! What a certainty!"
"Better than nothing at all."
"Anything is better than that. Our best certainties are only straws thrown to the drowning—if we think as you do."
"Bars of lead rather. They help to sink us the quicker. We know much—but not the truth of anything that matters."
"You will some day, Myles."
"Yes, too late, if your faith and its whips and sugarplums are true, Honor."
"The life of the Moor is so short," she said, suddenly changing the subject. "Now it is just trembling out into the yearly splendour of the ling; then, that done, it will go to sleep again for month upon month—lying dry, sere, dead, save for the mournful singing of rains and winds. The austerity and sternness of it!"
"Tonic to toughen mental fibres."