Understand too that the sources of interest incidentally within your reach are of many kinds. But in these you will find little to interest you if you have not made some progress in those humanities of culture we just now referred to, and this goes some way to prove that if it be not a duty we owe to ourselves, yet at all events it would be wise to make some such acquisitions. Without them some of the highest, and purest, and most accessible enjoyments of life are unattainable. The people then you will be among are interesting, and the different classes in different ways. Every man, woman, and child almost is in some way or other an interesting study. And nature interests in a thousand forms, and in a thousand moods. If bigness only interests you, if nothing less than a mountain moves you, Heaven help you! for then, somehow or other, you have been deprived of infinite sources of enjoyment which have been provided for, or are at all events within the reach of instructed and cultivated perception. Some or other of these are always before you, and should have been to you unpalling and inexhaustible. If it be not so with you, then are you mentally in the state in which Milton was physically, when ‘the serene drop had quenched his visual ray.’ Your bodily eye sees, but in your inward eye there is no speculation. You are now, instead of ‘the book of knowledge fair,’
Presented with an universal blank
Of nature’s works, for you expunged and razed;
And wisdom, at one entrance, quite shut out:
and too, together with wisdom, a great part of the enjoyment of life. Endeavour then to note nature’s forms, so endlessly varied, and every variation good! Note, too, her garb: again how varied, and again every variation good! Endeavour to note the reciprocal relations of organic and inorganic nature, of life to dead matter. And above all, note the relation of all you see to sovereign man. Think of how what you are beholding informed man’s mind and shaped his life in times past, and how it is informing his mind and shaping his life now. Solicit thought to interpret to you what your eye reports. This world belongs to those who understand it. Despise not knowledge. Awaken imagination. Deem none made of meaner clay than yourself.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE SWISS ALLMENDS.
All the realm shall be in common, * * *
And there shall be no money.—Shakespeare.
The reader will have seen that I was, throughout the excursion recorded in the foregoing pages, paying some attention to the Swiss Allmends. Allmend means land which is held and used, as the word itself indicates, in common. In this general sense it includes common land of all kinds, whether in pasture, under forest, or in cultivation. In ordinary usage, however, it has come, without absolutely excluding the two former kinds, to signify common land under cultivation, with, in fact, almost a further restriction to common land, in which the cultivation is effected by the spade, or at all events, by the hand of man.