This is but one among many visions of which the remembrance makes life worshipful; and it is pity that at the hour of their coming well-nigh all whom they should delight lie chambered within brick walls, lost in sleep or in the mazes of unprofitable thoughts. For these things in their rare appearances are more precious than an hour's slumber, were it dreamless as a child's, or all the watches of luxurious unrest. If another summer is given me I hope to take the road when July has come with balmy nights, and wander days at a stretch with all I need upon my shoulders. Then I shall know the real joy of vagrancy, caring little where night finds me, and quickening my steps for nothing and for no man. I shall linger in every glade or on every hill-top which calls to me to stay; I shall tell all the hedgerow flowers, and lean over the gates to watch the foals playing. The brooks shall be my washing-basins, and I shall quench hunger and thirst in the tiled kitchens of lonely farmsteads. If I hear the shriek of a train I shall smile when I think of its cooped and harried passengers, and plunge devious into some pathless wood, in whose depths the only sounds are the tap of the woodpecker's bill or the measured axe-strokes of the woodman. I shall fling myself down to rest under what tree I will, and pulling from my pocket the book of my choice, I shall summon a wise and cheerful companion to my side as easily as ever oriental magician called a jinn to do him service. I shall once more be commensal with wild creatures, and wonder that solitude was ever a pain; I shall be healthily disdainful of the valetudinarian who lives to spoil either his body or his soul.
These are the wanderings which henceforward will chiefly suffice to my need. For since I roamed my fill in other continents the gadfly may no longer sting me out of my tranquil haunts. In their youth lonely people suffer more than others from that restlessness which fills the mind with sudden distaste for the present scene, and a fierce longing to be somewhere far away. Others are preserved from it by the love of home; but we, in our poverty of attachment, listen more readily to the depreciating voice.
I remember how deep had always been my longing to look out upon the sea from some Greek island, and how one day, when this desire was granted, and I walked along hills set high above the blue Ægean, I was seized with an instant yearning to be instead upon Ranmore Common in Surrey. Yet at that moment a life's ambition was being fulfilled; I stood in a scene of incomparable beauty, gazing down on those deep azure waters whose voice is always to me as a lament for wandering Odysseus; the lower slopes were rich with olive trees, powdering with silver the tilled lands round a beautiful monastery lying there in its enchanted rest. Dark cypresses rose amid white walls of villages, by the contrast of their gloom making all bright colours glorious; away to the left, where the shore verged westward tracing inimitable curves between field and sea, lay slumbering a little white town with minarets and walled gardens and tiny haven—a very place for Argonauts; and yet my thoughts turned to the chalk downs of England and honeysuckle crowning the unfruitful hollies. Sed quia semper abest quod aves praesentia temnis;—Such desire has distracted Roman minds; the perversity is very old; and perhaps only children find no disillusion in the accomplishment of a dream.
For our feet have one country and our dreams another, and there is no constancy in us. It is not alone in the bartering of one earthly scene for its fellow that we suffer the sick thirst of change; but into the rarest hour of achieved ideal to which hope promised her supreme satisfaction, the same wayward longing will often find a way; as in a sacred place amid the purest and most exquisite meditations of the soul, there will suddenly flit inexplicable shadows of irreverence, with echoes of incongruous voices from the abandoned world.
But now as the years pass and the penury of human love has made the home woods and fields more dear, I feel that this unrest is drawing to its end. For as the seasons pass over the uplands and the meadows, clothing them with new splendours between the seed-time and the harvest, no vision rises upon the memory dearer and more beneficent than theirs. As the lover's fancy dwells upon the image of his beloved in this or that environment, and thus or thus arrayed, so I see the woods and fields in the various glories of the year and know not in which garb I love them best. They have heard my laments, my confidences, all my broken resolves: they are bound to me by so pure and intimate an affection that all those grander wonders of the world should never draw me again from this allegiance. Not for the vision of Himalaya piercing the heaven, or the sunsets of Sienna, or the moonlight on the Taj Mahal, or for any other beauty or any wonder shall I weary of the cornfields framed in elms or the great horses turning in the furrow against the evening sky.
For with the growth of years our desires wander less, and are mercifully contracted to the scope of our wearying powers. We haunt the same old places and want the same old things, dwelling amongst them with an increasing constancy of devotion. For we find that year by year the old places and things are not really the same; something has touched them in our absence; strange still agencies have intervened, long silences of dissolution and the ineluctable fate of change. And so that perfect sameness which we find unattainable takes on the quality of ideal and demands the grown man's devotion, as the change that is forbidden casts its resistless spell over the guarded and tethered child. The eyes of youth are on the far end of the vista, those of age upon the near; the old horse that has drawn the coulter through the clay is glad for the four hedges of the paddock which irk the growing colt's desire. When Richard Jefferies was asked why he walked the same lane day after day, at first he was at a loss for a reply; but gradually the reason became clear to him. It was because he had become aware of the iron law: Nothing twice: he wanted the same old and loved things not twice but endlessly; he was yearly more eager to be with them, and paint indelibly upon his memory their delicate quiet beauty, their soft and perishable charm.
That is how I also feel, as with the return of summer I wander out into the old meadows and climb the familiar hills; I find myself hoping that nothing is changed, and am stirred with sweet anxieties of reminiscence. And surely within the enchanted boundaries of the counties where I ramble, there is variety which not the hundred eyes of Argus could exhaust. These fields and woodlands in high summer feast all the senses with a surfeit of delights. How good it is to exercise in all its range the fine mechanism of the body, suffering each part of it to indulge its own hunger after beauty; to feel the texture of petals, and draw the long grasses through the fingers; to breathe an air laden with the scent of blossoms, passing from uplands fragrant with bean-flowers into untilled regions odorous with pines; to hear the birds' chorus at sunrise and the distant sound of reaping; to see innumerable marvels; the belts of clover mantling wine-dark in the wind; the poppies in the standing corn, the carmine yew-stems on the downs; above you the soft grey clouds delicately floating; below you, as the day declines, some distant lonely water emerging in its glory to be the mirror and refuge of all heaven's light; to remember the gorse and broom and look forward to the royal purple of the heather—all this is a consummation of pure life, a high, sensuous pleasure penetrating to the inmost soul, and of such exceeding price that to disdain its offerings or to pass incurious before them, is to live in the blindness of the tribe of Genseric.
In such wanderings the mind is filled with slow and seasonable thoughts, lasting as the trees and buildings of the country-side. Old deliberate contemplations, perceptions after long regard ingathered from abundant nature, theories leisurely compacted in sunshine or storm, to stand in the fields of memory, crowned with beauty by the indulgent years. So in the visible meadows stand the ancient barns, with roofs of umber tiles parcel-gilded with old gold of lichen, and crowning their seasoned timbers "as naturally as leaves"; restful structures of a quiet age, capacious of dim space, unvexed by the glare of a hundred summers.
And if you ask what profit is here for one who must do battle in the loud world, study for a while the artifice and industrious policy of plants by which they attract to themselves the visitants they need or with most masterful defence repel the importunate advance, and you will return to the societies of men, even to their parliaments, enriched with arts of prudence beyond the practice of Machiavel. Examine the dog-rose upon the hedge, how by putting forth thorns it raises itself to the light and ranges irresistible along the leafy parapets; see how the flowers adapt their form and colour to the convenience of the bee or the predilections of the bird; consider the furze armed with spines against browsing muzzles, and be near when it casts its seed wide upon the earth; and then say if among states or governments there is a wiser economy or an intelligence more provident of its end. I myself have the conceit that if time, revoking my sentence of superannuation, should restore my lost years and add youth to the wisdom learned along the hedges, even I, a very profitless weed, should not again so uncivilly decay, but flower to another June and see my seed multiply around me.
Perhaps, if that might be, I should strive to learn thoroughly, and bring science to bear upon experience. But, as I am, classifications and dissections are repellent to my fancy. I cannot get to the hearts of flowers by any Linnæan approach, but go rather by the old animistic way, still honoured by Milton through his Genius of the Woods: