Here It Seems Good To Know, Or To
Imagine, That The Men I Occasionally Meet In My Solitary
Rambles, And
Those I see in the scattered rustic village hard
by, are of the same race, and possibly the descendants, of
The
people who occupied this spot in the remote past - Iberian and
Celt, and Roman and Saxon and Dane. If that hard-featured and
sour-visaged old gamekeeper, with the cold blue unfriendly
eyes, should come upon me here in my hiding-place, and scowl
as he is accustomed to do, standing silent before me, gun in
hand, to hear my excuses for trespassing in his preserves, I
should say (mentally): This man is distinctly English, and
his far-off progenitors, somewhere about sixteen hundred years
ago, probably assisted at the massacre of the inhabitants of
the pleasant little city at my feet. By and by, leaving the
ruins, I may meet with other villagers of different features
and different colour in hair, skin, and eyes, and of a
pleasanter expression; and in them I may see the remote
descendants of other older races of men, some who were lords
here before the Romans came, and of others before them, even
back to Neolithic times.
This, I take it, is a satisfaction, a sweetness and peace to
the soul in nature, because it carries with it a sense of the
continuity of the human race, its undying vigour, its
everlastingness. After all the tempests that have overcome
it, through all mutations in such immense stretches of time,
how stable it is!
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