And Yet A Little While, Yet A Few Days Of This Fictitious
Liberty, And They Will Begin To Hear Imperious Voices Calling On
Them To Return; And Some Passion, Some Duty, Some Worthy Or
Unworthy Expectation, Will Set Its Hand Upon Their Shoulder And
Lead Them Back Into The Old Paths.
Once and again we have all made
the experiment.
We know the end of it right well. And yet if we
make it for the hundredth time to-morrow: it will have the same
charm as ever; our heart will beat and our eyes will be bright, as
we leave the town behind us, and we shall feel once again (as we
have felt so often before) that we are cutting ourselves loose for
ever from our whole past life, with all its sins and follies and
circumscriptions, and go forward as a new creature into a new
world.
It was well, perhaps, that I had this first enthusiasm to encourage
me up the long hill above High Wycombe; for the day was a bad day
for walking at best, and now began to draw towards afternoon, dull,
heavy, and lifeless. A pall of grey cloud covered the sky, and its
colour reacted on the colour of the landscape. Near at hand,
indeed, the hedgerow trees were still fairly green, shot through
with bright autumnal yellows, bright as sunshine. But a little way
off, the solid bricks of woodland that lay squarely on slope and
hill-top were not green, but russet and grey, and ever less russet
and more grey as they drew off into the distance.
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