From Its Subtle
Windings And Changes Of Level There Arises A Keen And Continuous
Interest, That Keeps The Attention Ever Alert And Cheerful.
Every
sensitive adjustment to the contour of the ground, every little dip
and swerve, seems instinct with life and an exquisite sense of
balance and beauty.
The road rolls upon the easy slopes of the
country, like a long ship in the hollows of the sea. The very
margins of waste ground, as they trench a little farther on the
beaten way, or recede again to the shelter of the hedge, have
something of the same free delicacy of line - of the same swing and
wilfulness. You might think for a whole summer's day (and not have
thought it any nearer an end by evening) what concourse and
succession of circumstances has produced the least of these
deflections; and it is, perhaps, just in this that we should look
for the secret of their interest. A foot-path across a meadow - in
all its human waywardness and unaccountability, in all the grata
protervitas of its varying direction - will always be more to us
than a railroad well engineered through a difficult country. {7}
No reasoned sequence is thrust upon our attention: we seem to have
slipped for one lawless little moment out of the iron rule of cause
and effect; and so we revert at once to some of the pleasant old
heresies of personification, always poetically orthodox, and
attribute a sort of free-will, an active and spontaneous life, to
the white riband of road that lengthens out, and bends, and
cunningly adapts itself to the inequalities of the land before our
eyes. We remember, as we write, some miles of fine wide highway
laid out with conscious aesthetic artifice through a broken and
richly cultivated tract of country. It is said that the engineer
had Hogarth's line of beauty in his mind as he laid them down. And
the result is striking. One splendid satisfying sweep passes with
easy transition into another, and there is nothing to trouble or
dislocate the strong continuousness of the main line of the road.
And yet there is something wanting. There is here no saving
imperfection, none of those secondary curves and little
trepidations of direction that carry, in natural roads, our
curiosity actively along with them. One feels at once that this
road has not has been laboriously grown like a natural road, but
made to pattern; and that, while a model may be academically
correct in outline, it will always be inanimate and cold. The
traveller is also aware of a sympathy of mood between himself and
the road he travels. We have all seen ways that have wandered into
heavy sand near the sea-coast, and trail wearily over the dunes
like a trodden serpent. Here we too must plod forward at a dull,
laborious pace; and so a sympathy is preserved between our frame of
mind and the expression of the relaxed, heavy curves of the
roadway.
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