In Real Nature, As Well As In Old
Landscapes, Beneath That Impartial Daylight In Which A Whole
Variegated Plain Is Plunged And Saturated, The Line Of The Road
Leads The Eye Forth With The Vague Sense Of Desire Up To The Green
Limit Of The Horizon.
Travel is brought home to us, and we visit
in spirit every grove and hamlet that tempts us in
The distance.
Sehnsucht - the passion for what is ever beyond - is livingly
expressed in that white riband of possible travel that severs the
uneven country; not a ploughman following his plough up the shining
furrow, not the blue smoke of any cottage in a hollow, but is
brought to us with a sense of nearness and attainability by this
wavering line of junction. There is a passionate paragraph in
Werther that strikes the very key. 'When I came hither,' he
writes, 'how the beautiful valley invited me on every side, as I
gazed down into it from the hill-top! There the wood - ah, that I
might mingle in its shadows! there the mountain summits - ah, that I
might look down from them over the broad country! the interlinked
hills! the secret valleys! Oh to lose myself among their
mysteries! I hurried into the midst, and came back without finding
aught I hoped for. Alas! the distance is like the future. A vast
whole lies in the twilight before our spirit; sight and feeling
alike plunge and lose themselves in the prospect, and we yearn to
surrender our whole being, and let it be filled full with all the
rapture of one single glorious sensation; and alas!
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