The Mere Winding Of The Path Is Enough To Enliven A Long Day's Walk
In Even A Commonplace Or Dreary Country-Side.
Something that we
have seen from miles back, upon an eminence, is so long hid from
us, as we
Wander through folded valleys or among woods, that our
expectation of seeing it again is sharpened into a violent
appetite, and as we draw nearer we impatiently quicken our steps
and turn every corner with a beating heart. It is through these
prolongations of expectancy, this succession of one hope to
another, that we live out long seasons of pleasure in a few hours'
walk. It is in following these capricious sinuosities that we
learn, only bit by bit and through one coquettish reticence after
another, much as we learn the heart of a friend, the whole
loveliness of the country. This disposition always preserves
something new to be seen, and takes us, like a careful cicerone, to
many different points of distant view before it allows us finally
to approach the hoped-for destination.
In its connection with the traffic, and whole friendly intercourse
with the country, there is something very pleasant in that
succession of saunterers and brisk and business-like passers-by,
that peoples our ways and helps to build up what Walt Whitman calls
'the cheerful voice of the public road, the gay, fresh sentiment of
the road.' But out of the great network of ways that binds all
life together from the hill-farm to the city, there is something
individual to most, and, on the whole, nearly as much choice on the
score of company as on the score of beauty or easy travel. On some
we are never long without the sound of wheels, and folk pass us by
so thickly that we lose the sense of their number. But on others,
about little-frequented districts, a meeting is an affair of
moment; we have the sight far off of some one coming towards us,
the growing definiteness of the person, and then the brief passage
and salutation, and the road left empty in front of us for perhaps
a great while to come. Such encounters have a wistful interest
that can hardly be understood by the dweller in places more
populous. We remember standing beside a countryman once, in the
mouth of a quiet by-street in a city that was more than ordinarily
crowded and bustling; he seemed stunned and bewildered by the
continual passage of different faces; and after a long pause,
during which he appeared to search for some suitable expression, he
said timidly that there seemed to be a GREAT DEAL OF MEETING
THEREABOUTS. The phrase is significant. It is the expression of
town-life in the language of the long, solitary country highways.
A meeting of one with one was what this man had been used to in the
pastoral uplands from which he came; and the concourse of the
streets was in his eyes only an extraordinary multiplication of
such 'meetings.'
And now we come to that last and most subtle quality of all, to
that sense of prospect, of outlook, that is brought so powerfully
to our minds by a road. 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! when we hasten
to the fruition, when THERE is changed to HERE, all is afterwards
as it was before, and we stand in our indigent and cramped estate,
and our soul thirsts after a still ebbing elixir.' It is to this
wandering and uneasy spirit of anticipation that roads minister.
Every little vista, every little glimpse that we have of what lies
before us, gives the impatient imagination rein, so that it can
outstrip the body and already plunge into the shadow of the woods,
and overlook from the hill-top the plain beyond it, and wander in
the windings of the valleys that are still far in front. The road
is already there - we shall not be long behind. It is as if we were
marching with the rear of a great army, and, from far before, heard
the acclamation of the people as the vanguard entered some friendly
and jubilant city. Would not every man, through all the long miles
of march, feel as if he also were within the gates?
CHAPTER XIV - ON THE ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES - 1874
It is a difficult matter to make the most of any given place, and
we have much in our own power.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 66 of 70
Words from 66333 to 67348
of 70588
