The air penetrates
through your clothes, and nestles to your living body.
You love
exercise and slumber, long fasting and full meals. You forget all
your scruples and live a while in peace and freedom, and for the
moment only. For here, all is absent that can stimulate to moral
feeling. Such people as you see may be old, or toil-worn, or
sorry; but you see them framed in the forest, like figures on a
painted canvas; and for you, they are not people in any living and
kindly sense. You forget the grim contrariety of interests. You
forget the narrow lane where all men jostle together in
unchivalrous contention, and the kennel, deep and unclean, that
gapes on either hand for the defeated. Life is simple enough, it
seems, and the very idea of sacrifice becomes like a mad fancy out
of a last night's dream.
Your ideal is not perhaps high, but it is plain and possible. You
become enamoured of a life of change and movement and the open air,
where the muscles shall be more exercised than the affections.
When you have had your will of the forest, you may visit the whole
round world. You may buckle on your knapsack and take the road on
foot. You may bestride a good nag, and ride forth, with a pair of
saddle-bags, into the enchanted East. You may cross the Black
Forest, and see Germany wide-spread before you, like a map, dotted
with old cities, walled and spired, that dream all day on their own
reflections in the Rhine or Danube. You may pass the spinal cord
of Europe and go down from Alpine glaciers to where Italy extends
her marble moles and glasses her marble palaces in the midland sea.
You may sleep in flying trains or wayside taverns. You may be
awakened at dawn by the scream of the express or the small pipe of
the robin in the hedge. For you the rain should allay the dust of
the beaten road; the wind dry your clothes upon you as you walked.
Autumn should hang out russet pears and purple grapes along the
lane; inn after inn proffer you their cups of raw wine; river by
river receive your body in the sultry noon. Wherever you went warm
valleys and high trees and pleasant villages should compass you
about; and light fellowships should take you by the arm, and walk
with you an hour upon your way. You may see from afar off what it
will come to in the end - the weather-beaten red-nosed vagabond,
consumed by a fever of the feet, cut off from all near touch of
human sympathy, a waif, an Ishmael, and an outcast. And yet it
will seem well - and yet, in the air of the forest, this will seem
the best - to break all the network bound about your feet by birth
and old companionship and loyal love, and bear your shovelful of
phosphates to and fro, in town country, until the hour of the great
dissolvent.
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