10. FOOTPATHS.
ALL round the shores of the island where I
dwell there runs a winding path. It is probably
as old as the settlement of the country, and
has been kept open with pertinacious fidelity by
the fishermen whose right of way it represents.
In some places, as between Fort Adams and Castle
Hill, it exists in its primitive form, an irregular
track above rough cliffs, whence you look down
upon the entrance to the harbor and watch the
white-sailed schooners that glide beneath. Elsewhere
the high-road has usurped its place, and
you have the privilege of the path without its
charm. Along our eastern cliffs it runs for some
miles in the rear of beautiful estates, whose owners
have seized on it, and graded it, and gravelled it,
and made stiles for it, and done for it everything
that landscape-gardening could do, while leaving
it a footpath still. You walk there with croquet
and roses on the one side, and with floating loons
and wild ducks on the other. In remoter places the
path grows wilder, and has ramifications striking
boldly across the peninsula through rough moorland
and among great ledges of rock, where you
may ramble for hours, out of sight of all but some
sportsman with his gun, or some truant-boy with
dripping water-lilies. There is always a charm to
me in the inexplicable windings of these wayward
tracks; yet I like the path best where it is nearest
the ocean. There, while looking upon blue sea and
snowy sails and floating gulls, you may yet hear
on the landward side the melodious and plaintive
drawl of the meadow-lark, most patient of summer
visitors, and, indeed, lingering on this island almost the whole year round.
But who cares whither a footpath leads? The
charm is in the path itself, its promise of something
that the high-road cannot yield. Away from
habitations, you know that the fisherman, the geologist,
the botanist may have been there, or that the
cows have been driven home and that somewhere
there are bars and a milk-pail. Even in the midst
of houses, the path suggests school-children with
their luncheon-baskets, or workmen seeking eagerly
the noonday interval or the twilight rest. A foot-path
cannot be quite spoiled, so long as it remains
such; you can make a road a mere avenue for fast
horses or showy women, but this humbler track
keeps its simplicity, and if a queen comes walking
through it, she comes but as a village maid. On
Sunday, when it is not etiquette for our fashionables
to drive, but only to walk along the cliffs,
they seem to wear a more innocent and wholesome
aspect in that novel position; I have seen a fine
lady pause under such circumstances and pick a
wild-flower; she knew how to do it. A footpath
has its own character, while that of the high-road
is imposed upon it by those who dwell beside it
or pass over it; indeed, roads become picturesque
only when they are called lanes and make believe
that they are but paths.
The very irregularity of a footpath makes half
its charm. So much of loitering and indolence
and impulse have gone to its formation, that all
which is stiff and military has been left out. I
observed that the very dikes of the Southern rice
plantations did not succeed in being rectilinear,
though the general effect was that of Tennyson's
"flowery squares." Even the country road, which
is but an enlarged footpath, is never quite straight,
as Thoreau long since observed, noting it with his
surveyor's eye. I read in his unpublished diary:
"The law that plants the rushes in waving lines
along the edge of a pond, and that curves the pond
shore itself, incessantly beats against the straight
fences and highways of men, and makes them conform
to the line of beauty at last." It is this unintentional
adaptation that makes a footpath so
indestructible. Instead of striking across the natural
lines, it conforms to them, nestles into the
hollow, skirts the precipice, avoids the morass. An
unconscious landscape-gardener, it seeks the most
convenient course, never doubting that grace will
follow. Mitchell, at his "Edgewood" farm, wishing
to decide on the most picturesque avenue to
his front door, ordered a heavy load of stone to be
hauled across the field, and bade the driver seek
the easiest grades, at whatever cost of curvature.
The avenue followed the path so made.
When a footpath falls thus unobtrusively into
its place, all natural forces seem to sympathize
with it, and help it to fulfil its destiny. Once
make a well-defined track through a wood, and
presently the overflowing brooks seek it for a channel,
the obstructed winds draw through it, the fox
and woodchuck travel by it, the catbird and robin
build near it, the bee and swallow make a high-road
of its convenient thoroughfare. In winter the
first snows mark it with a white line; as you wander
through you hear the blue-jay's cry, and see
the hurrying flight of the sparrow; the graceful
outlines of the leafless bushes are revealed, and the
clinging bird's-nests, "leaves that do not fall," give
happy memories of summer homes. Thus Nature
meets man half-way. The paths of the wild forest
and of the rural neighborhood are not at all the
same thing; indeed, a "spotted trail," marked only
by the woodman's axe-marks on the trees, is not a
footpath. Thoreau, who is sometimes foolishly
accused of having sought to be a mere savage, understood
this distinction well. "A man changes
by his presence," he says in his unpublished diary,
"the very nature of the trees. The poet's is not a
logger's path, but a woodman's, — the logger and
pioneer have preceded him, and banished decaying
wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and
built hearths and humanized nature for him. For
a permanent residence, there can be no comparison
between this and the wilderness. Our woods are
sylvan, and their inhabitants woodsmen and rustics;
that is, a
selvaggia and its inhabitants
salvages."
What Thoreau loved, like all men of
healthy minds, was the occasional experience of
untamed wildness. "I love to see occasionally,"
he adds, "a man from whom the
usnea (lichen)
hangs as gracefully as from a spruce."
Footpaths bring us nearer both to nature and
to man. No high-road, not even a lane, conducts
to the deeper recesses of the wood, where you hear
the wood-thrush. There are a thousand concealed
fitnesses in nature, rhymed correspondences of bird
and blossom, for which you must seek through
hidden paths; as when you come upon some
black brook so palisaded with cardinal-flowers
as to seem "a stream of sunsets"; or trace its
shadowy course till it spreads into some forest-pool, above which that rare and patrician insect,
the Agrion dragon-fly, flits and hovers perpetually,
as if the darkness and the cool had
taken wings. The dark brown pellucid water
sleeps between banks of softest moss; white stars
of twin-flowers creep close to the brink, delicate
sprays of dewberry trail over it, and the emerald
tips of drooping leaves forever tantalize the still
surface. Above these the slender, dark-blue insect
waves his dusky wings, like a liberated ripple of
the brook, and takes the few stray sunbeams on
his lustrous form. Whence came the correspondence
between this beautiful shy creature and the
moist, dark nooks, shot through with stray and
transitory sunlight, where it dwells? The analogy
is as unmistakable as that between the scorching
heats of summer and the shrill cry of the
cicada. They suggest questions that no
savant
can answer, mysteries that wait, like Goethe's
secret of morphology, till a sufficient poet can
be born. And we, meanwhile, stand helpless in
their presence, as one waits beside the telegraphic
wire, while it hums and vibrates, charged with
all fascinating secrets, above the heads of a
wondering world.
It is by the presence of pathways on the earth
that we know it to be the habitation of man; in
the barest desert, they open to us a common
humanity. It is the absence of these that renders
us so lonely on the ocean, and makes us glad
to watch even the track of our own vessel. But
on the mountain-top, how eagerly we trace out the
"road that brings places together," as Schiller says.
It is the first thing we look for; till we have found
it, each scattered village has an isolated and churlish
look, but the glimpse of a furlong of road puts
them all in friendly relations. The narrower the
path, the more domestic and familiar it seems.
The railroad may represent the capitalist or the
government; the high-road indicates what the
surveyor or the county commissioners thought
best; but the footpath shows what the people
needed. Its associations are with beauty and
humble life, — the boy with his dog, the little
girl with her fagots, the pedler with his pack;
cheery companions they are or ought to be.
"Jog on, jog on the footpath way,
And merrily hent the stile-a:
A merry heart goes all the day,
Your sad one tires in a mile-a."
The footpath takes you across the farms and
behind the houses; you are admitted to the family
secrets and form a personal acquaintance. Even
if you take the wrong path, it only leads you
"across-lots" to some man ploughing, or some old
woman picking berries, — perhaps a very spicy
acquaintance, whom the road would never have
brought to light. If you are led astray in the
woods, that only teaches you to observe landmarks
more closely, or to leave straws and stakes for
tokens, like a gypsy's
patteran, to show the ways
already traversed. There is a healthy vigor in
the mind of the boy who would like of all things
to be lost in the woods, to build a fire out of doors,
and sleep under a tree or in a haystack. Civilization
is tiresome and enfeebling, unless we occasionally
give it the relish of a little outlawry, and
approach, in imagination at least, the zest of a
gypsy life. The records of pedestrian journeys,
the
Wanderjahre and memoirs of good-for-nothings,
and all the delightful German forest literature, —
these belong to the footpath side of our
nature. The passage I best remember in all
Bayard Taylor's travels is the ecstasy of his
Thüringian forester, who said: "I recall the time
when just a sunny morning made me so happy
that I did not know what to do with myself. One
day in spring, as I went through the woods and
saw the shadows of the young leaves upon the
moss, and smelt the buds of the firs and larches,
and thought to myself, 'All thy life is to be spent
in the splendid forest,' I actually threw myself
down and rolled in the grass like a dog, over and
over, crazy with joy."
It is the charm of pedestrian journeys that they
convert the grandest avenues to footpaths. Through
them alone we gain intimate knowledge of the
people, and of nature, and indeed of ourselves.
It is easy to hurry too fast for our best reflections,
which, as the old monk said of perfection, must
be sought not by flying, but by walking, "Perfectionis
via non pervolanda sed perambulanda."
The thoughts that the railway affords us are dusty
thoughts; we ask the news, read the journals,
question our neighbor, and wish to know what is
going on because we are a part of it. It is only
in the footpath that our minds, like our bodies,
move slowly, and we traverse thought, like space,
with a patient thoroughness. Rousseau said that
he had never experienced so much, lived so truly,
and been so wholly himself, as during his travels
on foot.
What can Hawthorne mean by saying in his
English diary that "an American would never
understand the passage in Bunyan about Christian
and Hopeful going astray along a by-path into the
grounds of Giant Despair, from there being no
stiles and by-paths in our country"? So much
of the charm of American pedestrianism lies in
the by-paths! For instance, the whole interior of
Cape Ann, beyond Gloucester, is a continuous
woodland, with granite ledges everywhere cropping
out, around which the high-road winds, following
the curving and indented line of the sea, and dotted
here and there with fishing hamlets. This
whole interior is traversed by a network of foot-paths, rarely passable for a wagon, and not always
for a horse, but enabling the pedestrian to go
from any one of these villages to any other, in
a line almost direct, and always under an agreeable
shade. By the longest of these hidden ways,
one may go from Pigeon Cove to Gloucester, ten
miles, without seeing a public road. In the little
inn at the former village there used to hang an
old map of this whole forest region, giving a
chart of some of these paths, which were said
to date back to the first settlement of the
country. One of them, for instance, was called
on the map "Old Road from Sandy Bay to Squam
Meeting-house through the Woods"; but the road
is now scarcely even a bridle-path, and the most
faithful worshipper could not seek Squam Meeting-house
in the family chaise. Those woods
have been lately devastated; but when I first
knew that region, it was as good as any German
forest. Often we stepped almost from the
edge of the sea into some gap in the woods; there
seemed hardly more than a rabbit-track, yet presently
we met some wayfarer who had crossed the
Cape by it. A piny dell gave some vista of the
broad sea we were leaving, and an opening in the
woods displayed another blue sea-line before; the
encountering breezes interchanged odor of berry-bush and scent of brine; penetrating farther
among oaks and chestnuts, we came upon some
little cottage, quaint and sheltered as any Spenser
drew; it was built on no high-road, and turned
its vine-clad gable away from even the footpath,
Then the ground rose and we were surprised by a
breeze from a new quarter; perhaps we climbed
trees to look for landmarks, and saw only, still
farther in the woods, some great cliff of granite
or the derrick of an unseen quarry. Three miles
inland, as I remember, we found the hearthstones
of a vanished settlement; then we passed a swamp
with cardinal-flowers; then a cathedral of noble
pines, topped with crow's-nests. If we had not
gone astray by this time, we presently emerged on
Dogtown Common, an elevated table-land, over-spread with great boulders as with houses, and
encircled with a girdle of green woods and an
outer girdle of blue sea. I know of nothing more
wild than that gray waste of boulders; it is a
natural Salisbury Plain, of which icebergs and
ocean-currents were the Druidic builders; in
that multitude of couchant monsters there seems
a sense of suspended life; you feel as if they must
speak and answer to each other in the silent nights,
but by day only the wandering sea-birds seek
them, on their way across the Cape, and the
sweet-bay and green fern embed them in a softer
and deeper setting as the years go by. This is
the "height of ground" of that wild footpath;
but as you recede farther from the outer ocean
and approach Gloucester, you come among still
wilder ledges, unsafe without a guide, and you
find in one place a cluster of deserted houses,
too difficult of access to remove even their materials,
so that they are left to moulder alone.
I used to wander in those woods, summer after
summer, till I had made my own chart of their
devious tracks, and now when I close my eyes
in this Oldport midsummer, the soft Italian air
takes on something of a Scandinavian vigor; for
the incessant roll of carriages I hear the tinkle
of the quarryman's hammer and the veery's song;
and I long for those perfumed and breezy pastures,
and for those promontories of granite where the
fresh water is nectar and the salt sea has a regal
blue.
I recall another footpath near Worcester, Massachusetts;
it leads up from the low meadows into
the wildest region of all that vicinity, Tatesset
Hill. Leaving behind you the open pastures where
the cattle lie beneath the chestnut-trees or drink
from the shallow brook, you pass among the
birches and maples, where the woodsman's shanty
stands in the clearing, and the raspberry-fields are
merry with children's voices. The familiar birds
and butterflies linger below with them, and in the
upper and more sacred depths the wood-thrush
chants his litany and the brown mountain butterflies
hover among the scented vines. Higher yet
rises the "Rattlesnake Ledge," spreading over one
side of the summit a black avalanche of broken
rock, now overgrown with reindeer-moss and filled
with tufts of the smaller wild geranium. Just
below this ledge, — amid a dark, dense track
of second-growth forest, masked here and there
with grape-vines, studded with rare orchises,
and pierced by a brook that vanishes suddenly
where the ground sinks away and lets the blue
distance in, — there is a little monument to which
the footpath leads, and which always seemed
to me as wild a memorial of forgotten superstition
as the traveller can find amid the forests of
Japan.
It was erected by a man called Solomon Pearson
(not to give his name too closely), a quiet, thoughtful
farmer, long-bearded, low-voiced, and with that
aspect of refinement which an ideal life brings
forth even in quite uninstructed men. At the
height of the "Second Advent" excitement this
man resolved to build for himself upon these remote
rocks a house which should escape the wrath
to come, and should endure even amid a burning
and transformed earth. Thinking, as he had once
said to me, that, "if the First Dispensation had
been strong enough to endure, there would have
been no need of a Second," he resolved to build
for his part something which should possess permanence
at least. And there still remains on
that high hillside the small beginning that he
made.
There are four low stone walls, three feet thick,
built solidly together without cement, and without
the trace of tools. The end-walls are nine feet
high (the sides being lower) and are firmly united
by a strong iron ridge-pole, perhaps fifteen feet
long, which is imbedded at each end in the stone.
Other masses of iron lie around unused, in sheets,
bars, and coils, brought with slow labor by the
builder from far below. The whole building was
designed to be made of stone and iron. It is now
covered with creeping vines and the
débris of the
hillside; but though its construction had been
long discontinued when I saw it, the interior was
still kept scrupulously clean through the care
of this modern Solomon, who often visited his
shrine.
An arch in the terminal wall admits the visitor
to the small roofless temple, and he sees before
him, imbedded in the centre of the floor, a large
smooth block of white marble, where the deed of
this spot of land was to be recorded, in the hope
to preserve it even after the globe should have
been burned and renewed. But not a stroke of
this inscription was ever cut, and now the young
chestnut boughs droop into the uncovered interior,
and shy forest-birds sing fearlessly among them,
having learned that this house belongs to God, not
man. As if to reassure them, and perhaps in allusion
to his own vegetarian habits, the architect has
spread some rough plaster at the head of the apartment
and marked on it in bold characters, "Thou
shalt not kill." Two slabs outside, a little way
from the walls, bear these inscriptions, "Peace on
Earth," "Good-Will to Men." When I visited it,
the path was rough and so obstructed with bushes
that it was hard to comprehend how it had afforded
passage for these various materials; it seemed more
as if some strange architectural boulder had drifted
from some Runic period and been stranded there.
It was as apt a confessional as any of Wordsworth's
nooks among the Trossachs; and when one thinks
how many men are wearing out their souls in trying
to conform to the traditional mythologies of
others, it seems nobler in this man to have reared
upon that lonely hill the unfinished memorial of
his own.
I recall another path which leads from the Lower
Saranac Lake, near "Martin's," to what the guides
call, or used to call, "The Philosopher's Camp" at
Amperzand. On this oddly named lake, in the
Adirondack region, a tract of land was bought by
Professor Agassiz and his friends, who made there
a summer camping-ground, and with one comrade
I once sought the spot. I remember with what
joy we left the boat, — so delightful at first, so
fatiguing at last; for I cannot, with Mr. Murray,
call it a merit in the Adirondacks that you never
have to walk, — and stepped away into the free
forest. We passed tangled swamps, so dense with
upturned trees and trailing mosses that they
seemed to give no opening for any living thing to
pass, unless it might be the soft and silent owl
that turned its head almost to dislocation in
watching us, ere it flitted vaguely away. Farther
on, the deep, cool forest was luxurious with plumy
ferns; we trod on moss-covered roots, finding the
emerald steps so soft we scarcely knew that we
were ascending; every breath was aromatic; there
seemed infinite healing in every fragrant drop that
fell upon our necks from the cedar boughs. We
had what I think the pleasantest guide for a daylight
tramp, — one who has never before passed
over that particular route, and can only pilot you
on general principles till he gladly, at last, allows
you to pilot him. When we once got the lead
we took him jubilantly on, and beginning to look
for "The Philosopher's Camp," found ourselves
confronted by a large cedar-tree on the margin
of a wooded lake. This was plainly the end
of the path. Was the camp then afloat? Our
escort was in that state of hopeless ignorance of
which only lost guides are capable. We scanned
the green horizon and the level water, without
glimpse of human abode. It seemed an enchanted
lake, and we looked about the tree-trunk for
some fairy horn, that we might blow it. That
failing, we tried three rifle-shots, and out from
the shadow of an island, on the instant, there
glided a boat, which bore no lady of the lake,
but a red-shirted woodsman. The artist whom
we sought was on that very island, it seemed,
sketching patiently while his guides were driving
the deer.
This artist was he whose "Procession of the
Pines" had identified his fame with that delightful
forest region. He it was who had laid out
with artistic taste "The Philosopher's Camp,"
and who was that season still awaiting philosophers
as well as deer. He had been there for a
month, alone with the guides, and declared that
Nature was pressing upon him to an extent that
almost drove him wild. His eyes had a certain
remote and questioning look that belongs to imaginative
men who dwell alone. It seemed an
impertinence to ask him to come out of his
dream and offer us dinner; but his instincts of
hospitality failed not, and the red-shirted guide
was sent to the camp, which was, it seemed, on
the other side of the lake, to prepare our meal,
while we bathed. I am thus particular in speaking
of the dinner, not only because such is the
custom of travellers, but also because it was the
occasion of an interlude which I shall never forget.
As we were undressing for our bath upon
the lonely island, where the soft, pale water almost
lapped our feet, and the deep, wooded hills made
a great amphitheatre for the lake, our host be-thought
himself of something neglected in his instructions.
"Ben!" vociferated he to the guide, now rapidly
receding. Ben paused on his oars.
"Remember to bo-o-oil the venison, Ben!"
shouted the pensive artist, while all the slumbering
echoes arose to applaud this culinary confidence.
"And, Ben!" he added, imploringly, "don't
forget the dumplings!" Upon this, the loons, all
down the lake, who had hitherto been silent, took
up the strain with vehemence, hurling their wild
laughter at the presumptuous mortal who thus
dared to invade their solitudes with details as
trivial as Mr. Pickwick's tomato-sauce. They repeated
it over and over to each other, till ten
square miles of loons must have heard the news,
and all laughed together; never was there such
an audience; they could not get over it, and
two hours after, when we had rowed over to the
camp and dinner had been served, this irreverent
and invisible chorus kept bursting out, at all
points of the compass, with scattered chuckles
of delight over this extraordinary bill of fare.
Justice compels me to add that the dumplings
were made of Indian-meal, upon a recipe devised
by our artist; the guests preferred the venison,
but the host showed a fidelity to his invention
that proved him to be indeed a dweller in an
ideal world.
Another path that comes back to memory is
the bare trail that we followed over the prairies of
Nebraska, in 1856, when the Missouri River was
held by roving bands from the Slave States, and
Freedom had to seek an overland route into
Kansas. All day and all night we rode between
distant prairie-fires, pillars of evening light and
of morning cloud, while sometimes the low grass
would burn to the very edge of the trail, so that
we had to hold our breath as we galloped through.
Parties of armed Missourians were sometimes seen
over the prairie swells, so that we had to mount
guard at nightfall; Free-State emigrants, fleeing
from persecution, continually met us; and we
sometimes saw parties of wandering Sioux, or
passed their great irregular huts and houses of
worship. I remember one desolate prairie summit
on which an Indian boy sat motionless on horse-back;
his bare red legs clung closely to the white
sides of his horse; a gorgeous sunset was unrolled
behind him, and he might have seemed the last
of his race, just departing for the hunting-grounds
of the blest. More often the horizon showed no
human outline, and the sun set cloudless, and
elongated into pear-shaped outlines, as behind
ocean-waves. But I remember best the excitement
that filled our breasts when we approached
spots where the contest for a free soil had already
been sealed with blood. In those days, as one
went to Pennsylvania to study coal formations,
or to Lake Superior for copper, so one went to
Kansas for men. "Every footpath on this planet,"
said a rare thinker, "may lead to the door of a
hero," and that trail into Kansas ended rightly at
the tent-door of John Brown.
And later, who that knew them can forget the
picket-paths that were worn throughout the Sea
Islands of South Carolina, — paths that wound
along the shores of creeks or through the depths
of woods, where the great wild roses tossed their
airy festoons above your head, and the brilliant
lizards glanced across your track, and your horse's
ears suddenly pointed forward and his pace grew
uneasy as he snuffed the presence of something
you could not see. At night you had often to ride
from picket to picket in dense darkness, trusting
to the horse to find his way, or sometimes dismounting
to feel with your hands for the track,
while the great Southern fire-flies offered their
floating lanterns for guidance, and the hoarse
"Chuck-will's-widow" croaked ominously from
the trees, and the great guns of the siege of
Charleston throbbed more faintly than the drumming
of a partridge, far away. Those islands
are everywhere so intersected by dikes and ledges
and winding creeks as to form a natural military
region, like La Vendée; and yet two plantations
that are twenty miles asunder by the road will
sometimes be united by a footpath which a negro
can traverse in two hours. These tracks are limited
in distance by the island formation, but they
assume a greater importance as you penetrate the
mainland; they then join great States instead of
mere plantations, and if you ask whither one
of them leads, you are told "To Alabama," or "To
Tennessee."
Time would fail to tell of that wandering path
which leads to the Mine Mountain near Brattleborough,
where you climb the high peak at last,
and perhaps see the showers come up the Connecticut
till they patter on the leaves beneath you,
and then, swerving, pass up the black ravine and
leave you unwet. Or of those among the White
Mountains, gorgeous with great red lilies which
presently seem to take flight in a cloud of butterflies
that match their tints, — paths where the
balsamic air caresses you in light breezes, and
masses of alder-berries rise above the waving
ferns. Or of the paths that lead beside many a
little New England stream, whose bank is lost
to sight in a smooth green slope of grape-vine:
the lower shoots rest upon the quiet water, but
the upper masses are crowned by a white wreath
of alder-blooms; beside them grow great masses
of wild-roses, and the simultaneous blossoms and
berries of the gaudy nightshade. Or of those
winding tracks that lead here and there among
the flat stones of peaceful old graveyards, so
entwined with grass and flowers that every
spray of sweetbrier seems to tell more of life
than all the accumulated epitaphs can tell of
death.
And when the paths that one has personally
traversed are exhausted, memory holds almost as
clearly those which the poets have trodden for us,
— those innumerable by-ways of Shakespeare,
each more real than any high-road in England; or
Chaucer's
"Little path I found
Of mintes full and fennell greene";
or Spenser's
"Pathes and alleies wide
With footing worne";
or the path of Browning's "Pippa"
"Down the hillside, up the glen,
Love me as I love!"
or the weary tracks by which "Little Nell" wandered;
or the haunted way in Sydney Dobell's
ballad,
"Ravelstone, Ravelstone,
The merry path that leads
Down the golden morning hills,
And through the silver meads";
or the few American paths that genius has yet
idealized; that where Hawthorne's "David Swan"
slept, or that which Thoreau found upon the banks
of Walden Pond, or where Whittier parted with
his childhood's playmate on Ramoth Hill. It is
not heights, or depths, or spaces that make the
world worth living in; for the fairest landscape
needs still to be garlanded by the imagination, —
to become classic with noble deeds and romantic
with dreams.
Go where we please in nature, we receive in
proportion as we give. Ivo, the old Bishop of
Chartres, wrote, that "neither the secret depth
of woods nor the tops of mountains make man
blessed, if he has not with him solitude of mind,
the sabbath of the heart, and tranquillity of conscience."
There are many roads, but one termination;
and Plato says, in his "Republic," that the
point where all paths meet is the soul's true resting-place
and the journey's end.
THE END.