Along the Road
I
Since I turned the key on my study I have almost forgotten the familiar
titles on which my eye rested whenever I took a survey of my
book-shelves. Those friends stanch and true, with whom I have held
such royal fellowship when skies were chill and winds were cold, will
not forget me, nor shall I become unfaithful to them. I have gone
abroad that I may return later with renewed zest and deeper insight to
my old companionships. Books and nature are never inimical; they
mutually speak for and interpret each other; and only he who stands
where their double light falls sees things in true perspective and in
right relations.
The road along whose winding course I have been making a delightful
pilgrimage to-day has the double charm of natural beauty and of human
association; it is old, as age is reckoned in this new world; it has
grown hard under the tread of sleeping generations, and the great
figures of history have passed over it in their journeys between the
two great cities which mark its limits. In the earlier days it was the
king's highway, and along its up-hill and down-dale course the
battalions of royal troops marched and counter-marched to the call of
bugles that have gone silent these hundred years and more. It is a
road of varied fortunes, like many of those who have passed over it; it
is sometimes rich in all manner of priceless possessions, and again it
is barren, poverty-stricken, and desolate. It climbs long hills,
sometimes in a roundabout, hesitating, half-hearted way, and sometimes
with an abrupt and breathless ascent; at the summit it seems to pause a
moment as if to invite the traveller to survey the splendid domain
which it commands. On one side, in such a restful moment, one sees the
wide circle of waters, stretching far off to a horizon which rests on
clusters of islands and marks the limits of the world; in the
foreground, and sweeping around the other points of the compass, a
landscape rich in foliage, full of gentle undulations, and dotted here
and there with fallow fields, spreads itself like another sea that has
been hushed into sudden immutability, and then sown, every wave and
swell of it, with the seeds of exhaustless fertility.
From such points of eminence as these the road sometimes runs with
hurried descent, as if longing for solitude, into the heart of the
woodlands, and there winds slowly and solemnly under the overshadowing
branches; there are no fences here, and the sharp lines of separation
between road-bed and forest were long ago erased in that quiet
usurpation of man's work, which Nature never fails to make the moment
she is left to herself. The ancient spell of the woods is unbroken in
this leafy solitude, and no traveller in whom imagination survives can
hope to escape it. The deep breathings of primeval life are almost
audible, and one feels in a quick and subtle perception the long past
which unites him with the earliest generations and the most remote ages.
Passing out from this brief worship under the arches of the most
venerable roof in Christendom, the road takes on a frolic mood and
courts the open meadows and the flooding sunshine; green, sweet, and
strewn with wild flowers, the open fields call one from either side,
and arrest one's feet at every turn with solicitations to freedom and
joyousness. The white clouds in the blue sky and the long sweep of
these radiant meadows conspire together to persuade one that time has
strayed back to its happy childhood again, and that nothing remains of
the old activities but play in these immortal fields. Here the carpet
is spread over which one runs with childish heedlessness, courting the
disaster which brings him back to the breast of the old mother, and
makes him feel once more the warmth and sweetness out of which all
strength and beauty spring. A little brook crosses the road under a
rattling bridge, and wanders on across the fields, limpid and rippling,
running its little strain of music through the silence of the meadows.
Its voice is the only sound which breaks the stillness, and that itself
seems part of the solitude. By day the clouds marshal their shadows on
it, and when night comes the heavens sow it with stars, until it flows
like a dissolving belt of sky through the fragrant darkness.
Sometimes, as I have come this way after nightfall, I have heard its
call across the invisible fields, and in the sound I have heard I know
not what of deep and joyous mystery; the long-past and the far-off
future whispering together, under cover of the night, of those things
which the stars remember from their youth, and to which they look
forward in some remote cycle of their Shining.
Past old and well-worked farms, into which the toil and thrift of
generations have gone, the old road leads me, and brings my thoughts
back from elemental forces and primeval ages to these later centuries
in which human life has overlaid these hills and vales with rich
memories. Wherever man goes Nature makes room for him, as if prepared
for his coming, and ready to put her mighty shoulder to the wheel of
his prosperity. The old fences, often decayed and fallen, are not
spurned; the movement of universal life does not flow past them and
leave them to rot in their ugliness; year by year time stains them into
harmony with the rocks, and every summer a wave out of the great sea of
life flings itself over them, and leaves behind some slight and seemly
garniture of moss and vine. The old farm-houses have grown into the
landscape, and the hurrying road widens its course, and sometimes makes
a long detour, that it may unite these outlying folk with the great
world. There stands the old school-house, sacred to every traveller
who has learned that childhood is both a memory and a prophecy of
heaven. One pauses here, and hears, in the unbroken stillness, the
rush of feet that have never grown weary with travel, and the clamour
of voices through which immortal youth still shouts to the kindred
hills and skies. Into those windows Nature throws all manner of
invitations, and through them she gets only glances of recognition and
longing. There are the fields, the woods, and the hills in one
perpetual rivalry of charm; the bird sings in the bough over the
window, and on still afternoons the brook calls and calls again. Here
one feels anew the eternal friendship between childhood and Nature, and
remembers that they only can abide in that fellowship who carry into
riper years the self-forgetfulness, the sweet unconsciousness, the open
mind and heart of a child.