Along the Road
II
I have found that walking stimulates observation and opens one's eyes
to movements and appearances in earth and sky, which ordinarily escape
attention. The constant change of landscape which attends even the
slow progress of a loitering gait puts one on the alert for discoveries
of all kinds, and prompts one to suspect every leafy covert and to peer
into every wooded recess with the expectation of surprising Nature as
Actaeon surprised Diana--in the moment of uncovered loveliness. On the
other hand, when one lounges by the hour in the depths of the forest,
or sits, book in hand, under the knotted and familiar apple tree, on a
summer afternoon, the faculty of observation is lulled into a dreamless
sleep; one ceases to be far enough away from Nature to observe her; one
becomes part of the great, silent movements in the midst of which he
sits, mute and motionless, while the hours slip by with the peace of
eternity already upon them.
When I reached the end of my walk, and paused for a moment before
retracing my steps, I was conscious of the inexhaustible richness of
the world through which I had come; a thousand voices had spoken to me,
and a thousand sights of wonder moved before me; I was awake to the
universe which most of us see only in broken and unintelligent dreams.
Through all this realm of truth and poetry men have passed and repassed
these many years, I said to myself; and I began to wonder how many of
those now long asleep really saw or heard this great glad world of sun
and summer! I began slowly to retrace my steps, and as I reached the
summit of the hill and looked beyond I saw the cattle standing
knee-deep in the brook that loiters across the fields, and I heard the
faint bleating of sheep borne from a distant pasturage.
These familiar sights and sounds touched me with a sudden pathos; there
is nothing in human associations so venerable, so familiar, as the
lowing of the home-coming kine and the bleating of the flocks. They
carry one back to the first homes and the most ancient families. Older
than history, more ancient than civilisation, are these familiar tones
which unite the low-lying meadows and the upland pastures with the fire
on the hearthstone and the nightly care of the fold. When the shadows
deepen over the country-side, the oldest memories are revived and the
oldest habits recalled by the scenes about the farm-house. The same
offices fall to the husbandman, the same sights reveal themselves to
the housewife, the same sounds, mellow with the resonance of uncounted
centuries, greet the ears of the children as in the most primitive ages.
The highway itself stands as a memorial of the most venerable customs
and the most ancient races. As I lift my eyes from its beaten
road-bed, and look out upon it through the imagination, it escapes all
later boundaries and runs back through history to the very dawn of
civilisation; it marks the earliest contact of men with a world which
was wrapped in mystery. The hour that saw a second home built by human
hands heard the first footfall on the first highway. That narrow
foot-path led to civilisation, and has broadened into the highway
because human fellowships and needs have multiplied and directed the
countless feet that have beaten it into permanency. Every new highway
has been a new bond between Nature and men, a new evidence of that
indissoluble fellowship into which they are forever united.
I have sometimes tried to recall in imagination the world of Nature
before a human voice had broken the silence or a human foot left its
impress on the soil; but when I remember that what I see in this sweep
of force and beauty is largely what I myself put into the vision, that
Nature without the human ear is soundless, and without the human eye
colourless, I understand that what lies spread before me never was
until a human soul confronted it and became its interpreter. This
radiant world upon which I look was without form and void until the
earliest man brought to the vision of it that creative power within
himself which touched it with form and colour and relations not its
own. Nature is as incomplete and helpless without man as man would be
without Nature. He brought her varied and inexhaustible beauty, and
clothed her with a garment woven on we know not what looms of divine
energy; and she fed, sheltered, and strengthened him for the life which
lay before him. Together they have wrought from the first hour, and
civilisation, with all the circle of its arts, is their joint handiwork.
In the atmosphere of our rich modern fellowship with Nature, the
unwritten poetry to which every open heart falls heir, we forget our
earliest dependence on the great mother and the lessons she taught when
men gathered about her knee in the childhood of the world. Not a spade
turned the soil, not an axe felled a tree, not a path was made through
the forest, that did not leave, in the man whose arm put forth the
toil, some moral quality. In the obstacles which she placed in their
pathway, in the difficulties with which she surrounded their life, the
wise mother taught her children all the lessons which were to make them
great. It was no easy familiarity which she offered them, no careless
bestowal of bounty upon dependents; she met them as men, and offered
them a perpetual alliance upon such terms as great and equal sovereigns
proffer and accept. She gave much, but she asked even more than she
offered, and in the first moment of intercourse she struck in men that
lofty note of sovereignty which has never ceased to thrill the race
with mysterious tones of power and prophecy. Men have stood erect and
fearless in the presence of the most awful revelations of the forces of
Nature, affirming by their very attitude a supremacy of spirit which no
preponderance of power can overshadow. Face to face through all his
history man has stood with Nature, and to each generation she has
opened some new page of her inexhaustible story. Beginning in the
hardest toil for the most material rewards, this fellowship has
steadily added one province of knowledge and intimacy after another,
until it has become inclusive of the most delicate and hidden recesses
of character as well as those which are obvious and primary. In
response to spirits which have continually come into a closer contact
with her life, Nature has added to her gifts of food and wine, poetry
and art, far-reaching sciences, occult wisdoms and skills; she has
invited the greatest to become her ministers, and has rewarded their
unselfish service by sharing with them the mighty forces that sleep and
awake at her bidding; one after another the poets of truest gift have
forsaken the beaten paths of cities and men, and found along her
untrodden ways the vision that never fades; her voice, now that men
begin to understand it again as their forefathers understood it, is a
voice of worship. So, from their first work for food and shelter, men
have steadily won from Nature gifts of insight and knowledge and
prophecy, until now the mightiest secrets are whispered by the trees to
him who listens, and the winds sometimes take up the burden of prophecy
and sing of a fellowship in which all truth shall be a common
possession.
As I walk along the old highway, the deepening shadows touch the
familiar landscape with mystery; one landmark after another vanishes
until the lights in the scattered farm-houses gleam like reflected
constellations. A deep silence fills the great heavens and broods over
the wide earth; all things have become dim and strange; and yet I feel
no loneliness in the midst of this star-lit solitude. The heavens
shining over me, and the scattered household fires declare to me that
fellowship of light in which Nature holds out her hand to man and leads
him, step by step, to the unspeakable splendours of her central sun.