We expose our mind to the landscape (as we would expose the
prepared plate in the camera) for the moment only during which the
effect endures; and we are away before the effect can change. Hence
we shall have in our memories a long scroll of continuous wayside
pictures, all imbued already with the prevailing sentiment of the
season, the weather and the landscape, and certain to be unified more
and more, as time goes on, by the unconscious processes of thought.
So that we who have only looked at a country over our shoulder, so to
speak, as we went by, will have a conception of it far more memorable
and articulate than a man who has lived there all his life from a
child upwards, and had his impression of to-day modified by that of
to-morrow, and belied by that of the day after, till at length the
stable characteristics of the country are all blotted out from him
behind the confusion of variable effect.
I begin my little pilgrimage in the most enviable of all humours:
that in which a person, with a sufficiency of money and a knapsack,
turns his back on a town and walks forward into a country of which he
knows only by the vague report of others.
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