With every hour you
change. 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.
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