You may see from afar off what it will come to in the
end - the weather-beaten red-nosed vagabond, consumed by a fever of
the feet, cut off from all near touch of human sympathy, a waif, an
Ishmael, and an outcast. And yet it will seem well - and yet, in the
air of the forest, this will seem the best - to break all the network
bound about your feet by birth and old companionship and loyal love,
and bear your shovelful of phosphates to and fro, in town country,
until the hour of the great dissolvent.
Or, perhaps, you will keep to the cover. For the forest is by
itself, and forest life owns small kinship with life in the dismal
land of labour. Men are so far sophisticated that they cannot take
the world as it is given to them by the sight of their eyes. Not
only what they see and hear, but what they know to be behind, enter
into their notion of a place. If the sea, for instance, lie just
across the hills, sea-thoughts will come to them at intervals, and
the tenor of their dreams from time to time will suffer a sea-change.
And so here, in this forest, a knowledge of its greatness is for much
in the effect produced.
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