You might think for a whole summer's day (and
not have thought it any nearer an end by evening) what concourse and
succession of circumstances has produced the least of these
deflections; and it is, perhaps, just in this that we should look for
the secret of their interest. A foot-path across a meadow - in all
its human waywardness and unaccountability, in all the GRATA
PROTERVITAS of its varying direction - will always be more to us than
a railroad well engineered through a difficult country. No reasoned
sequence is thrust upon our attention: we seem to have slipped for
one lawless little moment out of the iron rule of cause and effect;
and so we revert at once to some of the pleasant old heresies of
personification, always poetically orthodox, and attribute a sort of
free-will, an active and spontaneous life, to the white riband of
road that lengthens out, and bends, and cunningly adapts itself to
the inequalities of the land before our eyes. We remember, as we
write, some miles of fine wide highway laid out with conscious
aesthetic artifice through a broken and richly cultivated tract of
country.
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