We remember standing beside
a countryman once, in the mouth of a quiet by-street in a city that
was more than ordinarily crowded and bustling; he seemed stunned and
bewildered by the continual passage of different faces; and after a
long pause, during which he appeared to search for some suitable
expression, he said timidly that there seemed to be a GREAT DEAL OF
MEETING THEREABOUTS. The phrase is significant. It is the
expression of town-life in the language of the long, solitary country
highways. A meeting of one with one was what this man had been used
to in the pastoral uplands from which he came; and the concourse of
the streets was in his eyes only an extraordinary multiplication of
such 'meetings.'
And now we come to that last and most subtle quality of all, to that
sense of prospect, of outlook, that is brought so powerfully to our
minds by a road. In real nature, as well as in old landscapes,
beneath that impartial daylight in which a whole variegated plain is
plunged and saturated, the line of the road leads the eye forth with
the vague sense of desire up to the green limit of the horizon.
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