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. Such an one has not
surrendered his will and contracted for the next hundred miles,
like a man on a railway. He may change his mind at every finger-
post, and, where ways meet, follow vague preferences freely and go
the low road or the high, choose the shadow or the sun-shine,
suffer himself to be tempted by the lane that turns immediately
into the woods, or the broad road that lies open before him into
the distance, and shows him the far-off spires of some city, or a
range of mountain-tops, or a rim of sea, perhaps, along a low
horizon. In short, he may gratify his every whim and fancy,
without a pang of reproving conscience, or the least jostle to his
self-respect.
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