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. You reckon up the miles that
lie between you and intrusion. You may walk before you all day
long, and not fear to touch the barrier of your Eden, or stumble
out of fairyland into the land of gin and steam-hammers. And there
is an old tale enhances for the imagination the grandeur of the
woods of France, and secures you in the thought of your seclusion.
When Charles VI. hunted in the time of his wild boyhood near
Senlis, there was captured an old stag, having a collar of bronze
about his neck, and these words engraved on the collar: 'Caesar
mihi hoc donavit.
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