The very
margins of waste ground, as they trench a little farther on the
beaten way, or recede again to the shelter of the hedge, have
something of the same free delicacy of line--of the same swing and
wilfulness. 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. {7}
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. It is said that the engineer
had Hogarth's line of beauty in his mind as he laid them down.
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