The Pocket | Page 8

sun, then soaked
once more. But there were some calm intervals, and one notably, when
we were skirting the forest of Mormal, a sinister name to the ear, but a
place most gratifying to sight and smell. It looked solemn along the
riverside, drooping its boughs into the water, and piling them up aloft
into a wall of leaves. What is a forest but a city of nature's own, full of
hardy and innocuous living things, where there is nothing dead and
nothing made with the hands, but the citizens themselves are the houses
and public monuments? There is nothing so much alive and yet so quiet
as a woodland; and a pair of people, swinging past in canoes, feel very
small and bustling by comparison.
I wish our way had always lain among woods. Trees are the most civil
society. An old oak that has been growing where he stands since before
the Reformation, taller than many spires, more stately than the greater
part of mountains, and yet a living thing, liable to sicknesses and death,
like you and me: is not that in itself a speaking lesson in history? But
acres on acres full of such. patriarchs contiguously rooted, their green
tops billowing in the wind, their stalwart younglings pushing up about
their knees; a whole forest, healthy and beautiful, giving colour to the
light, giving perfume to the air; what is this but the most imposing
piece in nature's repertory?
*
But indeed it is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim
upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of the air,
that emanation from the old trees, that so wonderfully changes and
renews a weary spirit.
*
With all this in mind, I have often been tempted to put forth the
paradox that any place is good enough to live a life in, while it is only
in a few, and those highly favoured, that we can pass a few hours
agreeably. For, if we only stay long enough, we become at home in the

neighbourhood. Reminiscences spring up, like flowers, about
uninteresting corners. We forget to some degree the superior loveliness
of other places, and fall into a tolerant and sympathetic spirit which is
its own reward and justification.
*
For when we are put down in some unsightly neighbourhood, and
especially if we have come to be more or less dependent on what we
see, we must set ourselves to hunt out beautiful things with all the
ardour and patience of a botanist after a rare plant. Day by day we
perfect ourselves in the art of seeing nature more favourably. We learn
to live with her, as people learn to live with fretful or violent spouses:
we dwell lovingly on what is good, and shut our eyes against all that is
bleak or inharmonious. We learn, also, to come to each place in the
right spirit. The traveller, as Brantome quaintly tells us, 'fait des
discours en soi pour se soutenir en chemin.'
*
There is no end, indeed, to making books or experiments, or to travel,
or to gathering wealth. Problem gives rise to problem. We may study
for ever, and we are never as learned as we would. We have never
made a statue worthy of our dreams. And when we have discovered a
continent, or crossed a chain of mountains, it is only to find another
ocean or another plain upon the farther side. In the infinite universe
there is room for our swiftest diligence and to spare. It is not like the
works of Carlyle, which can be read to an end. Even in a corner of it, in
a private park, or in the neighbourhood of a single hamlet, the weather
and the seasons keep so deftly changing that although we walk there for
a lifetime there will be always something to startle and delight us.
*
It is in virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any man continues
to exist with even patience, that he is charmed by the look of things and
people, and that he wakens every morning with a renewed appetite for
work and pleasure. Desire and curiosity are the two eyes through which
he sees the world in the most enchanted colours: it is they that make
women beautiful or fossils interesting: and the man may squander his
estate and come to beggary, but if he keeps these two amulets he is still
rich in the possibilities of pleasure.
*

To look on the happy side of nature is common, in their hours, to all
created things. Some are vocal under a good influence, are pleasing
whenever they are pleased, and hand on their happiness to others, as a
child who, looking upon lovely things,