The Return of the Native | Page 3

feel that he had a natural right
to wander on Egdon: he was keeping within the line of legitimate

indulgence when he laid himself open to influences such as these.
Colours and beauties so far subdued were, at least, the birthright of all.
Only in summer days of highest feather did its mood touch the level of
gaiety. Intensity was more usually reached by way of the solemn than
by way of the brilliant, and such a sort of intensity was often arrived at
during winter darkness, tempests, and mists. Then Egdon was aroused
to reciprocity; for the storm was its lover, and the wind its friend. Then
it became the home of strange phantoms; and it was found to be the
hitherto unrecognized original of those wild regions of obscurity which
are vaguely felt to be compassing us about in midnight dreams of flight
and disaster, and are never thought of after the dream till revived by
scenes like this.
It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man's nature--neither
ghastly, hateful, nor ugly; neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame;
but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and
mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have
long lived apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had
a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities.
This obscure, obsolete, superseded country figures in Domesday. Its
condition is recorded therein as that of heathy, furzy, briary
wilderness--"Bruaria." Then follows the length and breadth in leagues;
and, though some uncertainty exists as to the exact extent of this
ancient lineal measure, it appears from the figures that the area of
Egdon down to the present day has but little diminished. "Turbaria
Bruaria"--the right of cutting heath-turf--occurs in charters relating to
the district. "Overgrown with heth and mosse," says Leland of the same
dark sweep of country.
Here at least were intelligible facts regarding landscape--far-reaching
proofs productive of genuine satisfaction. The untameable, Ishmaelitish
thing that Egdon now was it always had been. Civilization was its
enemy; and ever since the beginning of vegetation its soil had worn the
same antique brown dress, the natural and invariable garment of the
particular formation. In its venerable one coat lay a certain vein of
satire on human vanity in clothes. A person on a heath in raiment of

modern cut and colours has more or less an anomalous look. We seem
to want the oldest and simplest human clothing where the clothing of
the earth is so primitive.
To recline on a stump of thorn in the central valley of Egdon, between
afternoon and night, as now, where the eye could reach nothing of the
world outside the summits and shoulders of heathland which filled the
whole circumference of its glance, and to know that everything around
and underneath had been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the stars
overhead, gave ballast to the mind adrift on change, and harassed by
the irrepressible New. The great inviolate place had an ancient
permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular
sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is
renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields
changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon
remained. Those surfaces were neither so steep as to be destructible by
weather, nor so flat as to be the victims of floods and deposits. With the
exception of an aged highway, and a still more aged barrow presently
to be referred to--themselves almost crystallized to natural products by
long continuance--even the trifling irregularities were not caused by
pickaxe, plough, or spade, but remained as the very finger-touches of
the last geological change.
The above-mentioned highway traversed the lower levels of the heath,
from one horizon to another. In many portions of its course it overlaid
an old vicinal way, which branched from the great Western road of the
Romans, the Via Iceniana, or Ikenild Street, hard by. On the evening
under consideration it would have been noticed that, though the gloom
had increased sufficiently to confuse the minor features of the heath,
the white surface of the road remained almost as clear as ever.

II
Humanity Appears upon the Scene, Hand in Hand with Trouble
Along the road walked an old man. He was white-headed as a mountain,

bowed in the shoulders, and faded in general aspect. He wore a glazed
hat, an ancient boat-cloak, and shoes; his brass buttons bearing an
anchor upon their face. In his hand was a silver-headed walking-stick,
which he used as a veritable third leg, perseveringly dotting the ground
with its point at every few inches' interval. One would have said that he
had been, in his day, a naval