Vanishing Roads and Other Essays | Page 2

far-spreading solitude and mark
the road stretching on and on into infinite space, or the eye loses it in
some wistful curve behind the fateful foliage of lofty storm-stirred trees,
or as it merely loiters in sunny indolence through leafy copses and
ferny hollows, whatever its mood or its whim, by moonlight or at
morning; never more than thus, eagerly afoot or idly contemplative, are
we impressed by that something that Nature seems to have to tell us,
that something of solemn, lovely import behind her visible face. If we
could follow that vanishing road to its far mysterious end! Should we
find that meaning there? Should we know why it stops at no mere
market-town, nor comes to an end at any seaport? Should we come at
last to the radiant door, and know at last the purpose of all our travel?
Meanwhile the road beckons us on and on, and we walk we know not
why or whither.
Vanishing roads do actually stir such thoughts, not merely by way of
similitude, but just in the same way that everything in Nature similarly
stirs thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls; as moonlit waters stir

them, or the rising of the sun. As I have said, they have come to seem a
part of natural phenomena, and, as such, may prove as suggestive a
starting-point as any other for those speculations which Nature is all the
time provoking in us as to why she affects us thus and thus. These
mighty hills of multitudinous rock, piled confusedly against the sky--so
much granite and iron and copper and crystal, says one. But to the soul,
strangely something besides, so much more. These rolling shapes of
cloud, so fantastically massed and moulded, moving in rhythmic
change like painted music in the heaven, radiant with ineffable glories
or monstrous with inconceivable doom. This sea of silver, "hushed and
halcyon," or this sea of wrath and ravin, wild as Judgment Day. So
much vapour and sunshine and wind and water, says one.
Yet to the soul how much more!
And why? Answer me that if you can. There, truly, we set our feet on
the vanishing road.
Whatever reality, much or little, the personifications of Greek
Nature-worship had for the ancient world, there is no doubt that for a
certain modern temperament, more frequently met with every day,
those personifications are becoming increasingly significant, and one
might almost say veritably alive. Forgotten poets may, in the first
instance, have been responsible for the particular forms they took, their
names and stories, yet even so they but clothed with legend presences
of wood and water, of earth and sea and sky, which man dimly felt to
have a real existence; and these presences, forgotten or banished for a
while in prosaic periods, or under Puritanic repression, are once more
being felt as spiritual realities by a world coming more and more to
evoke its divinities by individual meditation on, and responsiveness to,
the mysterious so-called natural influences by which it feels itself
surrounded. Thus the first religion of the world seems likely to be its
last. In other words, the modern tendency, with spiritually sensitive
folk, is for us to go direct to the fountain-head of all theologies, Nature
herself, and, prostrating ourselves before her mystery, strive to interpret
it according to our individual "intimations," listening, attent, for
ourselves to her oracles, and making, to use the phrase of one of the

profoundest of modern Nature-seers, our own "reading of earth." Such
was Wordsworth's initiative, and, as some one has said, "we are all
Wordsworthians today." That pagan creed, in which Wordsworth
passionately wished himself suckled, is not "outworn." He himself, in
his own austere way, has, more than any one man, verified it for us, so
that indeed we do once more nowadays
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his
wreathèd horn.
Nor have the dryads and the fauns been frighted away for good. All
over the world they are trooping back to the woods, and whoso has
eyes may catch sight, any summer day, of "the breast of the nymph in
the brake." Imagery, of course; but imagery that is coming to have a
profounder meaning, and a still greater expressive value, than it ever
had for Greece and Rome. All myths that are something more than
fancies gain rather than lose in value with time, by reason of the
accretions of human experience. The mysteries of Eleusis would mean
more for a modern man than for an ancient Greek, and in our modern
groves of Dodona the voice of the god has meanings for us stranger
than ever reached his ears. Maybe the meanings have a purport less
definite, but they have at least the suggestiveness