THE TEMPLES OF THE HILLS 273 



would imagine, to satisfy any person's love of wildness 

 and solitude. Here you will find places in appearance 

 like a primitive forest, where the trees have grown 

 as they would for generations untouched by man's 

 hand, and are interspersed with thorny thickets and 

 wide sunny spaces, stony and barren or bright with 

 flowers. Here, too, are groves of the most ancient 

 oaks in the land, grey giants that might have been 

 growing in the time of the Conquest, their immense 

 horizontal branches rough with growth of fern and 

 lichen; in the religious twilight of their shade you 

 might spend a long summer day without meeting a 

 human being or hearing any faintest sound of human 

 life. A boundless contiguity of shade such as the 

 sensitive poet desired, where he might spend his 

 solitary life and nevermore have his ears pained, his 

 soul made sick, with daily reports of oppression and 

 deceit and wrong and outrage. 



To the natural man they have another call. Like 

 the ocean and the desert they revive a sense and 

 feeling of which we had been unconscious, but which 

 is always in us, in our very marrow; the sense which, 

 as Herbert Spencer has said, comes down to us from 

 our remote progenitors at a time when the principal 

 activities of the race were in woods and deserts. 

 Given the right conditions and it springs to renewed 

 life; and we know it is this which gives to life its 

 best savour, and not the thousand pleasures or dis- 

 tractions which civilised dwellers in towns have 

 invented as substitutes. Here we are away from them 

 — out of doors, and able to shake the dust of such 



