THE TEMPLES Ol- THE HILLS 279 



are prent enough, one would imagine, to satisfy any 

 person's love of wiklness and solitude. Here you will 

 iind places in appearance like a primitive forest, where 

 the trees have grown as they would for generations 

 untouched hy 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 never more 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 distractions which civilised 

 dwellers in towns have invented as substitutes. Here 

 we are away from them — out of doors, and able to shake 



