IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 129 



the great world how little could I call my own ! 

 Only a few feet of soil out of the measureless land 

 scape ; only a few trees and flowers out of all that 

 boundless foliage ! I seemed driven out of the 

 heritage to which I was born ; cheated out of my 

 birthright in the beauty of the field and the mys 

 tery of the Forest ; put off with the beggarly por 

 tion of a younger son when I ought to have fallen 

 heir to the kingdom. My chief joy was that from 

 the little space I called my own I could see the 

 whole heavens ; no man could rob me of that 

 splendid vision. 



In Arden, however, the question of ownership 

 never comes into one s thoughts ; that the Forest 

 belongs to you gives you a deep joy, but there is a 

 deeper joy in the consciousness that it belongs to 

 everybody else. 



The sense of freedom, which comes as strongly 

 to one in Arden as the smell of the sea to one who 

 has made a long journey from the inland, hints, I 

 suppose, at the offense which makes the dwellers 

 within its boundaries outlaws. For one reason or 

 another, they have all revolted against the rule of 

 the world, and the world has cast them out. They 

 have offended smug respectability, with its passion 

 less devotion to deportment ; they have outraged 

 conventional usage, that carefully devised system 

 by which small natures attempt to bring great ones 

 down to their own dimensions ; they have scandal 

 ized the orthodoxy which, like Memnon, has lost 



