32 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 



the summer whirlwinds from the very dust of the road, 

 and float over the highest walls ; they fall on the well- 

 kept lawns — monastery, prison, palace — there is no 

 fortress against a bit of printed paper. They penetrate 

 where even Danae's gold cannot go. Our Darwins, our 

 Lyalls, Herschels, Faradays — all the immense army of 

 those that go down to nature with considering eye — are 

 steadfastly undermining and obliterating the supersti- 

 tious past, literally burying it under endless loads of 

 accumulated facts ; and the printing-presses, like so many 

 Argos, take these facts on their voyage round the world. 

 Over go temples, and minarets, and churches, or rather 

 there they stay, the hollow shells, like the snail shells 

 which thrushes have picked clean ; there they stay like 

 Karnac, where there is no more incense, like the stone 

 circles on our own hills, where there are no more human 

 sacrifices. Thus men's minds all over the printing-press 

 world are unlearning the falsehoods that have bound 

 them down so long ; they are unlearning, the first step 

 to learn. They are going down to nature and taking 

 up the clods with their own hands, and so coming to 

 have touch of that which is real. As yet we are in the 

 fact stage ; by-and-by we shall come to the alchemy, and 

 get the honey for the inner mind and soul. I found, 

 therefore, from the dandelion that there were no books, 

 and it came upon me, believe me, as a great surprise, 

 for I had lived quite certain that I was surrounded with 

 them. It is nothing but unlearning, I find now ; five 

 thousand books to unlearn. 



Then to unlearn the first ideas of history, of science, 

 of social institutions, to unlearn one's own life and pur- 

 pose ; to unlearn the old mode of thought and way of 

 arriving at things ; to takeoff peel after peel, and so get 

 by degrees slowly towards the truth— thus writinsf, as it 



