ONES OWN COUNTRY 123 



inhabitant of the forest likes to get back there again 

 from the plains. And the Englishman, though he 

 loves the Alps and the Himalaya, is touched by 

 nothing so deeply as by a Devonshire lane with 

 its banks of primroses and violets. And he may 

 have the greatest affection for peoples of other races 

 among whom he may have had to work, yet it is his 

 own countrymen that he will always really love. 



So the Artist comes back to home surroundings 

 and his own people. And he will return with his 

 sense of beauty quickened and refined by this wide 

 and varied experience of Nature. His sensibility 

 to the beauties of Nature will now be of rarest 

 delicacy, and his capacity for fine discrimination and 

 his feeling for distinction and excellence sure and 

 keen. 



He will have been toned and tuned up to the 

 highest pitch in his wrestling with Nature, and 

 will have been purged and purified in the white 

 region of the highest mountains. And in this high- 

 strung state he will now see that creation and mani- 

 festation of Nature which of all natural objects will 

 best declare her meaning, bring him into closer touch 

 with her very Heart, and stir in him the deepest 

 emotions. Between him and this object there will 

 be possible the closest community of soul. Here 

 then he will see Natural Beauty at its very finest. 



The natural object in which he will see this 

 consummation of Beauty will be the woman who 

 will be to him a kindred spirit, and whom he will 

 first admire and then love. 



It was through the love of man and woman for 

 each other in the far-off ages when love first came 



