Hl 
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 Danaé’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 take off peel after peel, and so get 
by degrees slowly towards the truth—thus writing, as it 
