ed, so I see the woods and fields in
the various glories of the year and know not in which garb I love them
best. They have heard my laments, my confidences, all my broken
resolves: they are bound to me by so pure and intimate an affection that
all those grander wonders of the world should never draw me again from
this allegiance. Not for the vision of Himalaya piercing the heaven, or
the sunsets of Sienna, or the moonlight on the Taj Mahal, or for any
other beauty or any wonder shall I weary of the cornfields framed in
elms or the great horses turning in the furrow against the evening sky.

For with the growth of years our desires wander less, and are mercifully
contracted to the scope of our wearying powers. We haunt the same old
places and want the same old things, dwelling amongst them with an
increasing constancy of devotion. For we find that year by year the old
places and things are not really the same; something has touched them in
our absence; strange still agencies have intervened, long silences of
dissolution and the ineluctable fate of change. And so that perfect
sameness which we find unattainable takes on the quality of ideal and
demands the grown man's devotion, as the change that is forbidden casts
its resistless spell over the guarded and tethered child. The eyes of
youth are on the far end of the vista, those of age upon the near; the
old horse that has drawn the coulter through the clay is glad for the
four hedges of the paddock which irk the growing colt's desire. When
Richard Jefferies was asked why he walked the same lane day after day,
at first he was at a loss for a reply; but gradually the reason became
clear to him. It was because he had become aware of the iron law:
_Nothing twice_: he wanted the same old and loved things not twice but
endlessly; he was yearly more eager to be with them, and paint indelibly
upon his memory their delicate quiet beauty, their soft and perishable
charm.

That is how I also feel, as with the return of summer I wander out into
the old meadows and climb the familiar hills; I find myself hoping that
nothing is changed, and am stirred with sweet anxieties of reminiscence.
And surely within the enchanted boundaries of the counties where I
ramble, there is variety which not the hundred eyes of Argus could
exhaust. These fields and woodlands in high summer feast all the senses
with a surfeit of delights. How good it is to exercise in all its range
the fine mechanism of