ise original poem; but it is
hopeless to disentangle it now.

THE THING

The wind awoke last night with so noble a violence that it was like
the war in heaven; and I thought for a moment that the Thing had broken
free. For wind never seems like empty air. Wind always sounds full and
physical, like the big body of something; and I fancied that the Thing
itself was walking gigantic along the great roads between the forests of
beech.

Let me explain. The vitality and recurrent victory of Christendom have
been due to the power of the Thing to break out from time to time from
its enveloping words and symbols. Without this power all civilisations
tend to perish under a load of language and ritual. One instance of this
we hear much in modern discussion: the separation of the form from the
spirit of religion. But we hear too little of numberless other cases of
the same stiffening and falsification; we are far too seldom reminded
that just as church-going is not religion, so reading and writing are
not knowledge, and voting is not self-government. It would be easy to
find people in the big cities who can read and write quickly enough to
be clerks, but who are actually ignorant of the daily movements of the
sun and moon.

The case of self-government is even more curious, especially as one
watches it for the first time in a country district. Self-government
arose among men (probably among the primitive men, certainly among the
ancients) out of an idea which seems now too simple to be understood.
The notion of self-government was not (as many modern friends and foes
of it seem to think) the notion that the ordinary citizen is to be
consulted as one consults an Encyclopaedia. He is not there to be asked
a lot of fancy questions, to see how he answers them. He and his fellows
are to be, within reasonable human limits, masters of their own lives.
They shall decide whether they shall be men of the oar or the wheel, of
the spade or the spear. The men of the valley shall settle whether the
valley shall be devastated for coal or covered with corn and vines; the
men of the town shall decide whether it shall be hoary with thatches or
splendid with spires. Of their own nature and instinct they shall gather
under a patriarchal chief or debate in a political market-place. And in
case the word "man" be misunderstood, I may remark that in this moral
atmosphere, this original soul of self-government, the women always have
quite as much