lf as readily in the abyss of London as in those
gulfs of chaos that open in the Milky Way, confronting the eye with
naked infinitude; and this sense of personal insignificance is at once
a horror and a joy. That humble acquiescence of the Londoner in his
fate which we call his apathy, is the natural consequence of an
overwhelming sense of personal insignificance. The great reformer
should be country-born; in the solitude of nature he may come to think
himself significant, and have faith in those thoughts and intuitions
which no one contradicts. But in London, collective life, by its mere
immensity, overwhelms individual life so completely that no audacity or
arrogance of genius can supply that continuous and firm faith in
himself which the reformer must possess.

If I resisted these debilitating influences, it was through no
particular virtue of my own: it was rather through what I may call a
kind of earth-hunger. I had an obstinate craving for fresh air,
unimpeded movement, outdoor life. I wanted the earth, and I wanted to
live in the close embrace of the earth. Some ancestor of mine must
have been a hermit on a mountain, a gipsy, or a peasant: I know not
which, but something of the temperament of all three had been
bequeathed to me. The smell of fresh-turned earth was a smell that
revived in me a portion of my nature that had seemed dead; a flower set
me dreaming of solitary woods; and I found myself watching clouds and
weather-signs as though my bread depended on their lenience. The first
time I saw a mountain I burst into tears, an act which astonished me no
less than my companions. I could offer no explanation of my conduct,
but I felt as though the mountain called me. I said to myself, 'There
is my home, yonder is the earth of which my corporeal part is
fashioned; it is there that I should live and die.' Even a London park
in the first freshness of a summer morning produced these sensations;
and those rare excursions which I took into the genuine country left me
aching for days afterwards with an exquisite pain. I often imagined
myself living as Wordsworth did in Dove Cottage, as Thoreau did in the
Walden Woods, and the vision was delightful. I took an agricultural
paper, and read it diligently, not because it was of the least
practical utility to me, but because its simple details of country life
seemed to me a kind of poetry. In my rambles I never saw a lovely site
without at once going to work to