that from the little space I called my
own I could see the whole heavens; no man could rob me of that splendid
vision.

In Arden, however, the question of ownership never comes into one's
thoughts; that the Forest belongs to you gives you a deep joy, but
there is a deeper joy in the consciousness that it belongs to everybody
else.

The sense of freedom, which comes as strongly to one in Arden as the
smell of the sea to one who has made a long journey from the inland,
hints, I suppose, at the offence which makes the dwellers within its
boundaries outlaws. For one reason or another, they have all revolted
against the rule of the world, and the world has cast them out. They
have offended smug respectability, with its passionless devotion to
deportment; they have outraged conventional usage, that carefully
devised system by which small natures attempt to bring great ones down
to their own dimensions; they have scandalised the orthodoxy which,
like Memnon, has lost the music of its morning, and marvels that the
world no longer listens; they have derided venerable prejudices--those
ugly relics by which some men keep in remembrance their barbarous
ancestry; they have refused to follow flags whose battles were won or
lost ages ago; they have scorned to compromise with untruth, to go with
the crowd, to acquiesce in evil "for the good of the cause," to speak
when they ought to keep silent and to keep silent when they ought to
speak. Truly the lists of sins charged to the account of Arden is a
long one, and were it not that the memory of the world, concerned
chiefly with the things that make for its comfort, is a short one, it
would go ill with the lovers of the Forest. More than once it has
happened that some offender has suffered so long a banishment that he
has taken permanent refuge in Arden, and proved his citizenship there
by some act worthy of its glorious privileges. In the Forest one comes
constantly upon traces of those who, like Dante and Milton, have found
there a refuge from the Philistinism of a world that often hates its
children in exact proportion to their ability to give it light. For
the most part, however, the outlaws who frequent the Forest suffer no
longer banishment than that which they impose on themselves. They come
and go at their own sweet will; and their coming, I suspect, is
generally a matter of their own choosing. The world still loves
darkness more than light; but it rarely nowadays falls