g firs and larches. The West Wind tells
us of the way how the branches spring outwards, or balance themselves,
or hang like garlands in the air, and carry their leaves, or needles,
or nuts; and of their ways of bending and straightening, of swaying
and trembling. It tells us also, this West Wind, how the sea is lashed
and furrowed; how the little waves spring up in the offing, and the
big waves rise and run forward and topple into foam; how the rocks are
shaken, the sands are made to hiss and the shingle is rattled up and
down; how the great breakers vault over the pier walls, leap
thundering against the breakwaters, and disperse like smoke off the
cannon's mouth, like the whiteness of some vast explosion.

These are the things which the Wind and the Woods can talk about with
us, nay, even the gorse and the shaking bents. But the hunting folk
pass too quickly, and make too much noise, to hear anything save
themselves and their horses' hoofs and their bugle and hounds.

II.

I have taken fox-hunting as the type of a pleasure _which destroys
something_, just because it is, in many ways, the most noble and, if I
may say so, the most innocent of such pleasures. The death, the,
perhaps agonising, flight of the fox, occupy no part of the hunter's
consciousness, and form no part of his pleasure; indeed, they could,
but for the hounds, be dispensed with altogether. There is a fine
community of emotion between men and creatures, horses and dogs adding
their excitement to ours; there is also a fine lack of the mere
feeling of trying to outrace a competitor, something of the collective
and almost altruistic self-forgetfulness of a battle. There is the
break-neck skurry, the flying across the ground and through the air at
the risk of limbs and life, and at the mercy of one's own and one's
horse's pluck, skill and good fellowship. All this makes up a rapture
in which many ugly things vanish, and certain cosmic intuitions flash
forth for some, at least, of the hunters. The element of poetry is
greater, the element of brutality less, in this form of intoxication
than in many others. It has a handsomer bearing than its modern
successor, the motor-intoxication, with its passiveness and (for all
but the driver) its lack of skill, its confinement, moreover, to
beaten roads, and its petrol-stench and dustcloud of privilege and of
inconvenience to others. And the intoxication of hunting is, to my
thinking at least, cleaner, wholesomer,