d assurance in your mind that you have
got out of the conventional into the natural, which will not establish
itself unless there be a consciousness of distance between you and the
next ploughed field. If possible, you should not know the east from the
west; or, if so, only by the setting of the sun. You should recognize
the direction in which you must return simply by the fall of water.

"But where shall the wood be found? Such woodlands there are still in
England, though, alas! they are becoming rarer every year. Profit from
the timber merchant or dealer in fire-wood is looked to; or else, as is
more probable, drives are cut broad and straight, like spokes of a wheel
radiating to a nave or centre, good only for the purposes of the slayer
of multitudinous pheasants. I will not say that a wood prepared, not as
the home, but the slaughter-ground, of game, is altogether inefficient
for our purpose. I have used such, even when the sound of the guns has
been near enough to warn me to turn my steps to the right or to the
left. The scents are pleasant even in winter; the trees are there, and
sometimes even yet the delightful feeling may be encountered that the
track on which you are walking leads to some far-off, vague destination,
in reaching which there may be much of delight, because it will be
new;--something also of peril, because it will be distant. But the wood,
if possible, should seem to be purposeless. It should have no evident
consciousness of being there, either for game or fagots. The felled
trunk on which you sit should seem to have been selected for some
accidental purpose of house-building, as if a neighbor had searched for
what was wanting and had found it. No idea should be engendered that it
was let out at so much an acre to a contractor, who would cut the trees
in order and sell them in the next market. The mind should conceive that
this wood never had been planted by hands, but had come there from the
direct beneficence of the Creator--as the first woods did come, before
man had been taught to recreate them systematically, and as some still
remain to us, so much more lovely in their wildness than when reduced to
rows and quincunxes, and made to accommodate themselves to laws of
economy and order.

"They will not come at once, those thoughts which are so anxiously
expected; and in the process of coming they are apt to be troublesome,
full of tricks, and almost traitorous. They must be imprisoned or bound