blessed if the sight of the mountain-head
above the sunset cloud-banks, the green gloom of the summer woodland,
the lake lashed with slanting storm, gives him a sense of profound
emotion, and fills him to the brim with the pure potion of beauty. He
may rest in that, for the time; he may feel that this is the message of
nature to him, thus and now; and that the more perfectly and
passionately that the beauty of nature comes home to him, the nearer he
comes to the thought of God.

This does not, either in the case of the man of science or the poet,
solve the further mystery--the mystery of complex human relationships.
But the investigation of science ardently pursued is more likely to
tend to isolate the explorer from his kind than the poetical
contemplation of nature, for the simple reason that the scientist's
business is not primarily with emotion but with concrete fact; while to
the poet the emotions of love and friendship, of patriotism and duty,
will all tend to be the object of impassioned speculation too. Both
alike will be apt to be somewhat isolated from the ordinary life of the
world, because both to the poet and the man of science the present
condition of things, the problems of the day, will be dwarfed by the
thought of the vast accumulation of past experience; both alike will
tend to minimise the value of human effort, because they will both be
aware that the phenomenon of human activity and human volition is but
the froth and scum working on the lip of some gigantic forward-moving
tide, and that men probably do not so much choose what they shall do,
as do what they are compelled to do by some unfathomable power behind
and above them. This thought may seem, to men of practical activity, to
weaken the force of effective energy in both poet and scientist. But
they will be content to be misunderstood on this point, because they
will be aware that such activity as they manifest is the direct effect
of something larger and greater than human volition, and that the
busiest lives are as much the inevitable outcome of this insuperable
force as their own more secluded, more contemplative lives.

The Mareway is an old track or drift-road, dating from primitive times,
which diverges from the Old North Road and runs for some miles along
the top of the low chalk downs which bound my southern horizon. Its
name is a corruption of the word Mary--Mary's way--for there was an
ancient shrine of pilgrimage dedicated to the Vir