ffices them.

In the winter weather the Mareway, in its dreary and sodden bareness,
is to my mind an even more impressive place. The wind comes sharply up
over the shoulder of the down. The trees are all bare; the pasture is
yellow-pale. The water lies in the ruts and ditches. The silence in the
pauses of the wind is intense. You can hear the soft sound of grass
pulled by the lips of unnumbered browsing sheep behind the hedgerow, or
the cry of farmyard fowls from the byre below, the puffing of the
steam-plough on the sloping fallow, the far-off railway whistle across
the wide valley. The rooks stream home from distant fields, and discuss
the affairs of the race with cheerful clamour in the depth of the wood.
The day darkens, and a smouldering sunset, hung with gilded clouds
streaked with purple bars, begins to burn behind the bare-stemmed
copse.

But what is, after all, the deepest charm that invests the old road is
the thought of all the sad and tender associations clothing it in the
minds of so many vanished generations. Even an old house has a haunting
grace enough, as a place where men have been born and died, have loved
and enjoyed and suffered; but a road like this, ceaselessly trodden by
the feet of pilgrims, all of them with some pathetic urgency of desire
in their hearts, some hope unfulfilled, some shadow of sickness or sin
to banish, some sorrow making havoc of home, is touched by that
infinite pathos that binds all human hearts together in the face of the
mystery of life. What passionate meetings with despair, what eager
upliftings of desirous hearts, must have thrilled the minds of the
feeble and travel-worn companies that made their slow journeys along
the grassy road! And one is glad to think, too, that there must
doubtless have been many that returned gladder than they came, with the
burden shifted a little, the shadow lessened, or at least with new
strength to carry the familiar load. For of this we may be sure, that
however harshly we may despise what we call superstition, or however
firmly we may wave away what we hold to have been all a beautiful
mistake, there is some fruitful power that dwells and lingers in places
upon which the hearts of men have so concentred their swift and
poignant emotions--for all, at least, to whom the soul is more than the
body, and whose thoughts are not bounded and confined by the mere
material shapes among which, in the days of our earthly limitations, we
move uneasil