ays pleasurably busy his mind about it. He may leave the
river-side, or fall out of the way of villages, but the road he has
always with him; and, in the true humour of observation, will find in
that sufficient company. From its subtle windings and changes of level
there arises a keen and continuous interest, that keeps the attention
ever alert and cheerful. Every sensitive adjustment to the contour of
the ground, every little dip and swerve, seems instinct with life and
an exquisite sense of balance and beauty. The road rolls upon the easy
slopes of the country, like a long ship in the hollows of the sea. The
very margins of waste ground, as they trench a little farther on the
beaten way, or recede again to the shelter of the hedge, have something
of the same free delicacy of line--of the same swing and wilfulness. You
might think for a whole summer's day (and not have thought it any nearer
an end by evening) what concourse and succession of circumstances has
produced the least of these deflections; and it is, perhaps, just in
this that we should look for the secret of their interest. A footpath
across a meadow--in all its human waywardness and unaccountability, in
all the _grata protervitas_ of its varying direction--will always be
more to us than a railroad well engineered through a difficult
country.[39] No reasoned sequence is thrust upon our attention: we seem
to have slipped for one lawless little moment out of the iron rule of
cause and effect; and so we revert at once to some of the pleasant old
heresies of personification, always poetically orthodox, and attribute a
sort of free will, an active and spontaneous life, to the white riband
of road that lengthens out, and bends, and cunningly adapts itself to
the inequalities of the land before our eyes. We remember, as we write,
some miles of fine wide highway laid out with conscious aesthetic
artifice through a broken and richly cultivated tract of country. It is
said that the engineer had Hogarth's line of beauty in his mind as he
laid them down. And the result is striking. One splendid satisfying
sweep passes with easy transition into another, and there is nothing to
trouble or dislocate the strong continuousness of the main line of the
road. And yet there is something wanting. There is here no saving
imperfection, none of these secondary curves and little trepidations of
direction that carry, in natural roads, our curiosity actively along
with them. One feels at