is eyes only an extraordinary multiplication of such "meetings."

And now we come to that last and most subtle quality of all, to that
sense of prospect, of outlook, that is brought so powerfully to our
minds by a road. In real nature as well as in old landscapes, beneath
that impartial daylight in which a whole variegated plain is plunged and
saturated, the line of the road leads the eye forth with the vague sense
of desire up to the green limit of the horizon. Travel is brought home
to us, and we visit in spirit every grove and hamlet that tempts us in
the distance. _Sehnsucht_--the passion for what is ever beyond--is
livingly expressed in that white riband of possible travel that severs
the uneven country; not a ploughman following his plough up the shining
furrow, not the blue smoke of any cottage in a hollow, but is brought to
us with a sense of nearness and attainability by this wavering line of
junction. There is a passionate paragraph in Werther that strikes the
very key. "When I came hither," he writes, "how the beautiful valley
invited me on every side, as I gazed down into it from the hill-top!
There the wood--ah, that I might mingle in its shadows! there the
mountain summits--ah, that I might look down from them over the broad
country! the interlinked hills! the secret valleys! O, to lose myself
among their mysteries! I hurried into the midst, and came back without
finding aught I hoped for. Alas! the distance is like the future. A vast
whole lies in the twilight before our spirit; sight and feeling alike
plunge and lose themselves in the prospect, and we yearn to surrender
our whole being, and let it be filled full with all the rapture of one
single glorious sensation; and alas! when we hasten to the fruition,
when _there_ is changed to _here_, all is afterwards as it was before,
and we stand in our indigent and cramped estate, and our soul thirsts
after a still ebbing elixir." It is to this wandering and uneasy spirit
of anticipation that roads minister. Every little vista, every little
glimpse that we have of what lies before us, gives the impatient
imagination rein, so that it can outstrip the body and already plunge
into the shadow of the woods, and overlook from the hilltop the plain
beyond it, and wander in the windings of the valleys that are still far
in front. The road is already there--we shall not be long behind. It is
as if we were marching with the rear of a great army, and, from far
before, hea