n (those who have turned aside for
wantonness have left no trace at all), and most have been well content
to see the same things as those who went before and as they themselves
have seen a hundred times. And now they, as the sound of their feet
and the echoes, are dead, and the roads are but pleasant folds in the
grassy chalk. Stay, traveller, says the dark tower on the hill, and
tread softly because your way is over men's dreams; but not too long;
and now descend to the west as fast as feet can carry you, and follow
your own dream, and that also shall in course of time lie under men's
feet; for there is no going so sweet as upon the old dreams of men.

_Edward Thomas._

ON A GREAT WIND

It is an old dispute among men, or rather a dispute as old as mankind,
whether Will be a cause of things or no; nor is there anything novel
in those moderns who affirm that Will is nothing to the matter, save
their ignorant belief that their affirmation is new.

The intelligent process whereby I know that Will not seems but is, and
can alone be truly and ultimately a cause, is fed with stuff and
strengthens sacramentally as it were, whenever I meet, and am made the
companion of, a great wind.

It is not that this lively creature of God is indeed perfected with a
soul; this it would be superstition to believe. It has no more a
person than any other of its material fellows, but in its vagary of
way, in the largeness of its apparent freedom, in its rush of purpose,
it seems to mirror the action of mighty spirit. When a great wind
comes roaring over the eastern flats towards the North Sea, driving
over the Fens and the Wringland, it is like something of this island
that must go out and wrestle with the water, or play with it in a game
or a battle; and when, upon the western shores, the clouds come
bowling up from the horizon, messengers, outriders, or comrades of a
gale, it is something of the sea determined to possess the land. The
rising and falling of such power, its hesitations, its renewed
violence, its fatigue and final repose--all these are symbols of a
mind; but more than all the rest, its exultation! It is the shouting
and the hurrahing of the wind that suits a man.

Note you, we have not many friends. The older we grow and the better
we can sift mankind, the fewer friends we count, although man lives by
friendship. But a great wind is every man's friend, and its strength
is the strength of good-fellowship; and e