r
wrappers from motives of economy.

I then tried to explain the rather delicate logical shade, that I not
only liked brown paper, but liked the quality of brownness in paper,
just as I liked the quality of brownness in October woods, or in beer,
or in the peat-streams of the North. Brown paper represents the primal
twilight of the first toil of creation, and with a bright-coloured
chalk or two you can pick out points of fire in it, sparks of gold, and
blood-red, and sea-green, like the first fierce stars that sprang out of
divine darkness. All this I said (in an off-hand way) to the old woman;
and I put the brown paper in my pocket along with the chalks, and
possibly other things. I suppose every one must have reflected how
primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's
pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the
infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely
about the things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and
the age of the great epics is past.

.....

With my stick and my knife, my chalks and my brown paper, I went out
on to the great downs. I crawled across those colossal contours that
express the best quality of England, because they are at the same time
soft and strong. The smoothness of them has the same meaning as the
smoothness of great cart-horses, or the smoothness of the beech-tree;
it declares in the teeth of our timid and cruel theories that the mighty
are merciful. As my eye swept the landscape, the landscape was as kindly
as any of its cottages, but for power it was like an earthquake. The
villages in the immense valley were safe, one could see, for centuries;
yet the lifting of the whole land was like the lifting of one enormous
wave to wash them all away.

I crossed one swell of living turf after another, looking for a place
to sit down and draw. Do not, for heaven's sake, imagine I was going to
sketch from Nature. I was going to draw devils and seraphim, and blind
old gods that men worshipped before the dawn of right, and saints in
robes of angry crimson, and seas of strange green, and all the sacred
or monstrous symbols that look so well in bright colours on brown paper.
They are much better worth drawing than Nature; also they are much
easier to draw. When a cow came slouching by in the field next to me, a
mere artist might have drawn it; but I always get wrong in the hind legs
of quadrupeds. So I drew the