e my birth, and the ancient
kindness of Him whom a daring poet calls, 'My old neighbour--God!'

Neighbourship with the earth also became a vital pleasure and a source
of peace. There was a time when I had a vivid horror of death; and as
I look back, and analyse my sensations, I believe this horror was in
large part the work of cities. It sprang from the constant vision of
deformity, the presence of hospitals, newspaper narratives of tragic
accidents, and the ghastly cheerfulness of metropolitan cemeteries. To
die with a window open to the trampling of a clamorous, unconcerned
street seemed a thing sordid and unendurable. To be whisked away in a
plumed hearse to a grave dug out of the debris of a hundred forgotten
graves was the climax of insult. It happened to me once to see a child
buried in what was called a common grave. It was a grave which
contained already half a dozen little coffins; it was a mere dust-bin
of mortality, and it seemed so profane a place that no lustration of
religion could give it sanctity. Dissolution met the mind there in
more than its native horror; it had the superimposed horror of
indecency and wilful outrage. But in the wide wholesome spaces of the
world, and beneath the clean stars, death seems not undesirable. A
country life gives one the pleasant sense of kinship with the earth.
It is no longer an offence to know oneself of the earth earthy. I was
so much engaged in the love and study of things whose life was brief
that the thought of death became natural. I saw constantly in flowers
and birds, and domestic creatures, the little round of life completed
and relinquished without regret. I saw also how the aged peasant
gathered up his feet and died, like a tired child falling asleep at the
close of a long day. Death is in reality no more terrible than birth;
but it is only the natural man who can so conceive it. He who lives in
constant kinship with the earth will go to his rest on the earth's
bosom without repugnance. I knew very well the place where I should be
buried; it was beneath a clean turf kept sweet by mountain winds; and
the place seemed desirable. Having come back by degrees to a life of
entire kinship with the earth, having shared the seasons and the
storms, it seemed but the final seal set upon this kinship, that I
should dissolve quietly into the elements of things, to find perhaps my
resurrection in the eternally renewed life of Nature.

Neighbourship meant a