y dale by which we had begun our
ascent.

But what that valley was which had led us from the summits round
backward to our starting-place, forcing upon us the refusal of whatever
powers protect this passage of the chain, I have never been able to
tell. It is not upon the maps; by our description the peasants knew
nothing of it. No book tells of it. No men except ourselves have seen
it, and I am willing to believe that it is not of this world.

ON ELY

There are two ways by which a man may acquire any kind of learning or
profit, and this is especially true of travel.

Everybody knows that one can increase what one has of knowledge or of
any other possession by going outwards and outwards; but what is also
true, and what people know less, is that one can increase it by going
inwards and inwards. There is no goal to either of these directions, nor
any term to your advantage as you travel in them.

If you will be extensive, take it easy; the infinite is always well
ahead of you, and its symbol is the sky.

If you will be intensive, hurry as much as you like you will never
exhaust the complexity of things; and the truth of this is very evident
in a garden, or even more in the nature of insects; of which beasts I
have heard it said that the most stolid man in the longest of lives
would acquire only a cursory knowledge of even one kind, as, for
instance, of the horned beetle, which sings so angrily at evening.

You may travel for the sake of great horizons, and travel all your life,
and fill your memory with nothing but views from mountain-tops, and yet
not have seen a tenth of the world. Or you may spend your life upon the
religious history of East Rutland, and plan the most enormous book upon
it, and yet find that you have continually to excise and select from the
growing mass of your material.

* * * * *

A wise man having told me this some days before (and I having believed
it), it seemed to me as though a new entertainment had been invented for
me, or rather as though I had found a bottomless purse; since by this
doctrine there was manifestly no end to the number of my pleasures, and
to each of this infinite number no possibility of exhaustion; but I
thought I would put it to the test in this way: putting aside but three
days, I determined in that space to explore a little corner of this
country.

Now, although I saw not one-hundredth of the buildings or the people in
th