ts, their weary ways, their gaudy dresses; we shun the sunken
cheeks, the lack-lustre eyes, the heart-sick souls of your painted
goddesses. We love not the fetid air, thick and hot with human breath,
and reeking with tobacco smoke, of your modern Parnassus--a Parnassus
whose crags were reared and shaped by the hands of the stage-carpenter!
Your studied dalliance with your venal muses is little to our taste.
Your halls are too stifling with carbonic acid gas; for us, we breathe
oxygen.

And the oxygen of the hill-tops is purer, keener, rarer, more ethereal.
It is rich in ozone. Now, ozone stands to common oxygen itself as the
clean-cut metal to the dull and leaden exposed surface. Nascent and ever
renascent, it has electrical attraction; it leaps to the embrace of the
atom it selects, but only under the influence of powerful affinities;
and what it clasps once, it clasps for ever. That is the pure air which
we drink in on the heather-clad heights--not the venomous air of the
crowded casino, nor even the close air of the middle-class parlour. It
thrills and nerves us. How we smile, we who live here, when some dweller
in the mists and smoke of the valley confounds our delicate atmosphere,
redolent of honey and echoing the manifold murmur of bees, with that
stifling miasma of the gambling hell and the dancing saloon! Trust
me, dear friend, the moorland air is far other than you fancy. You can
wander up here along the purple ridges, hand locked in hand with those
you love, without fear of harm to yourself or your comrade. No Bloom of
Ninon here, but fresh cheeks like the peach-blossom where the sun
has kissed it: no casual fruition of loveless, joyless harlots, but
life-long saturation of your own heart's desire in your own heart's
innocence. Ozone is better than all the champagne in the Strand or
Piccadilly. If only you will believe it, it is purity and life and
sympathy and vigour. Its perfect freshness and perpetual fount of youth
keep your age from withering. It crimsons the sunset and lives in the
afterglow. If these delights thy mind may move, leave, oh, leave the
meretricious town, and come to the airy peaks. Such joy is ours, unknown
to the squalid village which spreads its swamps where the poet's silver
Thames runs dull and leaden.

Have we never our doubts, though, up here on the hill-tops? Ay, marry,
have we! Are we so sure that these gospels we preach with all our hearts
are the true and final ones? Who shall an