lies and circumscriptions, and go forward as a new creature
into a new world.

It is well, perhaps, that I had this first enthusiasm to encourage me up
the long hill above High Wycombe; for the day was a bad day for walking
at best, and now began to draw towards afternoon, dull, heavy, and
lifeless. A pall of grey cloud covered the sky, and its colour reacted
on the colour of the landscape. Near at hand, indeed, the hedgerow trees
were still fairly green, shot through with bright autumnal yellows,
bright as sunshine. But a little way off, the solid bricks of woodland
that lay squarely on slope and hill-top were not green, but russet and
grey, and ever less russet and more grey as they drew off into the
distance. As they drew off into the distance, also, the woods seemed to
mass themselves together, and lay thin and straight, like clouds, upon
the limit of one's view. Not that this massing was complete, or gave the
idea of any extent of forest, for every here and there the trees would
break up and go down into a valley in open order, or stand in long
Indian file along the horizon, tree after tree relieved, foolishly
enough, against the sky. I say foolishly enough, although I have seen
the effect employed cleverly in art, and such long line of single trees
thrown out against the customary sunset of a Japanese picture with a
certain fantastic effect that was not to be despised; but this was over
water and level land, where it did not jar, as here, with the soft
contour of hills and valleys. The whole scene had an indefinable look of
being painted, the colour was so abstract and correct, and there was
something so sketchy and merely impressional about these distant single
trees on the horizon that one was forced to think of it all as of a
clever French landscape. For it is rather in nature that we see
resemblance to art, than in art to nature; and we say a hundred times,
"How like a picture!" for once that we say, "How like the truth!" The
forms in which we learn to think of landscape are forms that we have got
from painted canvas. Any man can see and understand a picture; it is
reserved for the few to separate anything out of the confusion of
nature, and see that distinctly and with intelligence.

The sun came out before I had been long on my way; and as I had got by
that time to the top of the ascent, and was now treading a labyrinth of
confined by-roads, my whole view brightened considerably in colour, for
it was the di