The high-roads
are made pleasant to the traveller by a border of trees, and often
afford him the hospitality of a wayside-bench beneath a comfortable
shade. But a fresher delight is to be found in the foot-paths, which go
wandering away from stile to stile, along hedges, and across broad
fields, and through wooded parks, leading you to little hamlets of
thatched cottages, ancient, solitary farm-houses, picturesque old mills,
streamlets, pools, and all those quiet, secret, unexpected, yet
strangely familiar features of English scenery that Tennyson shows us in
his idyls and eclogues. These by-paths admit the wayfarer into the very
heart of rural life, and yet do not burden him with a sense of
intrusiveness. He has a right to go whithersoever they lead him; for,
with all their shaded privacy, they are as much the property of the
public as the dusty high-road itself, and even by an older tenure. Their
antiquity probably exceeds that of the Roman ways; the footsteps of the
aboriginal Britons first wore away the grass, and the natural flow of
intercourse between village and village has kept the track bare ever
since. An American fanner would plough across any such path, and
obliterate it with his hills of potatoes and Indian corn; but here it is
protected by law, and still more by the sacredness that inevitably
springs up, in this soil, along the well-defined footprints of
centuries.
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