The peculiar sense of satisfaction, of
restfulness, of peace, experienced here is very perfect; but
in the wilderness, where man has never been, or has at all
events left no trace of his former presence, there is ever a
mysterious sense of loneliness, of desolation, underlying our
pleasure in nature. Here it seems good to know, or to
imagine, that the men I occasionally meet in my solitary
rambles, and those I see in the scattered rustic village hard
by, are of the same race, and possibly the descendants, of the
people who occupied this spot in the remote past--Iberian and
Celt, and Roman and Saxon and Dane. If that hard-featured and
sour-visaged old gamekeeper, with the cold blue unfriendly
eyes, should come upon me here in my hiding-place, and scowl
as he is accustomed to do, standing silent before me, gun in
hand, to hear my excuses for trespassing in his preserves, I
should say (mentally): This man is distinctly English, and
his far-off progenitors, somewhere about sixteen hundred years
ago, probably assisted at the massacre of the inhabitants of
the pleasant little city at my feet. By and by, leaving the
ruins, I may meet with other villagers of different features
and different colour in hair, skin, and eyes, and of a
pleasanter expression; and in them I may see the remote
descendants of other older races of men, some who were lords
here before the Romans came, and of others before them, even
back to Neolithic times.
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