I come across many persons who lament the recent great change
on Salisbury Plain. It is hateful to them; the sight of the
camp and troops marching and drilling, of men in khaki
scattered about everywhere over a hundred square leagues of
plain; the smoke of firing and everlasting booming of guns.
It is a desecration; the wild ancient charm of the land has
been destroyed in their case, and it saddens and angers them.
I was pretty free from these uncomfortable feelings.
It is said that one of the notions the Japanese have about the
fox--a semi-sacred animal with them--is that, if you chance
to see one crossing your path in the morning, all that comes
before your vision on that day will be illusion. As an
illustration of this belief it is related that a Japanese who
witnessed the eruption of Krakatoa, when the heavens were
covered with blackness and kindled with intermitting flashes
and the earth shaken by the detonations, and when all others,
thinking the end of the world had come, were swooning with
extreme fear, veiwed it without a tremor as a very sublime but
illusory spectacle. For on that very morning he had seen a
fox cross his path.
A somewhat similar effect is produced on our minds if we have
what may be called a sense of historical time--a consciousness
of the transitoriness of most things human--if we see
institutions and works as the branches on a pine or larch,
which fail and die and fall away successively while the tree
itself lives for ever, and if we measure their duration not by
our own few swift years, but by the life of nations and races
of men.
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