Solitude
is as characteristic of that region as beauty, and what the mass of
mankind need for their refreshment--most naturally and justly--is
not solitude but society.
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills,
is to them merely a drawback, to be overcome by moving about in
large masses, and by congregating in chosen resorts with vehement
hilarity. It would be most unreasonable to wish to curtail to
curtail the social expansion of men whose lives are for the most
part passed in a monotonous round of toil. But is it kinder and wiser,--
from any point of view but the railway shareholder's,--to allure
them into excursion trains by the prestige of a scenery which is to
them (as it was to all classes a century or two ago) at best
indifferent, or to provide them near at hand with their needed space
for rest and play, not separated from their homes by hours of
clamour and crowding, nor broken up by barren precipices, nor
drenched with sweeping storm?
Unquestionably it is the masses whom we have first to consider.
Sooner than that the great mass of the dwellers in towns should be
debarred from the influences of Nature--sooner than that they
should continue for another century to be debarred as now they are--
it might be better that Cumbrian statesmen and shepherds should be
turned into innkeepers and touts, and that every poet, artist,
dreamer, in England should be driven to seek his solitude at the
North Pole.
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