Читать книгу Neighbourhood: A year's life in and about an English village онлайн

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And it is the same with burning logs. Each kind of wood has its own essential odour, which pervades the room as though it were soul and body with the light. You cannot separate the two; no riding down of fancy will dissociate the flickering gipsy-gold of the embers and the perfume of the simmering bark. If these do not fill your mind with memories of the green twilight of woodlands, of hours spent in leafy shadows of forest-glades, then—then you are not made for a country fireside, and were happier hobnobbing with Modernity by his sooty, coal-fed hearth.

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It is not difficult to understand why indoor work is at most times tolerable in cities, fair weather or foul. For in cities earth and sky have long been driven out of their ancient comradeship. Stifled by pavements and masonry, the earth cannot feel the touch of the sunbeams, nor the air enrich itself with the breath of the soil. The old glad interchange is prevented at all points. There is no lure in the sunshine, no siren voice in the gale. Summer rain does not call you out into the open, to share the joy of it with the drinking grass and leaves. Amidst your dead, impenetrable bricks-and-mortar, you can plod on with your scribbling or figuring without a heart-stir; no vine-leaf will tap at your window, no lily-of-the-field taunt your industry, nor song of skylark dissipate your dreams.