Harvard Classics Volume 28: Essays English and American
General
Harvard Classics Volume 28: Essays English and American
American essays; English essays
"Next after her spiritual advantages, she owed most to the advantages
of her situation. The fountain of Domremy was on the brink of a
boundless forest; and it was haunted to that degree by fairies, that
the parish priest (_cure_) was obliged to read mass there once a year,
in order to keep them in any decent bounds. . . .
"But the forest of Domremy--those were the glories of the land; for in
them abode mysterious powers and ancient secrets that towered into
tragic strength. Abbeys there were, and abbey windows,'--'like Moorish
temples of the Hindoos,' that exercised even princely power both in
Touraine and in the German Diets. These had their sweet bells that
pierced the forests for many a league at matins or vespers, and each
its own dreamy legend. Few enough, and scattered enough, were these
abbeys, so as in no degree to disturb the deep solitude of the region;
yet many enough to spread a network or awning of Christian sanctity
over what else might have seemed a heathen wilderness." [5]
Now you cannot, indeed, have here in England, woods eighteen miles deep
to the centre; but you can, perhaps, keep a fairy or two for your
children yet, if you wish to keep them. But _do_ you wish it? Suppose
you had each, at the back of your houses, a garden large enough for
your children to play in, with just as much lawn as would give them
room to run,--no more--and that you could not change your abode; but
that, if you choose, you could double your income, or quadruple it, by
digging a coal-shaft in the middle of the lawn, and turning the
flower-beds into heaps of coke. Would you do it? I hope not. I can
tell you, you would be wrong if you did, though it gave you income
sixty-fold instead of four-fold.
83. Yet this is what you are doing with all England. The whole
country is but a little garden, not more than enough for your children
to run on the lawns of, if you would let them _all_ run there. And
this little garden you will turn into furnace-ground, and fill with
heaps of cinders, if you can; and those children of yours, not you,
will suffer for it. For the fairies will not be all banished; there
are fairies of the furnace as of the wood, and their first gifts seem
to be "sharp arrows of the mighty"; but their last gifts are "coals of
juniper."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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