I will confess to you, though, that in those first heats of youth, this little England—or rather, this little patch of moor in which I have struck roots as firm as the wild fir-trees do—looked at moments rather like a prison than a palace; that my foolish young heart would sigh, ‘Oh! that I had wings’—not as a dove, to fly home to its nest and croodle there—but as an eagle, to swoop away over land and sea, in a rampant and self-glorifying fashion, on which I now look back as altogether unwholesome and undesirable. But the thirst for adventure and excitement was strong in me, as perhaps it ought to be in all at twenty-one. Others went out to see the glorious new worlds of the West, the glorious old worlds of the East—why should not I? Others rambled over Alps and Apennines, Italian picture-galleries and palaces, filling their minds with fair memories—why should not I? Others discovered new wonders in botany and zoology—why should not I? Others too, like you, fulfilled to the utmost that strange lust after the burra shikar, which even now makes my pulse throb as often as I see the stags’ heads in our friend A—’s hall: why should not I? It is not learnt in a day, the golden lesson of the Old Collect, to ‘love the thing which is commanded, and desire that which is promised.’ Not in a day: but in fifteen years one can spell out a little of its worth; and when one finds one’s self on the wrong side of forty, and the first grey hairs begin to show on the temples, and one can no longer jump as high as one’s third button—scarcely, alas! to any button at all; and what with innumerable sprains, bruises, soakings, and chillings, one’s lower limbs feel in a cold thaw much like an old post-horse’s, why, one makes a virtue of necessity: and if one still lusts after sights, takes the nearest, and looks for wonders, not in the Himalayas or Lake Ngami, but in the turf on the lawn and the brook in the park; and with good Alphonse Karr enjoys the macro-microcosm in one ‘Tour autour de mon jardin.’ For there it is, friend, the whole infinite miracle of nature in every tuft of grass, if we have only eyes to see it, and can disabuse our minds of that tyrannous phantom of size. Only recollect that great and small are but relative terms; that in truth nothing is great or small, save in proportion to the quantity of creative thought which has been exercised in making it; that the fly who basks upon one of the trilithons of Stonehenge, is in truth infinitely greater than all Stonehenge together, though he may measure the tenth of an inch, and the stone on which he sits five-and-twenty feet. You differ from me? Be it so. Even if you prove me wrong I will believe myself in the right: I cannot afford to do otherwise. If you rob me of my faith in ‘minute philosophy,’ you rob me of a continual source of content, surprise, delight.