The gate had admitted them to a long winding road, with clumps of trees here and there on the borders of it. The road was apparently not much used, for it was more than sprinkled with grass all over. A ploughed field was on one side, and a wild heathy expanse, dotted with fir-trees, on the other. Suddenly on the side of the field, gradually on that of the heath, the ground changed to the green sward of a park. “A grand place for thinking!” said Richard to himself. But in truth Richard had hardly yet begun to think. He only followed the things that came to him; he never said to things, _Come;_ neither, when they came, did he keep them, and make them walk up and down before him till he saw what they were; he did not search out their pedigree, get them to give an account of themselves, show what they could do, or, in short, be themselves to him. He had written a few verses--not bad verses, but with feeling only, not thought in them. For instance, he had addressed an ode to the allegorical personage called Liberty, in which he bepraised her until, had she been indeed a woman, she must have been ashamed: she was the one essential of life! the one glory of existence! he was no man who would not die for her! But what was the thing he thus glorified? Liberty to go where you pleased, do what you liked, say what you chose!--that was all. Of inward liberty, of freedom from mental or spiritual oppression, from passion, from prejudice, from envy, from jealousy, from selfishness, from unfairness, from ambition, from false admiration, from the power of public opinion, from any motive energy save that of love and truth--a freedom of which outward freedom is scarce the shadow--of such liberty, for all the good books he had read, for all the good poems he had admired, Richard had not yet begun to dream, not to say _think_. Then again, he would write about love, and he had never been in love in his life! All he knew of love was the pleasure of imagining himself the object of a tall, dark-eyed, long-haired, devoted woman's admiration. He had never even thought whether he was worthy of being loved. He was indeed more worthy of love than many to whom it is freely given; but he knew no more about it, I say, than a chicken in the shell knows of the blue sky. The shabby spinster, living with her cousin the baker in the house opposite, knew a hundred times better than he what the word _love_ meant: she had a history, he had none.