The Dead and the Living

The last was indeed in essence a small thing, but was running to such a
great length it had to be ended before my selected best inscriptions
were used up, also before the true answer to the question: "Why, if
inscriptions do not greatly interest me, do I haunt churchyards?" was
given. Let me give it now: it will serve as a suitable conclusion to
what has already been said on the subject in this and in a former book.

When we have sat too long in a close, hot, brilliantly-lighted, over-
crowded room, a sense of unutterable relief is experienced on coming
forth into the pure, fresh, cold night and filling our lungs with air
uncontaminated with the poisonous gases discharged from other lungs. An
analogous sense of immense relief, of escape from confinement and
joyful liberation, is experienced mentally when after long weeks or
months in London I repair to a rustic village. Yet, like the person who
has in his excitement been inhaling poison into his system for long
hours, I am not conscious of the restraint at the time. Not consciously
conscious. The mind was too exclusively occupied with itself--its own
mind affairs. The cage was only recognised as a cage, an unsuitable
habitation, when I was out of it. An example, this, of the eternal
disharmony between the busy mind and nature--or Mother Nature, let us
say; the more the mind is concentrated on its own business the blinder
we are to the signals of disapproval on her kindly countenance, the
deafer to her warning whispers in our ear.

The sense of relief is chiefly due to the artificiality of the
conditions of London or town life, and no doubt varies greatly in
strength in town and country-bred persons; in me it is so strong that
on first coming out to where there are woods and fields and hedges, I
am almost moved to tears.

We have recently heard the story of the little East-end boy on his
holiday in a quiet country spot, who exclaimed: "How full of sound the
country is! Now in London we can't hear the sound because of the
noises." And as with sound--the rural sounds that are familiar from of
old and find an echo in us--so with everything: we do not hear nor see
nor smell nor feel the earth, which he is, physically and mentally, in
such per-period, the years that run to millions, that it has "entered
the soul"; an environment with which he is physically and mentally, in
such perfect harmony that it is like an extension of himself into the
surrounding space. Sky and cloud and wind and rain, and rock and soil
and water, and flocks and herds and all wild things, with trees and
flowers--everywhere grass and everlasting verdure--it is all part of
men, and is me, as I sometimes feel in a mystic mood, even as a
religious man in