I left the inn in rather a turbid humour.  Moving homeward by a new way, I presently found myself on the side of a little valley, in which lay a farm and an orchard.  The apple trees were in full bloom, and, as I stood gazing, the sun, which had all that day been niggard of its beams, burst forth gloriously.  For what I then saw, I have no words; I can but dream of the still loveliness of that blossomed valley.  Near me, a bee was humming; not far away, a cuckoo called; from the pasture of the farm below came a bleating of lambs.

XVI.

I am no friend of the people.  As a force, by which the tenor of the time is conditioned, they inspire me with distrust, with fear; as a visible multitude, they make me shrink aloof, and often move me to abhorrence.  For the greater part of my life, the people signified to me the London crowd, and no phrase of temperate meaning would utter my thoughts of them under that aspect.  The people as country-folk are little known to me; such glimpses as I have had of them do not invite to nearer acquaintance.  Every instinct of my being is anti-democratic, and I dread to think of what our England may become when Demos rules irresistibly.

Right or wrong, this is my temper.  But he who should argue from it that I am intolerant of all persons belonging to a lower social rank than my own would go far astray.  Nothing is more rooted in my mind than the vast distinction between the individual and the class.  Take a man by himself, and there is generally some reason to be found in him, some disposition for good; mass him with his fellows in the social organism, and ten to one he becomes a blatant creature, without a thought of his own, ready for any evil to which contagion prompts him.  It is because nations tend to stupidity and baseness that mankind moves so slowly; it is because individuals have a capacity for better things that it moves at all.

In my youth, looking at this man and that, I marvelled that humanity had made so little progress.  Now, looking at men in the multitude, I marvel that they have advanced so far.

Foolishly arrogant as I was, I used to judge the worth of a person by his intellectual power and attainment.  I could see no good where there was no logic, no charm where there was no learning.  Now I think that one has to distinguish between two forms of intelligence, that of the brain, and that of the heart, and I have come to regard the second as by far the more important.  I guard myself against saying that intelligence does not matter; the fool is ever as noxious as he is wearisome.  But assuredly the best people I have known were saved from folly not by the intellect but by the heart.  They come before me, and I see them greatly ignorant, strongly prejudiced, capable of the absurdest mis-reasoning; yet their faces shine with the supreme virtues, kindness, sweetness, modesty, generosity.  Possessing these qualities, they at the same time understand how to use them; they have the intelligence of the heart.