If I resisted these debilitating influences, it was through no particular virtue of my own:  it was rather through what I may call a kind of earth-hunger.  I had an obstinate craving for fresh air, unimpeded movement, outdoor life.  I wanted the earth, and I wanted to live in the close embrace of the earth.  Some ancestor of mine must have been a hermit on a mountain, a gipsy, or a peasant:  I know not which, but something of the temperament of all three had been bequeathed to me.  The smell of fresh-turned earth was a smell that revived in me a portion of my nature that had seemed dead; a flower set me dreaming of solitary woods; and I found myself watching clouds and weather-signs as though my bread depended on their lenience.  The first time I saw a mountain I burst into tears, an act which astonished me no less than my companions.  I could offer no explanation of my conduct, but I felt as though the mountain called me.  I said to myself, ’There is my home, yonder is the earth of which my corporeal part is fashioned; it is there that I should live and die.’  Even a London park in the first freshness of a summer morning produced these sensations; and those rare excursions which I took into the genuine country left me aching for days afterwards with an exquisite pain.  I often imagined myself living as Wordsworth did in Dove Cottage, as Thoreau did in the Walden Woods, and the vision was delightful.  I took an agricultural paper, and read it diligently, not because it was of the least practical utility to me, but because its simple details of country life seemed to me a kind of poetry.  In my rambles I never saw a lovely site without at once going to work to build an imaginary cottage on it, and the views I had from the windows of my dream-cottages were more real to me than the actual prospects on which I looked every day.  I have even gone so far as to seek the offices of land-agents, and haggle over the price of land which I never meant to buy, for the mere pleasure of fancying it was mine; and this kind of game was long pursued, for land-agents are a numerous tribe, and when one discovered my imposture, there was always another ready to accept me as a capitalist in search of the picturesque.  In short, to possess one small fragment of the world’s surface; to have a hut, a cabin, or a cottage that was verily my own, to eat the fruits of my own labour on the soil—­this seemed to me the crown and goal of all human felicity.  Conscript of the city as I was, drilled and driven daily in the grim barrack-yard of despotic civilisation, yet I was a deserter at heart; an earth-hunger as rapacious and intense as that of any French or Irish peasant burned in my bones, and, like the peasant conscript that I truly was, my dreams were all of green pastures and running streams, and the happy loneliness of open spaces under open skies.