the desire of neighbourship grows keen.  One is cheered even by the comradeship of his own shadow.  It becomes necessary to talk aloud merely to gain assurance that one lives.  So ghost-like appears man’s march across the fields of Time, that some active expression of physical sensation becomes imperative, in order to recover evidence of one’s physical existence; and thrice welcome, like the violence offered to the half-drowned, is any kind of buffet which breaks the dream, and sets the nerves tingling in the certainty of contact with men who breathe and live.

The easy and ostensible remedy for such a state of mind is immediate retreat to the reassuring hum of cities:  the more difficult but real remedy is the reassurance of one’s own identity.  Many people take the first course without admitting it; alleging the lack of intercourse or convenience in country life, whereas the real truth is that contact with the steadfast indifference of Nature has proved wounding to their egoism.  A vain man cannot maintain his sense of self-importance in the centre of a vast moor, or amid the threatening bulk of giant hills.  He looks upon nothing that respects him.  He can find nothing subservient to him.  Therefore he flies to the crowded haunts of men, and the porter touching his hat to him for a prospective twopence at the railway station, is the welcome confessor of his disallowed divinity.  It is, alas! the most common and humbling feature of human nature that we all stiffen our backs with pride when the knee of some fellow-creature is crooked in homage to us, although that homage may be bought for twopence!  No wonder that the man in whose character vanity is the chief essence cannot long endure contact with Nature; Nature respects no man, and laughs in the face of the strutting egoist.  But if a man will live long enough with Nature to become reconciled to her impassivity, he begins to recover self-respect, by recovering the conviction of his own identity.  He has that within himself which Nature has not, the faculty of consciousness.  He is but a trifling atom in the scheme of things, but he is a thinking atom.  He sees also that all living creatures have an identity of their own.  Each goes about the scheme of life in deliberate wisdom.  Why should he complain of insignificance when the bird, the flower, the horse that drags the plough, the beaver in the stream, the spider on the wall, make no complaint; each accomplishing its task as intently as though it were the one task the world wanted done?  In the life of the merest insect are toils as great, and vicissitudes as tragic, as in the most heroic human life, and to see so much is to attach a new dignity to all kinds of life.  The bird building its nest is doing precisely the same thing as the man who builds his house, and with an equal skill of architecture.  The flower, fighting for its life, is engaged in the same struggle as man, for whom every breath and pulse-beat is a victory