seen your sham idyls, your tinsel Arcadias.  We have tired of their stuffy atmosphere, their dazzling jets, their weary ways, their gaudy dresses; we shun the sunken cheeks, the lack-lustre eyes, the heart-sick souls of your painted goddesses.  We love not the fetid air, thick and hot with human breath, and reeking with tobacco smoke, of your modern Parnassus—­ a Parnassus whose crags were reared and shaped by the hands of the stage-carpenter!  Your studied dalliance with your venal muses is little to our taste.  Your halls are too stifling with carbonic acid gas; for us, we breathe oxygen.

And the oxygen of the hill-tops is purer, keener, rarer, more ethereal.  It is rich in ozone.  Now, ozone stands to common oxygen itself as the clean-cut metal to the dull and leaden exposed surface.  Nascent and ever renascent, it has electrical attraction; it leaps to the embrace of the atom it selects, but only under the influence of powerful affinities; and what it clasps once, it clasps for ever.  That is the pure air which we drink in on the heather-clad heights—­not the venomous air of the crowded casino, nor even the close air of the middle-class parlour.  It thrills and nerves us.  How we smile, we who live here, when some dweller in the mists and smoke of the valley confounds our delicate atmosphere, redolent of honey and echoing the manifold murmur of bees, with that stifling miasma of the gambling hell and the dancing saloon!  Trust me, dear friend, the moorland air is far other than you fancy.  You can wander up here along the purple ridges, hand locked in hand with those you love, without fear of harm to yourself or your comrade.  No Bloom of Ninon here, but fresh cheeks like the peach-blossom where the sun has kissed it:  no casual fruition of loveless, joyless harlots, but life-long saturation of your own heart’s desire in your own heart’s innocence.  Ozone is better than all the champagne in the Strand or Piccadilly.  If only you will believe it, it is purity and life and sympathy and vigour.  Its perfect freshness and perpetual fount of youth keep your age from withering.  It crimsons the sunset and lives in the afterglow.  If these delights thy mind may move, leave, oh, leave the meretricious town, and come to the airy peaks.  Such joy is ours, unknown to the squalid village which spreads its swamps where the poet’s silver Thames runs dull and leaden.

Have we never our doubts, though, up here on the hill-tops?  Ay, marry, have we!  Are we so sure that these gospels we preach with all our hearts are the true and final ones?  Who shall answer that question?  For myself, as I lift up my eyes from my paper once more, my gaze falls first on the golden bracken that waves joyously over the sandstone ridge without, and then, within, on a little white shelf where lies the greatest book of our greatest philosopher.  I open it at random and consult its sortes.  What comfort and counsel has Herbert Spencer for those who venture to see otherwise than the mass of their contemporaries?