Never more than when we tread some far-spreading solitude and mark the
road stretching on and on into infinite space, or the eye loses it in
some wistful curve behind the fateful foliage of lofty storm-stirred
trees, or as it merely loiters in sunny indolence through leafy copses
and ferny hollows, whatever its mood or its whim, by moonlight or at
morning; never more than thus, eagerly afoot or idly contemplative, are
we impressed by that something that Nature seems to have to tell us,
that something of solemn, lovely import behind her visible face. If we
could follow that vanishing road to its far mysterious end! Should we
find that meaning there? Should we know why it stops at no mere
market-town, nor comes to an end at any seaport? Should we come at last
to the radiant door, and know at last the purpose of all our travel?
Meanwhile the road beckons us on and on, and we walk we know not why or
whither.

Vanishing roads do actually stir such thoughts, not merely by way of
similitude, but just in the same way that everything in Nature similarly
stirs thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls; as moonlit waters stir
them, or the rising of the sun. As I have said, they have come to seem
a part of natural phenomena, and, as such, may prove as suggestive a
starting-point as any other for those speculations which Nature is all
the time provoking in us as to why she affects us thus and thus. These
mighty hills of multitudinous rock, piled confusedly against the sky--so
much granite and iron and copper and crystal, says one. But to the soul,
strangely something besides, so much more. These rolling shapes of
cloud, so fantastically massed and moulded, moving in rhythmic change
like painted music in the heaven, radiant with ineffable glories or
monstrous with inconceivable doom. This sea of silver, "hushed and
halcyon," or this sea of wrath and ravin, wild as Judgment Day. So much