Suburbs divide a city from the fields as walls did never. He of old went
from a little town, close and serried as a new box of toys, with one step
into the unsmirched country, carrying an unsated heart. Refreshed with
the animating compulsion of changeful life were man and woman, and much
like their child in a constant capacity for unique experiences, unique
days, years that are separate, known, and distinguishable, and not only
separate but long.

Indeed, some of us who travel hardly know how to remedy our fugitive,
resembling, hastening, and collapsing seasons, even by means of this
sovereign remedy of travel. It is to be feared that a modern journey is
not always to us so bracing a manner of living as was the untravelled
journey of hard days at home to the ancient islander. To journey as he
did, keeping his feet, with a moving heart against the moving seasons, to
resist, to withstand, widened the hours; but his posterity are taking all
means to narrow their own, even on the railway. To go the same way every
year, for instance, is to lose, when a few such years are gone, nearly
all the gain to life. To take no heed at all of the way, but merely to
be by any means at the end of the travelling, to sleep or go by night,
and to calculate Europe by hours, half-hours, junctions, and dining-cars,
is but to close up the time as though you closed a telescope. A long
railway journey and a long motor journey may be taken with the flight of
time as well as against it, and the habit of summaries can use these too
to its own end. Precipitate, unresisting, are the day in the train and
the heedless night. We love to reproach ourselves with living at too
great a speed, having, perhaps, no sense of the second meaning of the
phrase. Medicine may, perhaps, fulfil her promise of giving us a few
more years, but habit derides her by making each year a scanty gift.

Much, too, of the spirit of time is lost to us because we will not let