the common rebuke.

It has just been said that a park is by no means necessary for the
preparation of a country solitude. Indeed, to make those far and wide
and long approaches and avenues to peace seems to be a denial of the
accessibility of what should be so simple. A step, a pace or so aside,
is enough to lead thither.

A park insists too much, and, besides, does not insist very sincerely. In
order to fulfil the apparent professions and to keep the published
promise of a park, the owner thereof should be a lover of long seclusion
or of a very life of loneliness. He should have gained the state of
solitariness which is a condition of life quite unlike any other. The
traveller who may have gone astray in countries where an almost life-long
solitude is possible knows how invincibly apart are the lonely figures he
has seen in desert places there. Their loneliness is broken by his
passage, it is true, but hardly so to them. They look at him, but they
are not aware that he looks at them. Nay, they look at him as though
they were invisible. Their un-self-consciousness is absolute; it is in
the wild degree. They are solitaries, body and soul; even when they are
curious, and turn to watch the passer-by, they are essentially alone.
Now, no one ever found that attitude in a squire's figure, or that look
in any country gentleman's eyes. The squire is not a life-long solitary.
He never bore himself as though he were invisible. He never had the
impersonal ways of a herdsman in the remoter Apennines, with a blind,
blank hut in the rocks for his dwelling. Millet would not even have
taken him as a model for a solitary in the briefer and milder sylvan
solitudes of France. And yet nothing but a life-long, habitual, and wild
solitariness would be quite proportionate to a park of any magnitude.