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The Spirit of Place and Other Essays by Alice Christiana Thompson Meynell
page 57 of 66 (86%)
yourself or than any meaner burden. You lift the world, you raise the
horizon; you give a signal for the distance to stand up. It is like the
scene in the Vatican when a Cardinal, with his dramatic Italian hands,
bids the kneeling groups to arise. He does more than bid them. He lifts
them, he gathers them up, far and near, with the upward gesture of both
arms; he takes them to their feet with the compulsion of his expressive
force. Or it is as when a conductor takes his players to successive
heights of music. You summon the sea, you bring the mountains, the
distances unfold unlooked-for wings and take an even flight. You are but
a man lifting his weight upon the upward road, but as you climb the
circle of the world goes up to face you.

Not here or there, but with a definite continuity, the unseen unfolds.
This distant hill outsoars that less distant, but all are on the wing,
and the plain raises its verge. All things follow and wait upon your
eyes. You lift these up, not by the raising of your eyelids, but by the
pilgrimage of your body. "Lift thine eyes to the mountains." It is then
that other mountains lift themselves to your human eyes.

It is the law whereby the eye and the horizon answer one another that
makes the way up a hill so full of universal movement. All the landscape
is on pilgrimage. The town gathers itself closer, and its inner harbours
literally come to light; the headlands repeat themselves; little cups
within the treeless hills open and show their farms. In the sea are many
regions. A breeze is at play for a mile or two, and the surface is
turned. There are roads and curves in the blue and in the white. Not a
step of your journey up the height that has not its replies in the steady
motion of land and sea. Things rise together like a flock of
many-feathered birds.

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