for the great companionship of the sea and sky are all that sailors
need; and many a noble heart has been taught the best it had to learn
between dark stone walls. Still if human life be cast among trees at
all, the love borne to them is a sure test of its purity. And it is a
sorrowful proof of the mistaken ways of the world that the "country,"
in the simple sense of a place of fields and trees, has hitherto been
the source of reproach to its inhabitants, and that the words
"countryman, rustic, clown, paysan, villager," still signify a rude
and untaught person, as opposed to the words "townsman" and "citizen".
We accept this usage of words, or the evil which it signifies,
somewhat too quietly; as if it were quite necessary and natural that
country-people should be rude, and townspeople gentle. Whereas I
believe that the result of each mode of life may, in some stages of
the world's progress, be the exact reverse; and that another use of
words may be forced upon us by a new aspect of facts, so that we may
find ourselves saying: "Such and such a person is very gentle and
kind--he is quite rustic; and such and such another person is very
rude and ill-taught--he is quite urbane."

At all events, cities have hitherto gained the better part of their
good report through our evil ways of going on in the world generally;
chiefly and eminently through our bad habit of fighting with each
other. No field, in the Middle Ages, being safe from devastation, and
every country lane yielding easier passage to the marauders,
peacefully-minded men necessarily congregated in cities, and walled
themselves in, making as few cross-country roads as possible: while
the men who sowed and reaped the harvests of Europe were only the
servants or slaves of the barons. The disdain of all agricultural
pursuits by the nobility, and of all plain facts by the monks, kept
educated Europe in a state of mind over which natural phenomena could