have no power; body and intellect being lost in the practice of war
without purpose, and the meditation of words without meaning. Men
learned the dexterity with sword and syllogism, which they mistook for
education, within cloister and tilt-yard; and looked on all the broad
space of the world of God mainly as a place for exercise of horses, or
for growth of food.

There is a beautiful type of this neglect of the perfectness of the
Earth's beauty, by reason of the passions of men, in that picture of
Paul Uccello's of the battle of Sant' Egidio,[23] in which the armies
meet on a country road beside a hedge of wild roses; the tender red
flowers tossing above the helmets, and glowing beneath the lowered
lances. For in like manner the whole of Nature only shone hitherto for
man between the tossing of helmet-crests; and sometimes I cannot but
think of the trees of the earth as capable of a kind of sorrow, in
that imperfect life of theirs, as they opened their innocent leaves in
the warm springtime, in vain for men; and all along the dells of
England her beeches cast their dappled shade only where the outlaw
drew his bow, and the king rode his careless chase; and by the sweet
French rivers their long ranks of poplar waved in the twilight, only
to show the flames of burning cities on the horizon, through the
tracery of their stems; amidst the fair defiles of the Apennines, the
twisted olive-trunks hid the ambushes of treachery; and on their
valley meadows, day by day, the lilies which were white at the dawn
were washed with crimson at sunset.

And indeed I had once purposed, in this work, to show what kind of
evidence existed respecting the possible influence of country life on
men; it seeming to me, then, likely that here and there a reader would
perceive this to be a grave question, more than most which we contend