myself living as Wordsworth did in Dove Cottage, as Thoreau did in the
Walden Woods, and the vision was delightful. I took an agricultural
paper, and read it diligently, not because it was of the least
practical utility to me, but because its simple details of country life
seemed to me a kind of poetry. In my rambles I never saw a lovely site
without at once going to work to build an imaginary cottage on it, and
the views I had from the windows of my dream-cottages were more real to
me than the actual prospects on which I looked every day. I have even
gone so far as to seek the offices of land-agents, and haggle over the
price of land which I never meant to buy, for the mere pleasure of
fancying it was mine; and this kind of game was long pursued, for
land-agents are a numerous tribe, and when one discovered my imposture,
there was always another ready to accept me as a capitalist in search
of the picturesque. In short, to possess one small fragment of the
world's surface; to have a hut, a cabin, or a cottage that was verily
my own, to eat the fruits of my own labour on the soil--this seemed to
me the crown and goal of all human felicity. Conscript of the city as
I was, drilled and driven daily in the grim barrack-yard of despotic
civilisation, yet I was a deserter at heart; an earth-hunger as
rapacious and intense as that of any French or Irish peasant burned in
my bones, and, like the peasant conscript that I truly was, my dreams
were all of green pastures and running streams, and the happy
loneliness of open spaces under open skies.

This kind of earth-hunger is, I believe, not common among English
people to-day; if it were, the tide of life would not set so steadily
townward as it does. The class in which it existed most strongly was
the yeoman class, and this is a class which has practically
disappeared. In my youth I knew half a dozen persons of this class, to
whom towns were genuinely abhorrent. They would come to London once or