downlands, whose heads lift up so proudly, far up aloof from cities.

Sometimes waggoners or shepherds walk along this way, they that have come
into the city from over cloudy ridges, and the townsmen hinder them not,
for there is a tread that troubleth the grass and a tread that troubleth
it not, and each man in his own heart knoweth which tread he hath. And in
the sunlit spaces of the weald and in the wold's dark places, afar from
the music of cities and from the dance of the cities afar, they make there
the music of the country places and dance the country dance. Amiable, near
and friendly appears to these men the sun, and as he is genial to them and
tends their younger vines, so they are kind to the little woodland things
and any rumour of the fairies or old legend. And when the light of some
little distant city makes a slight flush upon the edge of the sky, and the
happy golden windows of the homesteads stare gleaming into the dark, then
the old and holy figure of Romance, cloaked even to the face, comes down
out of hilly woodlands and bids dark shadows to rise and dance, and sends
the forest creatures forth to prowl, and lights in a moment in her bower
of grass the little glowworm's lamp, and brings a hush down over the grey
lands, and out of it rises faintly on far-off hills the voice of a lute.
There are not in the world lands more prosperous and happy than Toldees,
Mondath, Arizim.

From these three little kingdoms that are named the Inner Lands the young
men stole constantly away. One by one they went, and no one knew why they
went save that they had a longing to behold the Sea. Of this longing they
spoke little, but a young man would become silent for a few days, and
then, one morning very early, he would slip away and slowly climb
Poltarnee's difficult slope, and having attained the top pass over and
never return. A few stayed behind in the Inner Lands and became the old
men, but none that had ever climbed Poltarnees from the very earliest