The water bubbled pleasantly in the great pool, and an old
house thrust a pretty gable out over lilacs clubbed with purple
bloom. The beauty of the place was put to my lips, like a cup of
the waters of comfort. The sadness was the drift of human life out
of sweet places such as this, into the town that overflowed the
meadows with its avenues of mean houses, where the railway station,
with its rows of stained trucks, its cindery floor, its smoking
engines, buzzed and roared with life.
But the pessimism of one who sees the simple life fading out, the
ancient quietude invaded, the country caught in the feelers of the
town, is not a real pessimism at all, or rather it is a pessimism
which results from a deficiency of imagination, and is only a
matter of personal taste, perhaps of personal belatedness. Twelve
generations of my own family lived and died as Yorkshire yeomen-
farmers, and my own preference is probably a matter of instinctive
inheritance. The point is not what a few philosophers happen to
like, but what humanity likes, and what it is happiest in liking.
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