File:The Old Road (1904) (14576498030).jpg

Identifier: cu31924028008229 (find matches)
Title: The Old Road
Year: 1904 (1900s)
Authors: Belloc, Hilaire, 1870-1953 Hyde, William Henry, 1858-1925, illus
Subjects: Roads
Publisher: London, A. Constable
Contributing Library: Cornell University Library
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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the loveof a good land—all these are increased or given by the pursuitof this kind of learning. Visions or intimations are confirmed.It is excellent to see perpetual agony and failure perpetuallybreeding the only enduring things; it is excellent to see thecrimes we know ground under the slow wheels whose ponderousadvance we can hardly note during the flash of one human life.One may say that historical learning grants men glimpses oflife completed and a whole; and such a vision should be thechief solace of whatever is mortal and cut off imperfectly fromfulfilment. Now of all that study the chief charm lies in mere antiquity.No one truly loves history who is not more exalted accordingto the greater age of the new things he finds. Though thingsare less observable as they are farther away, yet their appealis directly increased by such a distance in a manner which allknow though none can define it. It is not illusion; perhapsan ultimate reality stands out when the details are obscured.6
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a,o o FASCINATION OF ANTIQUITY At any rate it is the appeal which increases as we pass furtherfrom the memories of childhood, or from the backward visionof those groups of mountain which seem to rise higher andmore awfully into the air as we abandon them across theplains. Antiquity of that degree conveys—I cannot pretendto say how—echoes which are exactly attuned to whatever isleast perishable in us. After the present and manifold voice ofReligion to which these echoes lead, and with which in a sensethey merge, I know of nothing more nobly answering the per-petual questioning of a man. Nor of all the vulgar follies aboutus is any more despicable than that which regards the futurewith complacency, and finds nothing but imperfection in thatinnocent, creative, and wondering past which the antiquariesand geologists have revealed to us. For my part I desired to step exactly in the footprints ofsuch ancestors. I believed that, as I followed their hesitationsat the river-crossings, as I

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