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Updated: June 29, 2025
Pass beyond the narrow retreats of your evil and corrupt desires, and advance into the vast immensity of the realm of God, and abide ye in the meads of sanctity and of detachment, that the fragrance of your deeds may lead the whole of mankind to the ocean of God’s unfading glory.
"Fair these broad meads these hoary woods are grand; But we are exiles from our father's land." Silence fell upon them all after that. Mamma's white hands dropped from the guitar and slipped under Papa's arm; Prudence thought in her dreamy way of the little Canadian; Mollie remembered the American soldiers and their song; Hugh's mind was full to the brim of boats and rafts and ships.
Pausing in the midst of the lawns, and looking upward to the sweeps of wood which surrounded me, I addressed my orisons to the genius of the place, and prayed that I might once more return into its bosom, and be permitted to bring you along with me, for surely such meads, such groves, were formed for our enjoyment!
Our way is along Airedale, now a highway of toil and trade, desolated by the need of hungry poverty and greed of hungrier wealth; meads are replaced by blocks of grimy huts, groves are supplanted by factory chimneys that assoil earth and heaven, the one "shining" stream is filthy with the refuse of many mills.
Then there are slow readers, who plod along through a book, sentence by sentence, putting in a mark conscientiously where they left off to-day, so as to begin at the self-same spot to-morrow; fast readers, who gallop through a book, as you would ride a flying bicycle on a race; drowsy readers, to whom a book is only a covert apology for a nap, and who pretend to be reading Macaulay or Herbert Spencer only to dream between the leaves; sensitive readers, who cannot abide the least noise or interruption when reading, and to whose nerves a foot-fall or a conversation is an exquisite torture; absorbed readers, who are so pre-occupied with their pursuit that they forget all their surroundings the time of day, the presence or the voices of others, the hour for dinner, and even their own existence; credulous readers, who believe everything they read because it is printed in a book, and swallow without winking the most colossal lying; critical and captious readers, who quarrel with the blunders or the beliefs of their author, and who cannot refrain from calling him an idiot or an ass and perhaps even writing him down so on his own pages; admiring and receptive readers, who find fresh beauties in a favorite author every time they peruse him, and even discover beautiful swans in the stupidest geese that ever cackled along the flowery meads of literature; reverent readers, who treat a book as they would treat a great and good man, considerately and politely, carefully brushing the dust from a beloved volume with the sleeve, or tenderly lifting a book fallen to the floor, as if they thought it suffered, or felt harm; careless and rough readers, who will turn down books on their faces to keep the place, tumble them over in heaps, cram them into shelves never meant for them, scribble upon the margins, dogs-ear the leaves, or even cut them with their fingers all brutal and intolerable practices, totally unworthy of any one pretending to civilization.
The peasants who tilled the earth by the Upper and Lower Nile, the shepherds who kept their flocks in the Arabian desert, in Syria, or on the Silphium meads of Cyrenaica, the wood-cutters of Lebanon and Pontus, the mountaineers of Hispania and Sardinia, the brokers, merchants, and skippers of every port on the Mediterranean, were bound by these threads to the villa on the shore of Mareotis, and felt the tie when the master there docile as a boy to his mother's will tightened or released his hold.
The men thereof had widened and deepened the Weltering Water about them, and had bridged it over to the plain meads; and athwart the throat of the space left clear by the water they had built them a strong wall though not very high, with a gate amidst and a tower on either side thereof.
But when they rode down into the dale, they saw the plain meads below the Tower all bright with tents and booths, and much folk moving about amidst them; here and there amidst the roofs of cloth withal was showing the half finished frame of a timber house a-building.
It is very evident that the men of Gotham were of "honest" Jack Falstaff's opinion that the better part of valour is discretion: On a time there was a man of Gotham a-mowing in the meads and found a great grasshopper. He cast down his scythe, and did run home to his neighbours, and said that there was a devil in the field that hopped in the grass.
Bates, thence to pay a visit of polite canvass at the Kennels, and was now returning homeward by the lanes, he heard a dismal chorus of cries in the Mill meads. Forcing his clumsy horse through a gap in the hedge, he galloped along the sodden field tracks to the shifting scene of commotion.
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