It needs a general survey of the
past, and a knowledge of many unfamiliar conditions in the present, to
appreciate it.
The difficulty of those Eastern moors and hills, for instance, the
resistance they offer to human passage, meets you continually throughout
English history. The engineers of the modern railways could give one a
whole romance of it; the story of every army that has had to cross them,
and of which we have record, bears the same witness. The illusion which
the modern traveller may be under that the barrier is negligible is very
soon dispelled when for his recreation he crosses it by any other methods
than the railway; and perhaps in such an experience of travel nothing more
impresses one in the character of that barrier than the _loneliness_.
There is no other corresponding contrast of men and emptiness that I know
of in Europe.
The great towns lie, enormous, pullulating, millioned in the plains on
either side; they push their limbs up far into the valleys. Between them,
utterly deserted, you have these miles and miles of bare upland, like the
roof of a house between two crowded streets.
Merely to cross the Pennines, driving or on foot, is sufficient to teach
one this. To go the length of the hills along the watershed from the
Peak to Crossfell (few people have done it!) is to get an impression of
desertion and separation which you will match nowhere else in travel,
nowhere else, at least, within touch and almost hearing of great towns.
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