The clouds fly overhead still, and the waves curdle in the blue beneath; the smell of the newmown grass comes, and the tall white cliffs stand up.

All depends upon a Word spoken.

Do you think perhaps that there is no answer? do you think that the high lighthouses looking out over the water, the sea itself careering beyond them, that the ploughed lands, and the rocks that are hewn into great cities, are indifferent to who own, to who trespass upon them? that they are dumb, dead, and of no account?

Do you think that they have nothing to say to all this, that they will not deliver themselves upon whom they choose, that they have it not in their power to bless and to curse, ah! that they cannot repay love a hundredfold?

Do you not know that the streets, houses, public buildings of the city where you live, have tongues, arms, eyes? that they are on the watch? that the trees and streams around you are alive with answers, and that the common clay knows the tread of its true owner?

Do you think that England or any land will rise into life, will display her surpassing beauty, will pour out her love, to the touch of false owners—to people who finger banknotes, who make traffic, buying and selling her, who own by force of titledeeds, laws, police—who yet deny her, turning their backs upon her winds and her waves, and ashamed to touch her soil with their hands?

Do you think that she will arise to the call of these? O do you not know how she yearns for the mastery of her true owners, how she leans herself backward, displaying her charms, inviting—breathing courage even into faint souls to know their manhood—to come upon her boldly, to let none stand between?

O know well that it shall be. That the land they dwell on, that the Earth, for whatsoever people is worthy, shall become impossible to be separated from them—even in thought.

* * * * *

Of those who are truly the People, they are jealous of their land; the woods and the fields and the open sea are covered with their love—inseparable from life.

Every hedgerow, every old lumb and coppice, the nature of the soils in every field and part of a field, the suffs, the bedrock, pastures, ploughlands and fallows; the quarries and places of the best stone for roadmending, building, walling, roofing, draining; the best stuff for mending footpaths; the best water for miles round, and the taste and quality of the various wells and springs; the clays for puddling and for brickburning, the basseting out and dips of the beds; the cattle and livestock up and down, their various breeds, treatment and condition; the moors, forests, streams, rivers, seacoasts, familiar by sunlight, moonlight, starlight, and on dark nights—every nook and corner of them; the old trees and their histories, the waterside trees, and where pheasants frequently roost, and the places for netting rabbits and hares, or for spearing trout by lantern-light; or where the crab-apple and cluster-berry and mountain-flax and agrimony grow;

The haunts of the wild duck and snipe, the decoy of the corncrake, the nests of the storm-cock and the water-hen and the pewit; the legends told of old hollows and caves and crags; the bold and beautiful headlands, the taste of the air upon them; the old streets in the towns, and their histories, and the histories of the houses in them, and of those who lived in the houses; the old villages and their traditions, customs, specialties, notorious characters, feasts and frolics;

The knowledge of the arts of sea and river fishing, oyster and scallop dredging, the trawl, the seine and the drift-net, farming, fruit-growing, timbergrowing pilling and dressing, canal-making, sea-walling, ship-building, irrigation; the great crafts in stone, wood, iron—of the mason’s, the smith’s, the joiner’s, the tool-maker’s work; of the clean use of tools, of all faithful and perfect work, and the joy and majesty that comes of it—

Everything that the land has—calls an answer in the breasts of the people, and quickly grows love for the use of those that live on it.

Without this love no People can exist; this is the creation nourishment and defence of Nations. It is this that shall save England (as it has saved Ireland); which ultimately—of the very Earth—shall become the nurse of Humanity.

* * * * *

Between a great people and the earth springs a passionate attachment, lifelong—and the earth loves indeed her children, broad-breasted, broad-browed, and talks with them night and day, storm and sunshine, summer and winter alike.

[Here indeed is the key to the whole secret of education.]

Owners and occupiers then fall into their places; the trees wave proud and free upon the headlands; the little brooks run with a wonderful new music under the brambles and the grass.

[Determined—is the word henceforth—to worship nothing, no ownership, which is unreal; no title-deeds, money-smells, respectabilities, authorities;

To be arrogant, unpersuadable, faithful, free—not unworthy of the trees waving upon the high tops and of the earth rolling through the starlit night.]

Government and laws and police then fall into their places—the earth gives her own laws; Democracy just begins to open her eyes and peep! and the rabble of unfaithful bishops, priests, generals, landlords, capitalists, lawyers, kings, queens, patronisers and polite idlers goes scuttling down into general oblivion.

Faithfulness emerges, self-reliance, self-help, passionate comradeship.

* * * * *

Freedom emerges, the love of the land—the broad waters, the air, the undulating fields, the flow of cities and the people therein, their faces and the looks of them no less than the rush of the tides and the slow hardy growth of the oak and the tender herbage of spring and stiff clay and storms and transparent air.

* * * * *

All depends upon a word spoken or unspoken.

The clouds fly overhead still, and the smell of the new-mown grass is wafted by. It comes and recedes again.

I hear the awful syllable Change, and see all things, qualities, impersonations, gliding from the embraces of their own names; but I hear beyond;

I hear beyond the sound of the hone and strickle, and look in the eyes of the Mower, under the shade of his broad straw hat.

* * * * *

It comes and recedes again, and comes nearer.

The little waves lip up against the great black ship as she glides down river—

O sailor sitting on a plank over the side, beware!

The ship itself, the rigging, the tidal river, the docks, the wharves, and long busy streets, and country beyond—the shows of life and death—

Who makes and who unmakes them?

* * * * *

I touch you lightly. I am the spray.

I touch you that you remember, and forget not who you are.