Sunken road

“ The sun is new risen and the dew still glistens on the leaves of trees and the petals of flowers. A road like a grey ribbon thrusts into the quiet mountain gorge—a stone-paved road which yet looks as soft as velvet, so that one almost has a desire to stroke it. ”

“ The other day I passed along a road when the sun was shining, a broad daylighty forenoon sun-effect, and yet that stretch of road only received the full force of it on one portion; silver-grey it spread from my feet into distance; in mid-distance it took the gleam of quicksilver upon it, growing blue-grey as it receded, and fawn-coloured as it neared me, darkening with the ruts and markings of the foreground—detail always produces darkness unless the light shines full and nearly upon it, and then it will be full of acute shadow and strong light. ”

“ There is an old-fashioned country roadhouse, such as we knew before the landscape gardener and the boulevard fiend were turned loose upon our rural towns. To follow their windings is heaven enough for me. A fringe of buttercups to fence the way, thickets of underbrush to darken the near distance, constant little ups and downs where the road slips into hollow to follow the call of a romping brook or climb a hill to watch for the sea. Wintergreen berries and russet patches everywhere, and the [14] snow of blackberry bushes in bloom far as the eye can travel. ”

“ FROM PARIS TO CHATEAU THIERRY The road winds out its weary way, Where fields are torn with sorrow; It is a road of yesterday, That dreams no fair tomorrow. It is silent, saddened road, A lonely road to follow; For in its dust red rivers flowed, And now, from every hollow, The crows rise up in sullen flight The crows that, blackly flying Against the skyline, speak of night, And bitterness, and dying. It is a road that creeps around Farmhouses that lie broken ”

“ He knows they will never return. Far off—on a smooth dark road—he hears them faintly. The road, like a sombre river, quietly flowing, Moves among murmurous walls. A deeper breath Swells them to sound: he hears his steps more clearly. ”

“ We diverge from the highway into a mountain road, which resembles the body of a serpent when in motion, going literally up one elevation, and down another. To the right, deep glens, gullies, and ravines; but the darkness with which they are now filled is thick and impervious to the eye, and nothing breaks the silence about us but the rush of the mountain torrent over some jutting precipice below us. ”

“ Nature has adopted them among her own works, and the road that mounts the hill to meet the sky-line, or winds away into mystery through the woodland, seems to be veritably her own highway leading us to the stars, luring us to her secret places. And just as her rocks and trees, we know not how or why, have come to have for us a strange spiritual suggestiveness, so the vanishing road has gained a meaning for us beyond its use as the avenue of mortal wayfaring, the link of communication between village and village and city and city ”

“ Some ten minutes’ driving, up a hill or two, while lamps grow less and less frequent, and we are out of the town, rolling along a road which is as good as an ordinary English turnpike-road—passing every now and then through spots of perfect darkness, where clumps of firs overhang the road on each side, and new again looking over a broad spread of water stretching away from our feet, with a row of distant wooded slopes appearing more and more clearly as the moon slowly rises. ”

“ The road rises as it leaves the town, and a little way beyond my windows it climbs to a summit, so that, walking forward, one sees nothing in front but the sharp, slightly curved edge of the road against the sky. Though I have travelled this way so often, each time that I set eyes on the clean cut of the road and the great emptiness beyond, something in me is thrilled, faintly yet perceptibly, like taut wires troubled by a gust of wind. ”

“ And all around them was a bright light, and the light of the stars was darkened. Then the wayfarers saw that there was not one road only, but many side-tracks and by-paths. And each road seemed to some one the shortest road to take. ”

“ One pleasant evening I was sitting on my porch with my dog sleeping near me, and Harriet not far away rocking and sewing, and as I looked out across the quiet fields I could see in the distance a curving bit of the town road. I could see the valley below it and the green hill beyond, and my mind went out swiftly along the country road which I had so recently travelled on foot, and I thought with deep satisfaction of all the people I had met on my pilgrimages—the Country Minister with his problems, the buoyant Stanleys, Bill Hahn the Socialist, the Vedders in their garden, the Brush Peddler. ”

“ Even in the midst of houses, the path suggests school-children with their luncheon-baskets, or workmen seeking eagerly the noonday interval or the twilight rest. A footpath cannot be quite spoiled, so long as it remains such; you can make a road a mere avenue for fast horses or showy women, but this humbler track keeps its simplicity, and if a queen comes walking through it, she comes but as a village maid. ”

“ The ripple of the water in the reeds at the edge of the road, and the sigh of the evening breeze, fluttering the leaves and creaking the yellow canes of the great bamboos, alone stir the silence, which comes as a welcome relief after the toil and excitement of the day; but alas! we have all forgotten the perils of the road at nightfall, and in the sudden darkness, deepened by the shadowy trees, a false step might precipitate cart and passengers into the deep water. ”

“ They swung out into the faintly-shining darkness of the water-road, into which the climbing moon could not look—a darkness crossed and flecked by the red gleamings of the few gondola and sandolo lights abroad at this hour in the quiet street. ”

“ Scattered among the cones and craters which marked the blazing white of the place were the tourists; and the pink and blue of parasols made spots of color. Our arrival gave them something new to look at. Our pack-horses walked in a slow line on the road across the formation, I came in the middle, George behind us, while Sun Road led, his form making among the cameras and parasols the daily sensation which no longer displeased him. As the cameras approached and converged, he rode slowly along and took us beyond the hotel to a place where we dismounted. ”

“ One small street, the Rue Pié, appears to have lost all control over itself, for it dives insanely under another street—houses, road and all—and then rushes down hill in the dark to apparent destruction. There is one lane that is especially picturesque. ”

“ The road, for the entire distance, is one uninterrupted ascent toward the summit of one of the lesser hills on which the village stands, affording from every point—unless when now and then a jutting mountain crag overhangs the path, and for a moment, intercepts the vision—a view of the broad expanse of sea, the valley widening as you rise—each footstep of the ascent adding some new beauty of form and color, light and shadow to the scene. ”

“ For a while the road skirts the edge of a deep glen on the left; it becomes deeper and deeper; there are little fields, and haymakers at work at the bottom; then the slopes change; the heather creeps down; the beck frets and foams, sending its noise upward to your ear; screes and scars intermingle their rugged forms and variations of colour; a waterfall rushes down the crags; and when these have passed before your eyes you find yourself on a desolate summit. ”

“ But to-day there is silence; the sunshine lights up the purple heather and the already yellowing fern; the tall and beautiful larches stand graceful in the stillness. Their lines always flow in pleasant curves; they need no wind to bend them into loveliness of form: so quiet and deserted is the place that the wide highway road is green with vegetation, and the impression of our wheels is the only trace upon them. Looking up, the road—up the hill—it appears green almost from side to side. It is well made and firm, and fit for any traffic ”

“ In real nature, as well as in old landscapes, beneath that impartial daylight in which a whole variegated plain is plunged and saturated, the line of the road leads the eye forth with the vague sense of desire up to the green limit of the horizon. ”

“ It was in the dusk of a summer evening, and the road presently became hedgeless, a white track on a wild, silent hill. The down fell away steeply on one side, and I noticed, as I went along, that little paths went twisting and winding down the turf, pausing by very ancient, low, twisted thorns, and then trickling and turning away towards the dimness of the valley. Somehow, I know not why, these queer, winding paths by the old thorns made my companion and myself think of the People—that is, the fairies—and we turned back again towards Marlborough. ”

“ Thus every traveller on a country road is surrounded by monuments more ancient, more impressive, and more beautiful than the ancient or modern world can show as the production of human hands.
He finds much enjoyment in the study of the forms and characteristics of the different trees by the wayside. If the road passes over highland, on a breezy day he can look down upon or across the tops of undulating forest trees, whose swaying movements remind him of the waves of the sea. ”

“ The road became more animated. Charming villas appeared encircled with cosy little gardens, wooded hills sloped gently upwards behind the houses. They saw once again the expanse of the valley as the waning day rested over meadows and fields. The lamps had been lit in a great empty restaurant garden. A hasty darkness seemed to be stealing down from every quarter simultaneously. They were now at the cross-roads. George and Heinrich got off and lit cigarettes. ”

“ Even in winter, when you have to walk briskly all day, and there is no sitting on any bank of earth or fallen tree to write a fragment or rest, and when there is no sleeping out, but only the prospect of freezing at some wretched coffee-house or inn, the road still lies outside the door of your house full of charm and mystery. You want to know where the roads lead to, and what may be on them beyond the faint horizon’s line. ”

“ The sharp hills, the pleasant deep valleys, the bridges not too well kept, the verdure deep grown along old fences, the houses opening hospitably at the very roadside, all these things I love. They come to me with the same sort of charm and flavour, only vastly magnified, which I find often in the essays of the older writers—those leisurely old fellows who took time to write, REALLY write. The important thing to me about a road, as about life—and literature, is not that it goes anywhere, but that it is livable while it goes. ”

“ While the country round the Peak is wild, bare, and rugged, the line of valleys and dales on which lies the road from Matlock to Burton and Manchester, presents the most charming series of pictures of undulating woodland scenery, adorned by mansions and cottages, that it is possible to imagine. The high road continually runs along the steep side of valleys,—on one side are thick coverts climbing the rocky hill-sides, all variegated with wild flowers, briars, and brushwood ”

“ I should not have spoken of it as "made," for, when it is most characteristic, an English lane has no suggestion of ever having been man-made like other roads. It seems as much a natural feature as the woods or meadows through which it passes; and sometimes, as in Surrey, when it runs between high banks, tunnelling its way under green boughs, it seems more like an old river-bed than a road, whose sides nature has tapestried with ferns and flowers. ”

“ Monday Road, like all the other roads which sink their mutual differences into the so dreary Fulham Road, consists of large, equal-faced houses stuck together in two opposite rows which are separated by about fifteen yards or so of second-hand Tarmac; a road like another, you will mildly say, but you cannot possibly realise its dismal grimness if you have not lived there. ”

“ John's Wood Road, my impatience so completely overpowered me that I stood up in the cab and stretched my head out of the window, to see the end of the journey before we reached it. Just as a church clock in the distance struck the quarter past, we turned into the Forest Road. ”

“ The road was a deep wearisome sandy track, stretching wearisomely into the wearisome pine forest—a species of wilderness more oppressive a thousand times to the senses and imagination than any extent of monotonous prairie, barren steppe, or boundless desert can be; for the horizon there at least invites and detains the eye, suggesting beyond its limit possible change; the lights and shadows and enchanting colours of the sky afford some variety in their movement and change, and the reflections of their tints ”

“ This magnificent road, which from London to Holyhead, is as even as a ‘parquet,’ here runs along the side of the left range of mountains, at about their middle elevation and following all their windings; so that in riding along at a brisk trot or gallop, the traveller is presented at every minute with a completely new prospect; and without changing his position, overlooks the valley now before him, now behind, now at his side. ”

“ Myndert Gerrit looked longest at Middle Point, now a low table of land with water on both sides. A street—or what was to be a street—ran down its middle, from the water to where, at the mainland, it joined the great road that stretched away through the woods to the river—to the great world—to trade and life and fortune. ”