The moor was
ever most to my liking. I was born on the edge of it, and once
its majesty has sunk into a human soul, that soul is forever after
attuned to it. How little we have the making of ourselves. And
how much greater the need that we should make of that little the
most. All my days I have been preaching against heredity as the
arch-enemy of hope and effort, and here is mine, holding me fast.
When I see, rising out of the dark moor, the lonely cairn that
sheltered the bones of my fathers before the White Christ preached
peace to their land, a great yearning comes over me. There I want
to lay mine. There I want to sleep, under the heather where the
bees hum drowsily in the purple broom at noonday and white shadows
walk in the night. Mist from the marshes they are, but the people
think them wraiths. Half heathen yet, am I? Yes, if to yearn for
the soil whence you sprang is to be a heathen, heathen am I, not
half, but whole, and will be all my days.
But not so. He is the heathen who loves not his native land. Thor
long since lost his grip on the sons of the vikings.
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