Explore "A Summer Stroll" by Grant Allen on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
MY friend the Poet and I walk the world together on somewhat different principles. It is a fixed belief of his that illusion is far more beautiful than reality. He likes to see the distant hills through some dim veil of mist; he likes to believe the skylark feeds on dew and sunshine, and he is revolted when I explain to him, in spite of Shelley, the actual staples of its unromantic diet. To him, it seems, everything loses just half its beauty when he knows all about it. Analysis, he says, is destructive of pleasure. Only in an imagined and unrealized world can he find the pure elements that delight his fancy.
But to me the actual world as it stands is beautiful. I love to descry the very contour of the hills; I love to watch from afar the saucer-shaped combes on the flanks of the South Downs, when the afternoon light floods and bathes them in its glory. Illusion to my mind is less lovely than reality. Nothing on earth seems more beautiful than Truth. I love to catch her face behind the clouds that conceal her.