ings. We cease to exercise our minds on them, we cease to ask ourselves questions; and in order to attain a condition of mental activity again, we have positively to withdraw from our ordinary surroundings, and to put ourselves where the freshness and novelty of our surroundings may excite us to think and use our intelligence in a natural, spontaneous way.
I wish to make a few remarks to you about the questions which may naturally be suggested by a country. I do not mean England in particular, but any country in which we may happen to find ourselves. I will make my fragmentary remarks under a few general headings.
First of all each country has general natural features of its own. These differ very markedly; I do not think anybody understands how much they differ till he has been to some other country than his own. The country which most opened my eyes to the beauty of England and to the causes which have created English life was Russia. In Russia I first understood what it must be to live in one vast unending plain, with no features, no natural break whatever in the scenery, nothing to cut the outline of the horizon. The feeling that it would be possible to go on for hundreds of miles, with no change in the surrounding features, nothing which could suggest a new idea to the mind, produced a sense of monotony which we in England can never understand. I merely give you this as an instance of the way in which inevitably the great features of a country do form and affect the minds of the people who live in it.
