"The Other Side of the Hedge" is a 1911 allegorical sketch by E. M. Forster, included in the same year's short story collection The Celestial Omnibus.

[1] The story is a dreamlike first-person narrative by an unnamed young man who has just turned twenty-five, and who has spent his entire life walking down a narrow path or road bounded by two tall hedges of dead, thorny shrubbery.

The narrator grows exhausted from walking, sits on a milestone to catch his breath, collapses, and in a daze drags himself through the thorny hedge.

He discovers that the landscape on the other side of the hedge is pleasant and bucolic, with green rolling hills and fields inhabited by people who do not compete with one another and are not in a hurry to get anywhere.

The older man shows him to a gate of translucent horn in the hedge, and the increasingly conflicted narrator expresses a determination to return to the road, but - at the last possible instant - desists, and lays down in a meadow and falls asleep.