some day there will be a history of england written from the point of view of one parish, or town, or great house. not until there is such a history will all our accumulations of information be justified. it will begin with a geological picture, something large, clear, architectural, not a mass of insignificant names. it must be imaginative: it might, perhaps, lean sometimes upon mr. doughty’s dawn in britain. the peculiar combination of soil and woodland and water determines the direction and position and importance of the ancient trackways; it will determine also the position and size of the human settlements. the early marks of these—the old flint and metal implements, the tombs, the signs of agriculture, the encampments, the dwellings—will have to be clearly described and interpreted. folk-lore, legend, place-names must be learnedly, but bravely and humanly used, so that the historian who has not the extensive sympathy and imagination of a great novelist will have no chance of success. what endless opportunities will he have for really giving life to past times in such matters as the line made by the edge of an old wood with the cultivated land, the shapes of the fields, with their borders of streams or hedge or copse or pond or wall or road, the purpose and interweaving of the roads and footpaths that suggest the great permanent thoughts and the lesser thoughts and dreams of the brain.... as the historic centuries are[148] reached, the action of great events, battles, laws, roads, invasions, upon the parish—and of the parish upon them—must be shown. architecture, with many of its local characteristics still to be traced, will speak as a voice out of the stones of castle, church, manor, farm, barn and bridge. the birds and beasts cannot be left out. the names of the local families—gentle and simple—what histories are in them, in the curt parish registers, in tombstones, in the names of fields and houses and woods. better a thousand errors so long as they are human than a thousand truths lying like broken snail-shells round the anvil of a thrush. if only those poems which are place-names could be translated at last, the pretty, the odd, the romantic, the racy names of copse and field and lane and house. what a flavour there is about the bassetts, the boughtons, the worthys, the tarrants, winterbournes, deverills, manningfords, the suttons: what goodly names of the south country—woodmansterne, hollingbourne, horsmonden, wolstanbury, brockenhurst, caburn, lydiard tregoze, lydiard millicent, clevancy, amesbury, amberley (i once tried to make a beautiful name and in the end it was amberley, in which time had forestalled me); what sweet names penshurst, frensham, firle, nutley, appleshaw, hambledon, cranbrook, fordingbridge, melksham, lambourn, draycot, buscot, kelmscot, yatton, yalding, downe, cowden, iping, cowfold, ashe, liss.... then there are the histories of roads. every traveller in hampshire remembers the road that sways with airy motion and bird-like curves down from the high land of clay and flint through the chalk to the sand and the river. it doubles round the head of a coombe, and the whole descent is through beech[149] woods uninterrupted and all but impenetrable to the eye above or below except where once or twice it looks through an arrow slit to the blue vale and the castled promontory of chanctonbury twenty miles south-east. as the road is a mere ledge on the side of a very steep hill the woods below it hurry down to a precipitous pit full of the glimmering, trembling and murmuring of innumerable leaves and no sight or sound of men. it is said to have been made more than half a century ago to take the place of the rash straight coach road which now enters it near its base. a deeply-worn, narrow and disused track joining it more than half-way down suggests that the lower part was made by the widening of an old road; but much of the upper half is new. certainly the road as it now is, broad and gently bending round the steep coombe, is new, and it was made at the expense of the last of a family which had long owned the manor house near the entrance of the coombe. his were all the hanging beech woods—huge as the sky—upon the hill, and through them the road-makers conducted this noble and pleasant way. but near the top they deviated by a few yards into another estate. the owner would not give way. a lawsuit was begun, and it was not over when the day came for the road to be open for traffic according to the contract or, if not, to pass out of the defaulter’s hands. the day passed; the contract was broken; the speculation had failed, and the tolls would never fill the pockets of the lord of the manor. he was ruined, and left his long white house by the rivulet and its chain of pools, his farms and cottages, his high fruit walls, his uncounted beeches, the home of a hundred owls, his spanish chestnuts above the rocky lane, his horse-chestnut and sycamore[150] stately in groups, his mighty wych elms, his apple trees and all their mistletoe, his walnut trees, and the long bay of sky that was framed by his tall woods east and north and west.

there are many places which nobody can look upon without being consciously influenced by a sense of their history. it is a battlefield, and the earth shows the scars of its old wounds; or a castle or cathedral of distinct renown rises among the oaks; or a manor house or cottage, or tomb or woodland walk that speaks of a dead poet or soldier. then, according to the extent or care of our reading and the clearness of our imagination, we can pour into the groves or on the turf tumultuous or silent armies, or solitary man or woman. it is a deeply-worn coast; the spring tide gnaws the yellow cliff, and the wind files it with unceasing hiss, and the relics of every age, skull and weapon and shroudpin and coin and carven stone, are spread out upon the clean, untrodden sand, and the learned, the imaginative, the fanciful, the utterly unhistoric and merely human man exercises his spirit upon them, and responds, if only for a moment. in some places history has wrought like an earthquake, in others like an ant or mole; everywhere, permanently; so that if we but knew or cared, every swelling of the grass, every wavering line of hedge or path or road were an inscription, brief as an epitaph, in many languages and characters. but most of us know only a few of these unspoken languages of the past, and only a few words in each. wars and parliaments are but dim, soundless, and formless happenings in the brain; toil and passion of generations produce only an enriching of the light within the glades, and a solemnizing of the shadows.

[151]

out of a whole century or age we remember nothing vividly and in a manner that appeals to the eye, except some such picture as that which gerald of wales gives of a welsh prince, cyneuric, son of rhys. he was tall and handsome, fair-complexioned, his hair curled; his dress was a thin cloak, and under that a shirt, his legs and feet being bare, regardless of thistle and brier; a man to whom nature and not art had given his beauty and comely bearing. outside wales, and in ages far removed from the twelfth century, this figure of a man will follow us, and help to animate any wild scene that is coloured by antiquity. it is some such man, his fair hair perhaps exchanged for black, and his nobility more animal and clothed in skins, that we see, if we see a man at all, when we muse deeply upon the old road worn deep into the chalk, among burial mound and encampment; we feel rather than see the innumerable companies of men like this, following their small cattle to the stream or the dew-pond, wearing out the hard earth with their naked feet and trailing ash staves. going up such a road, between steep banks of chalk and the roots and projecting bases of beeches whose foliage meets overhead—a road worn twenty feet deep, and now scarce ever used as a footpath except by fox and hare—we may be half-conscious that we have climbed that way before during the furrowing of the road, and we move as in a dream between this age and that dim one which we vainly strive to recover.

but because we are imperfectly versed in history, we are not therefore blind to the past. the eye that sees the things of to-day, and the ear that hears, the mind that contemplates or dreams, is itself an instrument of an antiquity equal to whatever it is called upon to appre[152]hend. we are not merely twentieth-century londoners or kentish men or welshmen. we belong to the days of wordsworth, of elizabeth, of richard plantagenet, of harold, of the earliest bards. we, too, like taliesin, have borne a banner before alexander, have been with our lord in the manger of the ass, have been in india, and with the “remnant of troia,” and with noah in the ark, and our original country is “the region of the summer stars.” and of these many folds in our nature the face of the earth reminds us, and perhaps, even where there are no more marks visible upon the land than there were in eden, we are aware of the passing of time in ways too difficult and strange for the explanation of historian and zoologist and philosopher. it is this manifold nature that responds with such indescribable depth and variety to the appeals of many landscapes.

we come to a huge, flat-bottomed, grassy coombe, smooth as a racecourse, that winds out of the cornland into the heart of the downs. it is like the bed of a river of great depth. at its entrance beeches clothe either side; but presently they cease, and up the steep juniper slopes go the paths of hares, of the herds and flocks of earliest ages and of the men and women and children also, whose children’s children’s children have forgotten them though not perhaps their philosophy. the grass of the slope is mingled with small sweet herbage, the salad burnet rosy-stemmed, the orange bird’s-foot trefoil, the purple thyme, the fine white flax, the delicatest golden hawk-bit, and basil and marjoram, and rosettes of crimson thistles, all sunny warm and fragrant, glittering and glowing or melting into a simmering haze, musical with grasshoppers and a-flutter with blue butterflies, so that the[153] earth seems to be a thick-furred, genial animal. at length the windings shut out the plain, and the coombe is a green hall roofed by the hot blue sky. its walls are steeper than ever, and the burrowings of the rabbits have streaked the grasses with long splashes—like those made by sea-birds on rocks—of white chalk. the curves of these walls are like those of the flight of the swifts that dive overhead. here there are no human paths, no sign of house, of grave, of herd, of cultivation. it is the world’s end, and the rabbits race up and down as in a dream of solitude.

yet the mind is not discontented and unfed. this is no boundless solitude of ocean where one may take a kind of pleasure

to float for ever with a careless course

and think himself the only being alive.

it is not an end but a beginning that we have reached. these are the elements—pure earth and wind and sunlight—out of which beauty and joy arise, original and ancient, for ever young. their presence restores us not to the middle ages, not to the days of mr. doughty’s heroic princes and princesses of britain,[4] not to any dim arch?ologist’s world of reeking marsh and wood, of mammoth and brutish men, but to a region out of space and out of time in which life and thought and physical health are in harmony with sun and earth, fragrant as the flowers in the grass, blithe as the grasshopper, swift as the hares, divine; and out of it all arises a vision of the man who will embody this thought, a man whom human infelicity, discontented with the past, has placed in a golden age still farther back, for the sufficient reason[154] that in every age he has been a dream, and our dreaming is of the dawn or the night, always disappointed but undaunted by the day that follows. and so no storied valley or hillside is richer in humanity than this coombe. it is one of the countless edens where we are in contact not with the soldier and ploughman and mason that change the surface of the earth, but with prophet and poet who have ever lived to trace to nature and to the early ages the health and vigour of men. there is the greatest antiquity of all, peace and purity and simplicity, and in the midst is the mother earth, the young mother of the world, with a face like ceres before she had lost persephone in the underworld. in fact, so blessed is this solitary hall that after climbing out it is mournful to see the rabbit-worn tunnels and the roman camp on the ridge.

cornwall.

in cornwall, where the wrinkles and angles of the earth’s age are left to show, antiquity plays a giant’s part on every hand. what a curious effect have those ruins, all but invisible among the sands, the sea-blue scabious, the tamarisk and rush, though at night they seem not inaudible when the wild air is full of crying! some that are not nearly as old are almost as magical. one there is that stands near a great water, cut off from a little town and from the world by a round green hill and touched by no road but only by a wandering path. at the foot of this hill, among yellow mounds of sand, under blue sky, the church is dark and alone. it is not very old—not five centuries—and is of plainest masonry: its blunt short spire of slate slabs that leans slightly to one side, with the[155] smallest of perforated slate windows at the base, has a look of age and rusticity. in the churchyard is a rough grey cross of stone—a disc supported by a pillar. it is surrounded by the waving noiseless tamarisk. it looks northward over the sandhills at a blue bay, guarded on the west by tall grey cliffs which a white column surmounts.

for a time the nearer sandhills have rested and clothed themselves in bird’s-foot trefoil, thyme, eyebright and short turf: but once the church was buried beneath them. between the round hill and the church a tiny stream sidles along through a level hiding-place of flags and yellow flag flowers, of purple figwort and purple orchis and green grass.

a cormorant flies low across the sky—that sable bird which seems to belong to the old time, the time of badger and beaver, of ancient men who rose up out of the crags of this coast. to them, when the cuckoo first called one april, came over the blue sea a small brown ship, followed by three seals, and out of it descended a christian from ireland, black-haired, blue-eyed, with ready red lips and deep sweet voice and spoke to them, all alone. he told them of a power that ruled the blue waters and shifting sands, who could move the round green hill to the rock of the white gulls; taller and grimmer than the cloven headland yet sweet and gentle as the fennel above; deep-voiced as the atlantic storm, tender also as the sedgewarbler in the flags below the hill; whose palace was loftier than the blue to which the lark was now soaring, milder and richer than the meadows in may and everlasting; and his attendants were more numerous and bright than the herring under a moon of frost. the milkpails should be fuller and the grass deeper and the corn[156] heavier in the car if they believed in this; the pilchards should be as water boiling in the bay; and they should have wings as of the white birds that lounged about the precipices of the coast. and all the time the three seals lay with their heads and backs above the shallows and watched. perhaps the men believed his word; perhaps they dropped him over the precipice to see whether he also flew like a gull: but here is the church named after him.

all along the coast (and especially where it is lofty and houseless, and on the ledges of the crags the young grey gulls unable to fly bob their heads seaward and try to scream like their parents who wheel far and near with double yodeling cry), there are many rounded barrows looking out to sea. and there are some amidst the sandhills, bare and corrugated by the wind and heaved up like a feather-bed, their edges golden against the blue sky or mangily covered by drab marram grass that whistles wintrily; and near by the blue sea, slightly roughened as by a barrow, sleeps calm but foamy among cinder-coloured isles; donkeys graze on the brown turf, larks rise and fall and curlews go by; a cuckoo sings among the deserted mines. but the barrows are most noble on the high heather and grass. the lonely turf is full of lilac scabious flowers and crimson knapweed among the solid mounds of gorse. the brown-green-grey of the dry summer grass reveals myriads of the flowers of thyme, of stonecrop yellow and white, of pearly eyebright, of golden lady’s fingers, and the white or grey clover with its purest and earthiest of all fragrances. here and there steep tracks descend slantwise among the thrift-grown crags to the sea, or promise to descend but end abruptly in[157] precipices. on the barrows themselves, which are either isolated or in a group of two or three, grow thistle and gorse. they command mile upon mile of cliff and sea. in their sight the great headlands run out to sea and sinking seem to rise again a few miles out in a sheer island, so that they resemble couchant beasts with backs under water but heads and haunches upreared. the cliffs are cleft many times by steep-sided coves, some with broad sand and shallow water among purple rocks, the outlet of a rivulet; others ending precipitously so that the stream suddenly plunges into the black sea among a huddle of sunless boulders. near such a stream there will be a grey farm amid grey outbuildings—with a carved wooden eagle from the wreckage of the cove, or a mermaid, once a figure-head with fair long hair and round bosom, built into the wall of a barn. or there is a briny hamlet grouped steeply on either side of the stream which gurgles among the pebbles down to the feet of the bearded fisherman and the ships a-gleam. or perhaps there is no stream at all, and bramble and gorse come down dry and hot to the lips of the emerald and purple pools. deep roads from the sea to the cliff-top have been worn by smuggler and fisherman and miner, climbing and descending. inland shows a solitary pinnacled church tower, rosy in the warm evening—a thin line of trees, long bare stems and dark foliage matted—and farther still the ridges of misty granite, rough as the back of a perch.

of all the rocky land, of the sapphire sea white with quiet foam, the barrows are masters. the breaking away of the rock has brought them nearer to the sea as it has annihilated some and cut off the cliff-ways in mid-career. they stand in the unenclosed waste and are removed from[158] all human uses and from most wayfaring. thus they share the sublimity of beacons and are about to show that tombs also have their deaths. linnet and stonechat and pipit seem to attend upon them, with pretty voices and motions and a certain ghastliness, as of shadows, given to their cheerful and sudden flittings by the solemn neighbourhood. but most of their hold upon the spirit they owe to their powerful suggestion that here upon the high sea border was once lived a bold proud life, like that of beowulf, whose words, when he was dying from the wounds of his last victory, were: “bid the warriors raise a funeral mound to flash with fire on a promontory above the sea, that it may stand high and be a memorial by which my people shall remember me, and seafarers driving their tall ships through the mist of the sea shall say: ‘beowulf’s mound.’”

in cornwall as in wales, these monuments are the more impressive, because the earth, wasting with them and showing her bones, takes their part. there are days when the age of the downs, strewn with tumuli and the remnants of camp and village, is incredible; or rather they seem in the course of long time to have grown smooth and soft and kind, and to be, like a rounded languid cloud, an expression of earth’s summer bliss of afternoon. but granite and slate and sandstone jut out, and in whatsoever weather speak rather of the cold, drear, hard, windy dawn. nothing can soften the lines of trendreen or brown willy or carn galver against the sky. the small stone-hedged ploughlands amidst brake and gorse do but accentuate the wildness of the land from which they have been won. the deserted mines are frozen cries of despair as if they had perished in conflict with[159] the waste; and in a few years their chimneys standing amidst rotted woodwork, the falling masonry, the engine rusty, huge and still (the abode of rabbits, and all overgrown with bedstraw, the stern thistle and wizard henbane) are in keeping with the miles of barren land, littered with rough silvered stones among heather and furze, whose many barrows are deep in fern and bramble and foxglove. the cotton grass raises its pure nodding white. the old roads dive among still more furze and bracken and bramble and foxglove, and on every side the land grows no such crop as that of grey stones. even in the midst of occasional cornfield or weedless pasture a long grey upright stone speaks of the past. in many places men have set up these stones, roughly squaring some of them, in the form of a circle or in groups of circles—and over them beats the buzzard in slow hesitating and swerving flight. in one place the work of nature might be mistaken for that of man. on a natural hillock stands what appears to be the ruin of an irregularly heaped wall of grey rock, roughened by dark-grey lichen, built of enormous angular fragments like the masonry of a giant’s child. near at hand, bracken, pink stonecrop, heather and bright gold tormentil soften it; but at a distance it stands black against the summer sky, touched with the pathos of man’s handiwork overthrown, yet certainly an accident of nature. it commands cape cornwall and the harsh sea, and st. just with its horned church tower. on every hand lie cromlech, camp, circle, hut and tumulus of the unwritten years. they are confused and mingled with the natural litter of a barren land. it is a silent bedlam of history, a senseless cemetery or museum, amidst which we walk as animals must do when they see those valleys full of[160] skeletons where their kind are said to go punctually to die. there are enough of the dead; they outnumber the living; and there those trite truths burst with life and drum upon the tympanum with ambiguous fatal voices. at the end of this many-barrowed moor, yet not in it, there is a solitary circle of grey stones, where the cry of the past is less vociferous, less bewildering, than on the moor itself, but more intense. nineteen tall, grey stones stand round a taller, pointed one that is heavily bowed, amidst long grass and bracken and furze. a track passes close by, but does not enter the circle; the grass is unbent except by the weight of its bloom. it bears a name that connects it with the assembling and rivalry of the bards of britain. here, under the sky, they met, leaning upon the stones, tall, fair men of peace, but half-warriors, whose songs could change ploughshare into sword. here they met, and the growth of the grass, the perfection of the stones (except that one stoops as with age), and the silence, suggest that since the last bard left it, in robe of blue or white or green—the colours of sky and cloud and grass upon this fair day—the circle has been unmolested, and the law obeyed which forbade any but a bard to enter it. sky-blue was the colour of a chief bard’s robe, emblematic of peace and heavenly calm, and of unchangeableness. white, the colour of the druid’s dress, was the emblem of light, and of its correlatives, purity of conduct, wisdom, and piety. green was the colour of the youthful ovate’s robe, for it was the emblem of growth. their uniformity of colour signified perfect truth. and the inscription upon the chair of the bards of beisgawen was, “nothing is that is not for ever and ever.” blue and white and green, peace and light and[161] growth—“nothing is that is not for ever and ever”—these things and the blue sky, the white, cloudy hall of the sun, and the green bough and grass, hallowed the ancient stones, and clearer than any vision of tall bards in the morning of the world was the tranquil delight of being thus “teased out of time” in the presence of this ancientness.

it is strange to pass from these monumental moors straight to the sea which records the moments, not the years or the centuries. in fine weather especially its colour—when, for example, it is faintly corrugated and of a blue that melts towards the horizon into such a hue that it is indistinguishable from the violet wall of dawn—is a perpetual astonishment on account of its unearthliness and evanescence. the mind does not at once accept the fact that here underneath our eyes is, as it were, another sky. the physical act of looking up induces a special mood of solemnity and veneration, and during the act the eyes meet with a fitting object in the stainless heavens. looking down we are used to seeing the earth, the road, the footpath, the floor, the hearth; but when, instead, it is the sea and not any of these things, although our feet are on firm land, the solemnity is of another kind. in its anger the sea becomes humanized or animalized: we see resemblances to familiar things. there is, for instance, an hour sometimes after sunset, when the grey sky coldly lights the lines of white plumes on a steely sea, and they have an inevitable likeness to a trampling chivalry that charges upon a foe. but a calm sea is incomparable except to moods of the mind. it is then as remote from the earth and earthly things as the sky, and the remoteness is the more astonishing because it is almost within our[162] grasp. it is no wonder that a great idea was expressed by the fortunate islands in the sea. the youthfulness, the incorruptibility of the sea, continually renewing itself, the same from generation to generation, prepares it as a fit sanctuary of the immortal dead. so at least we are apt to think at certain times, coming from the heavy, scarred, tormented earth to that immense a?ry plain of peacock blue. and yet at other times that same unearthliness will suggest quite other thoughts. it has not changed and shrunken and grown like the earth; it is not sun-warmed: it is a monster that has lain unmoved by time, sleeping and moaning outside the gates within which men and animals have become what they are. actually that cold fatal element and its myriad population without a sound brings a wistfulness into the mind as if it could feel back and dimly recall the dawn of time when the sea was incomprehensible and impassable, when the earth had but lately risen out of the waters and was yet again to descend beneath: it becomes a type of the waste where everything is unknown or uncertain except death, pouring into the brain the thoughts that men have had on looking out over untrodden mountain, forest, swamp, in the drizzling dawn of the world. the sea is exactly what it was when mountain, forest, swamp were imperturbable enemies, and the sight of it restores the ancient fear. i remember one dawn above all others when this restoration was complete. when it was yet dark the wind rose gustily under a low grey sky and a lark sang amidst the moan of gorse and the creak of gates and the deeply-taken breath of the tide at the full. nor was it yet light when the gulls began to wheel and wind and float with a motion like foam on a whirlpool or inter[163]woven snow. they wheeled about the masts of fishing-boats that nodded and kissed and crossed in a steep cove of crags whose black edges were slavered by the foam of the dark sea; and there were no men among the boats or about the grey houses that looked past the walls of the cove to the grim staircase and sea-doors of a black headland, whose perpendicular rocks stood up far out of the reach of the wings fashioned in the likeness of gigantic idols. the higher crags were bushy and scaly with lichen, and they were cushioned upon thrift and bird’s-foot trefoil and white bladder campion. it was a bristling sea, not in the least stormy, but bristling, dark and cold through the slow colourless dawn, dark and cold and immense; and at the edge of it the earth knelt, offering up the music of a small flitting bird and the beauty of small flowers, white and gold, to those idols. they were terrible enough. but the sea was more terrible; for it was the god of whom those rocks were the poor childish images, and it seemed that the god had just then disclosed his true nature and hence the pitiful loveliness of the flowers, the pitiful sweetness of the bird that sang among the rocks at the margin of the kind earth.

now and then the sea will startle by some resemblance to the earth. thus i have come unexpectedly in sight of it on a strange coast and have not known that it was the sea. a gale from the north-east was blowing, and it was late afternoon in mid-winter. the land was sandy moorland, treeless and dark with iron-coloured heather. a mile away i saw rising up into the sky what seemed a peaty mountain in cardiganshire, as it would be in a tempest of rain, and it was only when i was near the cliff and could see the three long walls of white waves towards[164] the shore that i knew it was the sea. more common is the calm dark-blue sea in mid-summer, over which go criss-cross bands of lighter hue, like pale moorland paths winding about a moor.

in a stern land like cornwall that so often refuses the consolations of grass and herb and tree, the relentings are the more gracious. these are to be found in a whole valley where there are sloping fields of corn and grass divided by green hedges, and woods rich and misty and warm, and the bones of the land are buried away until it ends in a bay where high and cavernous dark rocks stand on either side of blue water and level sand. often all the sweetness of the country round seems to have run into one great roadside hedge as dewdrops collect in the bosom of a leaf. the stones of the original wall are themselves deeply hidden in turf, or from the crevices ferns descend and the pale blooms of pennywort rise up; the lichen is furry and the yellow or pink stonecrop is neat and dense; ivy climbs closely up and hangs down in loose array. up from the top of the wall or mound rise bramble and gorse and woodbine over them, or brier and thorn and woodbine again; and the tallest and massiest of foxgloves cleave through these with their bells, half a hundred of them in rows five deep already open and as many more yet in bud, dense as grapes, dewy, murmurous; and below the foxgloves are slender parsleys, rough wood sage and poppies. at the foot of the wall, between it and the road, is a grassy strip, where the yarrow grows feathery with gilded cinquefoil and tormentil—or above nettles as dense as corn rise large discs of white hog parsnip flower, a coarse and often dirty flower that has a dry smell of summer—or bramble and[165] brier arch this way and that their green and rosy and purple stems, bright leaves, flowers pink and white. only the shin-breaking cornish stiles of stone, interrupting the hedge and giving a view of barren hills or craggy-sided sea, destroy the illusion created by this exuberance of herb and bush and the perfume of woodbine and rose.

nowhere is the stateliness or grace or privacy of trees more conspicuous than about the cornish towns and farms. the tall round-topped elms above padstow, for example, would be natural and acceptable unconsciously elsewhere; but above those crossing lines of roof they have an indescribable benevolence. the farmhouses are usually square, dry and grey, being built of slate with grey-slated roofs painted by lichen; some are whitewashed; in some, indeed, the stones are of many greys and blues, with yellowish and reddish tinges, hard, but warm in the sun and comforting to look at when close to the sea and some ruinous promontory; few are screened by ivy or climbing rose. the farm buildings are of the same kind, relieved by yellow straw, the many hues of hay, the purple bracken stacks, the dark peat. the gates are coarse and mean, of iron or of cheap or rough wood, lightly made, patched, held together by string, and owing their only charm to the chance use of the curved ribs of ships as gate-posts. but to many of the buildings sycamore and ash and apple trees bent above tall grass lend their beauty of line, of mass, of colour, of shade, of sound and of many motions. i can never forget the rows of ash trees, the breezy sycamores and the tamarisks by ancient harlyn, with its barrows on the hill, its ruins of chapel and church among rushes and poppies, its little oak wood by the sandy river mouth where the men of[166] old time buried their dead, the poppied corn, the white gulls and their black shadows wheeling over sunny turf. the file of lean woods seen between perranporth and st. agnes inland. the sycamores above the farm near towan cross where the road dips and the deep furrow of a little valley winds, with hay upon its slopes, out to sea. the green wood, long and beautiful, below the gentle brown slopes of hudder down. the several companies of trees in the valley by the red river, and the white farm of reskajeage near by, under ash and elm, sycamore and wych-elm and lime, a rough orchard of apples and a gnarled squat medlar to one side—the trees grouped as human figures are when they begin to move after some tense episode. the wych-elm, sycamore and ash round the tower of gwithian church and in amongst the few thatched cottages alongside the yellow towans and violet sea. in a land of deserted roofless houses with solid chimneys that no man wants, the narrow copse of small spindly oaks upholding with bare crooked stems as of stone a screen of leaves, above a brooklet that runs to the sea through dense rush and foxglove and thistle where the sedge-warbler sings. the long low mound of green wood nearest to land’s end. between tregothal and bosfranken, the wet copse in a narrow valley, where red campion and bracken and bramble are unpenetrated among flowery elders, sallows, thorns and sycamores. a farm that has a water-mill and water gloomy and crystal under sycamore and ash. the thin halting procession of almost branchless trees on the ridge of the beacon above sancreed—a procession that seems even at mid-day to move in another world, in the world and in the age of the stone circles and cairns and cromlechs of the moor beyond.[167] the sycamore and elder that surround and tower above tregonebris near boscawen un. the avenue of ash and elm and wych-elm and sycamore, very close together, leading from grey nancothan mill, where the dark-brown water mingles its noise with the rustling trees. the wych-elms and golden-fruited sycamores about the roads near st. hilary, and the long avenue of ash up to the church itself, and the elms through which the evening music floats, amidst the smell of hay, in a misty mountained sunset.

under the flaming fleeces of a precipitous sky, in a windless hush and at low tide, i descended to a narrow distinct valley just where a stream ran clear and slow through level sands to a bay, between headlands of rocks and of caves among the rocks. the sides of the valley near the sea were high and steep and of grass until their abrupt end in a low but perpendicular wall of rock just above the river sands. inland the valley began to wind and at the bend trees came darkly trooping down the slopes to the water. immediately opposite the ford—the wet sands being unscathed by any foot or hoof or wheel—a tributary ran into the river through a gorge of its own. it was a gorge not above a hundred feet across, and its floor was of sand save where the brook was running down, and this floor was all in shadow because the banks were clothed in thick underwood and in ash, sycamore, wych-elm and oak meeting overhead. and in these sands also there was no footprint save of the retreated sea. there was no house, nor wall, nor road. and there was no sound in the caverns of foliage except one call of a cuckoo as i entered and the warbling of a blackbird that mused in the oaks and then laughed and was silent and mused[168] again and filled the mind with the fairest images of solitude—solitude where a maid, thinking of naught, unthought of, unseen, combs out her yellow hair and lets her spirit slip down into the tresses—where a man fearful of his kind ascends out of the deeps of himself so that his eyes look bravely and his face unstiffens and unwrinkles and his motion and gesture is fast and free—where a child walks and stops and runs and sings in careless joy that takes him winding far out into abysses of eternity and makes him free of them, so that years afterward the hour and place and sky return, and the eternity on which they opened as a casement, but not the child, not the joy.

i like trees for the cool evening voices of their many leaves, for their cloudy forms linked to earth by stately stems—for the pale lifting of the sycamore leaves in breezes and also their drooping, hushed and massed repose, for the myriad division of the light ash leaves—for their straight pillars and for the twisted branch work, for their still shade and their rippling or calm shimmering or dimly glowing light, for the quicksilver drip of dawn, for their solemnity and their dancing, for all their sounds and motions—their slow-heaved sighs, their nocturnal murmurs, their fitful fingerings at thunder time, their swishing and tossing and hissing in violent rain, the roar of their congregations before the south-west wind when it seems that they must lift up the land and fly away with it, for their rustlings of welcome in harvest heat—for their kindliness and their serene remoteness and inhumanity, and especially the massiest of the trees that have also the glory of motion, the sycamores, which are the chief tree of cornwall, as the beeches and yews are[169] of the downs, the oaks of the weald, the elms of the wiltshire vales.

before i part from trees i should like to mention those of mid-somerset—and above all, the elms. i am thinking of them as they are at noon on the hottest days of haymaking at the end of june. the sky is hot, its pale blue without pity and changing to a yellow of mist near the horizon. the land is level and all of grass, and where the hay is not spread in swathes the grass is almost invisible for the daisies on its motionless surface. here and there the mower whirrs and seems natural music, like the grasshopper’s, of the burning earth. through the levels wind the heavy-topped grey willows of a hidden stream. in the hedges and in the wide fields and about the still, silent farmhouses of stone there are many elms. they are tall and slender despite their full mounded summits. they cast no shade. in the great heat their green is all but grey, and their leaves are lost in the mist which their mingling creates. grey-hooded, grey-mantled, they seem to be stealing away over the fields to the sanctuary of the dark-wooded hills, low and round and lapped entirely in leaves, which stand in the mist at the edge of the plain—to be leaving that plain to the possession of the whirring mower and the sun of almighty summer.

sycamores solemnized the cornish farm in the twilight, where i asked the farmer’s wife if she could let us have two beds for the night. she stood in the doorway, hands on hips, watching her grandchildren’s last excited minutes of play in the rickyard.

“he’s the master,” she replied, pointing to the farmer who was talking to his carter, between the rickyard and the door, under the sycamores.

[170]

“two beds?”

“that is what we should like,” said my friend and i.

“what do you want with two beds?” he asked with a tinge of scorn as well as of pity in his frank amusement. “my missus and i have only had one bed these forty years.”

here he laughed so gaily that he could not have embarrassed the very devil of puritanism, and turning to his man he called forth a deep bass laughter and from his wife a peal that shook her arms so that she raised them to the sides of the porch for better support; the children also turned their laughter our way.

“but perhaps one of you kicks in his sleep?... we don’t.... come inside. i dare say you are tired.... good-night, john. now, children, up with you.”

i think they were the most excellent pair of man and woman i ever saw. both were of a splendid physical type, she the more energetic, black-haired, black-eyed, plump and tall and straight; he the more enduring, fair-haired and bearded, blue-eyed, hardly her equal in height, certainly not in words. in forty years neither had overpowered the other. they had not even agreed to take separate paths, but like two school-boys, new friends, they could afford to contend together in opinions without fear of damage or of lazy truce. he had ploughed and sowed and reaped: she had borne him seven children, had baked and churned and stitched. they had loved sweet things together, and, with curses at times, their children and the land. physical strength and purity—that were in them the whole of morality—seemed to have given them that equality with the conditions of life which philosophy has[171] done nothing but talk about. they of all men and women had perhaps jarred least upon the music of the spheres. they had the right and power to live, and the end was laughter.

in all those years they had been separated but once. until four years ago she had not been out of cornwall except to bury her mother, who had suddenly died in london. two hundred pounds fell to her share on that death and the money arrived one morning after the harvest thanksgiving. for a week she continued to go about her work in the old way save that she sent rather hurriedly for a daughter who had just left her place as cook in exeter. at the end of the week, having stored the apples and shown her daughter how to use the separator, she walked in to penzance in her best clothes but without even a handbag; her husband was out with his gun. by the next day she was at liverpool. she sent off a picture postcard, with a little note written by the shopkeeper, saying that she would be back by christmas, and telling her husband to sell the old bull. then she sailed for new york. she saw niagara; she visited her nephew, john davy, at cincinnati; she spent two weeks in railway travelling west and south, and saw the indians. four days before christmas she was back in the rickyard, driving before her a young bull and carrying in her hand a bunch of maize.

“well, ann, you’re back before your time,” said her husband, after praising the beast.

“yes, samuel, and i feel as if i could whitewash the dairy, that i do,” said she.

“suppose you wait till to-morrow,” proposed sam davy.

[172]

“i think i will, for i can hear that mary is behind with the separator.”

“she’s a good girl, but she hasn’t got your patience, my dear.”

“oh, here, sam, here’s the change,” she said, giving him the bunch of maize.

in cornwall many of the women looked less english than the men. the noticeable men were fair-haired and, of fair complexion, blue-eyed and rather small-headed, upright and of good bearing. the noticeable women had black hair, pale, seldom swarthy, faces, very dark eyes. perhaps the eyes were more foreign than anything else in them: they were singularly immobile and seldom changed in expression with their voices. several of the dark-eyed, black-haired women had a beauty of a fearless character like gypsy women, in their movement and expression. but the wives of small farmers and miners on piecework look old very soon and are puckered and shadowy in the face. some of these middle-aged and old women suggested an early and barbarous generation. the eyes were small and deep-set, and the face narrowed forward like an animal’s; which gave the whole a peering expression of suspicion and even alarm. the eyes of most human beings are causes of bewilderment and dismay if curiously looked at; but the strangest i ever saw were in an old cornish woman. they were black and round as a child’s, with a cold brightness that made them seem not of the substance of other eyes, but like a stone. they were set in a narrow, bony face of parchment among grey hair crisp and disarrayed. i saw them only for a few[173] minutes while i asked a few questions about the way, and it was as much as i could do to keep up the conversation, so much did those motionless eyes invite me to plunge into an abyss of human personality—such intense loneliness and strangeness did they create, since they proclaimed shrilly and clearly that beyond a desire to be fed and clothed we had nothing in common. had they peered up at me out of a cromlech or hut at bosporthennis i could not have been more puzzled and surprised.

men and women were hospitable and ready to smile as the welsh are; and they have an alluring na?veté as well as some righteousness. one family was excessively virtuous or had a wish to appear so: i do not know which alternative to like the less, since it was in a matter of game. they rented land on a large estate and had a right to the rabbits: the hares were sacred to the great landowner. the farmer’s wife assured me that one of her sons had lately brought in a lame hare and proposed to put it out of its pain, but that she had said: “no, take it out and let it die outside anywhere. the best thing is to be afraid in things of this kind and then you won’t go wrong.” doing much the same kind or quantity of manual work as their husbands and being much out of doors, the women’s manners were confident and free. their speech was as a rule fluent and grammatical and clearly delivered, with less accent than in any part of england. coming into a mining village one day and wanting tea, i asked a woman who was drawing water from a farmyard well if she could make me some, thinking she was the farmer’s wife. she said she would, but took me to one of a small row of cottages over the way,[174] where her husband was half-naked in the midst of his saturday wash. taking no notice of him she led me into the sitting-room and, with a huge loaf held like a violin, began buttering and cutting thin slices while she talked to me, to the little children and to her husband, from the adjacent kitchen. she was tall, straight as a pillar, black-haired, with clear untanned but slightly swarthy skin, black eyes, kindly gleaming cheeks and red lips smiling above her broad breast and hips. her clothes were black but in rags that hardly clung to her shoulders and waist. she was barely five and twenty, but had six young children about her, one in a cradle by the hearth and another still crawling at her feet. her only embarrassment came when i asked to pay for my tea—she began adding up the cost, a pennyworth of bread and butter, a halfpennyworth of tea, etc.! the kitchen consisted simply of a large grate and baking oven, plain tables and chairs on a flagged floor. but the sitting-room was a museum—with photographs of a volunteer corps, of friends and relations on the wall over the fire; foxgloves in jam-pots surrounded by green crinkled paper in the fireplace; on the mantelpiece, cheap little vases and scraps of ore and more photographs. on the walls were three pictures: one of two well-dressed children being timidly inspected by fallow deer; another of a grandmother showing a book to a child whose attention is diverted by the frolics of two kittens at her side; and a third of jesus, bleeding and crowned with thorns, high on a cross over a marble city beneath a romantic forest ridge, behind which was the conflagration of a crimson sunset.

other sitting-rooms were similarly adorned, with the addition of a picture of john wesley as a child escaping[175] from the window of a burning house, with many anxious men holding up their hands from below. the smell of flowers and of sun-warmed furniture and old upholstery mingles in such rooms.

but the kitchens are often as charming as in wales. i remember one especially near carn galver. the farmhouse was of whitened stone under a steep thatch. in front were fuchsia trees in the corner of a stony yard; to one side, the haystacks and piles of furze and bracken and peat. the farmer’s wife was carrying peat on an iron hook into the kitchen and i followed her. a pan of yellow scalded cream stood inside. the fireplace was a little room in itself, with seats at each side and a little fire of wood and three upright turves in one corner of the great stone hearth: over the fire the kettle boiled. horse ornaments of polished brass surmounted the fireplace. the wallpaper had given up its pattern long since to a smoky uneven gold; nailed to it were calendars and lists of fairs and sales; against it were two small tables, one to support a bible and an almanac, the other spread with a white cloth on which was a plate and a bowl of cream. behind the door and between it and the fire was a high-backed settle of dark wood, with elbow-rests. the floor was flagged and sanded. the light came in through a little square window on to the bible by the opposite wall, and through the open door on to the figure of the housewife, a woman of forty. a delicate white face shone beneath a broad untrimmed straw hat that was tied tightly under her chin so as to hide her ears and most of her black hair. her black skirt was kilted up behind; a white apron contrasted with black shoes, black stockings and black clothes. at first her face was hardly seen,[176] not only because but a part of it emerged from the shell of her hat, but because the spirit that emanated from it was more than the colour and features and so much in harmony with the sea and crag and moor and dolmen of her land. it is evading an insuperable difficulty to say that this spirit was not so much human as fay. it was the spirit of which her milky complexion, the bright black eyes, white teeth and fine red lips of her readily smiling and na?vely watching fearless face, her slender form, her light and rapid movements upon small feet, were only the more obvious expressions. her spirit danced before her—not quite visibly, not quite audibly—as she moved or spoke or merely smiled; if it could have been seen it would have been a little singing white flame changing to blue and crimson in its perpetual flickering. it was a spirit of laughter, of laughter unquenchable since the beginning of time, of laughter in spite of and because of all things, the laughter of life like a jewel in desolate places. it was a spirit most ancient and yet childlike, birdlike: it belonged to a world outside any which other human beings ever seemed to touch, but the laughter in it made it friendly, for it was far deeper than humour, it was gaiety of heart. her goings to and fro on those light feet had the grace, quickness, suddenness of a bird, of a wren that slips from twig to twig and jets out its needle of song, of a moorhen flicking its tail and hooting sharply. her laugh startled and delighted like the laugh of the woodpecker as it leaps across the glades—like the whistling of birds up amongst the dark clouds and the moon. but most of all she called to mind the meadow pipit of her own crags, that rises from green ledges out over the sea and then, falling slantwise with body curved like a[177] crescent, utters his passionate pulsating song, so rapid and passionate that it seems impossible and unfit that it should end except in death, yet suddenly ceasing as it lands again upon the samphire or the thrift. the spirit was as quicksilver in the corners of her eyes, as quicksilver in the heart. such a maid she must have been as the bard would have thought to send out the thrush to woo for him, when he heard the bird of ermine breast singing from the new-leaved hazel at dawn, on the edge of a brook among the steep woods—singing artfully with a voice like a silver bell—solemnly, too, so as to seem to be performing a sacrifice—and amorously, bringing balm to lovers’ hearts and inspiring the bard to send by him a message to the sun of all maidens that she, white as the snow of the first winter night, should come out to the green woods to him. she had lived for generations on the moor, for generations upon generations, and this was what she had gained from heather and furze and crag and seawind and sunshine tempered by no trees—inextinguishable laughter. but she was inarticulate. she milked the cows, made butter, baked bread, kept the peat fire burning and tended her children. when she talked, i asked for more cream. perhaps after several more generations have passed she will be a poet and astonish the world with a moorland laughter of words that endure.

everything in that house was old or smooth and bright with use, and the hollowed threshold of the doorway in the sun put me in mind of a hundred old things and of their goodliness to mortal eyes—the wrecked ship’s ribs, their bolt-holes rusty, that stand among nettles as gate-posts—the worn dark stones that rock to the tread among[178] the ripples of an umbrageous ford—many a polished stile and gate—the group of rigid but still gracious bowery thorns dotted with crimson haws in the middle of a meadow, their holes and lower branches rubbed hard and smooth and ruddy like iron by the cows—the ash staff beginning to bend like its master, the old man upon the roads who once wore scarlet and wound the horn for mr. ——’s hounds. odd it is how old use sanctifies a little thing. there was once a hut where a good man, but a poor and a weak and unwise, stayed all one fair summer and talked of english roads—he was a lord of the roads, at least of south country roads—and of ships, which he knew. now on the first night of his stay, needing a candlestick he kicked off the top of a pointed wooden paling, so as to make a five-angled piece on which he stuck the candle in its own grease. all through his stay he used the candlestick, when he read the divina commedia and pantagruel and henry brocken and recollected airs of italy and spain, amidst the sound of nightjars and two leafy streams: the light flickered out as he mused about the open sea, calm but boundless and without known harbour, on which he was drifting cheerfully, regardless of time, pied with nights and days. the hut was burnt and the man went—to drown a little afterwards with a hundred unlike himself in the sea—but among nettle and dock the candlestick was picked up safe. it had broken off straight and the simple shape was pleasant; it was dark with age; along with the mound and little pillar of wax remaining it had the shape of a natural thing; and it was his.

animate as well as inanimate things are open to this sanctification by age or use. i am not here thinking of[179] ceremonious use—for which i have small natural respect, so that i have been denied the power of appreciating either a great religious pomp or the dancing of mademoiselle genée. but some men, particularly sailors and field labourers, but also navvies and others who work heavily with their hands, have this glory of use. their faces, their clothes, their natures all appear to act and speak harmoniously, so that they cause a strong impression of personality which is to be deeply enjoyed in a world of masks, especially of black clerical masks. one of the best examples of this kind was a gamekeeper who daily preceded me by twenty or thirty yards in a morning walk up through a steep wood of beeches. he was a short, stiffly-built and stoutish man who wore a cap, thick skirted coat and breeches, leather gaiters and heavy boots, all patched and stained, all of nearly the same colour as his lightish-brown hair and weathered skin, but not so dark as the gun over his shoulder. the shades of this colour were countless and made up like the colour of a field of ripe wheat, which they would have resembled had they not been liberally dusted all over, just as his brown beard was grizzled. he went slowly up, swinging slightly at the shoulders and always smoking a pipe of strong shag tobacco of which the fumes hovered in the moist air with inexpressible sweetness and a good brown savour: if i may say so, the fit emanation of the brown woodland man who, when he stood still, looked like the stump of a tree.