214 NATURE IN DOWNLAND 



pass ; and his immortality would again be to him like 

 the sun shining in a blue sky that is without a cloud. 



Those who walk on the downs at this season, 

 where they are highest and treeless, will sometimes 

 feel that the loss of all that life and colour that 

 made the summer so much to them is in some re- 

 spects a gain. The vision that a little time ago 

 roamed bee-like above the surface from bloom to 

 bloom, ever finding and pausing to contemplate some 

 fresh object of beauty or interest, is now free to take 

 longer flights. 



The sunlight may not be so bright but the air is 

 clearer now : there are mornings and whole days when 

 the world is free from the haze that lately brooded on 

 the scene and dimmed all things, when you can look 

 beyond Sussex and see much of Kent and Surrey, 

 Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. You may walk 

 for a day along the hill-top, along the northern rim 

 of the range, and seldom lose sight of the sea, its 

 grey, immeasurable expanse silvered with the sunlight ; 

 while far down at your feet you have the flat wooded 

 district of the weald. On its plain you see scattered 

 village church towers and spires, and houses showing 

 red, white, or slate-black among the green oaks ; but 

 the trees are everywhere so abundant in hedgerows 

 and shaws and fragments of forest that it becomes 

 easy mentally to see this region as it was before the 



