1 96 Winter 



window you may not discern the garden laurels, far 

 less the white fringes worked round the green leaves 

 of them by the frozen mist then is there a journey I 

 better love to make than to sit reading and shuddering 

 by the light of a morning lamp. It is to the brow of a 

 rocky escarpment, on clear days overlooking a fertile 

 and well-peopled champaign. At starting you have 

 to feel your way among the trees of the long planta- 

 tion, much as Thoreau used to guide his steps o' nights 

 by touching the Walden firs ; but as the path rises, 

 the heavy thickness thins away, and the brown boughs 

 overlaid with frostwork and populous with forlorn 

 and fluttering birds come plainer and plainer into 

 view till, at last, on the edge of the Roman Camp at 

 the top, you stand in brilliant sunshine under a sky 

 of clearest blue. Even in summer it is a place of 

 fancies ; for (geologists will tell you) these frowning 

 cliffs once overlooked a mighty sea ; sea-gull and 

 cormorant fished where is now a sleepy pinewood ; 

 seaweed and tangle swayed to the tide where the 

 corn now nods in August and in spring the wild- 

 flowers bloom. And look you to-day how Nature is 

 mocking the present with a fanciful image of the past ! 

 Village, and town, and hamlet are as if submerged 

 in some weird, phantasmal ocean. What in summer 

 were purple mountains are low grey shores. Under 

 a gentle haze the level and desolate waste, where no 

 ship sails, is heaving in billows, and on the coast of 

 many a little bay and inlet the dark waves break into 



