154 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



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 



