228 THE 'SOUTH COUNTRY 



entrenchment as if by the weight of a crown that it had 

 worn for ages. Certainly it wears no crown to-day. Not 

 a human being lives there; they have all fled to the river- 

 side and the spire, leaving their ancient home to the 

 triumphs of the wide-flowering traveller's-joy, to the play 

 of children on the sward within its walls, and to the 

 archaeologist : and very sad and very noble it looks at 

 night when it and the surrounding Downs lift up their 

 dark domes of wood among the mountains of the sky, 

 and the great silence hammers upon the ears. 



Then a hedgeless road traverses without interrupting 

 the long Downs. One after another, lines of trees thin 

 and dark and old come out against the pale bright sky of 

 late afternoon and file away, beyond the green turf and 

 roots and the grey or yellow stubble. As the sun sets, 

 dull crimson, at the foot of a muslin of grey and gold 

 which his course has crimsoned, the low clouds on the 

 horizon in the north become a deathly blue white belong- 

 ing neither to day nor to night, while overhead the light- 

 combed cloudlets are touched faintly with flame. Now 

 the glory and the power of the colour in the west, and 

 now the pallid north, fill the brain to overflowing with 

 the mingling of distance, of sublime motion, and of hue, 

 and intoxicate it and give it wings, until at last when the 

 west is crossed by long sloping strata as of lava long cooled 

 they seem the bars of a cage impassable. But even they 

 are at last worn away and the sky is as nothing compared 

 with earth. For there, as I move, the infinite greys and 

 yellows of the crops, the grass, the bare earth, the clumps 

 of firs, the lines of beeches and oaks, play together in the 

 twilight, and the hills meet and lose their lines and flow 

 into one another and build up beautiful lines anew, the 





