CHARM OF THE DOWNS 25 



" Sweet and amusing " are not words we should now 

 use in this connection ; but the description is pleasant, 

 and the speculations, albeit fanciful, are suggestive ; for 

 it is a fact that the attractiveness of these broad hills 

 is in a measure due to their fungus-like roundness and 

 smoothness. But not only to these qualities, as we find 

 when we leave the chain to look upon an isolated 

 down : it fails to attract ; the charm is not in the one 

 but in the many. Furthermore, it is due to a com- 

 bination of various causes. To begin with, we have the 

 succession of shapely outlines ; the vast protuberances 

 and deep divisions between, suggestive of the most 

 prominent and beautiful curves of the human figure, 

 and of the " solemn slope of mighty limbs asleep." 



That modern poet's vision of a Titanic woman re- 

 clined in everlasting slumber on the earth, her loose 

 sweet-smelling hair lying like an old-world forest over 

 leagues of ground; the poet himself sitting for ever, 

 immersed in melancholy, in the shadow of her great 

 head, has seemed a mere outcome of a morbid imagina- 

 tion. Here, among the downs, the picture returns to 

 the mind with a new light, a strange grandeur ; it is 

 not a mere " flower of disease " and nothing more, but 

 is rather a startlingly vivid reminder that we ourselves 

 are anthropomorphic and mythopoeic, even as our 

 earliest progenitors were, who were earth-worshippers 

 in an immeasurably remote past, before the heavenly 

 powers existed. 



Here, too, where the lines of the earth are most 



