Perspective of the Cliffs -cy ^Ci^ 



(From The Spirit of Place) 



TT is the law whereby the eye and the horizon 

 answer one another that makes the way up a 

 hill so full of universal movement. All the land- 

 scape is on pilgrimage. The town gathers itself 

 closer, and its inner harbours literally come to 

 light ; the headlands repeat themselves ; little cups 

 within the treeless hills open and show their farms. 

 In the sea are many regions. A breeze is at play 

 for a mile or two, and the surface is turned. There 

 are roads and curves in the blue and in the white. 

 Not a step of your journey up the height that has 

 not its replies in the steady motion of land and 

 sea. Things rise together like a flock of many- 

 feathered birds. . . . 



... Up at the top of the seaward hill your first 

 thought is one of some compassion for sailors, 

 inasmuch as they sec but little of their sea. A 

 child on a mere Channel cliff looks upon spaces 

 and sizes that they cannot see in the Pacific, on 

 the ocean side of the world. Never in the solitude 

 of tlic blue water, never between the Cape of Good 

 Hope and Cape Horn, never between the Islands 

 and the West, has the seaman seen anything but a 

 little circle of sea. The Ancient Mariner, when he 



4" 



