10 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



of the world retreated, and their settlements give those 

 corners a strangeness and a charm to our fantastic sym- 

 pathies. Out from them conquerors in their turn have 

 gone to found a legend like the Welsh Madoc, an empire 

 like the men of Devon. The blood of conquered and 

 conqueror is in our veins, and it flushes the cheek at the 

 sight or thought of the w^est. Each man of us is as 

 ancient and complicated, as lofty-spired and as deep- 

 vaulted as cathedrals and castles old, and in those lands 

 our crypts and dark foundations are dimly remembered. 

 We look out to Vizards them from the high camps at 

 Battlesbury and Barbury : the lines of the Downs go 

 trooping along to them at night. Even in the bosom of 

 the South Country, when the tranquil bells are calling 

 over the corn at twilight, the westward-going hills, where 

 the sun has fallen, draw the heart away and fill us with 

 a desire to go on and on for ever, that same way. When, 

 in the clear windy dawn, thin clouds like traveller's joy 

 are upon the high air, it seems that up there also, in 

 those placid spaces, they travel and know the joy of the 

 road, and the sun — feeding on the blue, as a child said 

 yesterday, as Lucretius said before — goes the desired way. 

 London also calls, making the needle whirl in the 

 compass. For in London also a man may live as up "a 

 great river wide as any sea "; and over some of the fairest 

 of the South Country hangs the all-night glimmer of the 

 city, warning, threatening, beckoning anon. Some of this 

 country has already perished, or is so ramparted about that 

 there is no stranger country in the world unless it be 

 those perpendicular valleys cloven among the Blue Moun- 

 tains, their floors level and of the purest grass, but access- 



