SUSSEX 69 



go in amongst them. Yet there are parts of the forest 

 large and dark and primeval in look, with a few poor 

 isolated houses and a thin file of telegraph posts crossing 

 it among the high gloomy pines and down to the marshy 

 hollows, to the strewn gold of dwarf willows, and up 

 again to the deserted wooden windmill, the empty boarded 

 cottage, the heather-thatched sheds at the southern edge 

 of the moor. Looking at this tract of wild land the mind 

 seems to shed many centuries of civilization and to taste 

 something of the early man's alarm in the presence of 

 the uncultured hills — an alarm which is in us tempered 

 so as to aid an impression of the sublime. Its influence 

 lingers in the small strips of roadside gorse beyond its 

 proper boundary. Then, southward, there are softly dip- 

 ping meadows, fields of young corn, and oaks thrown 

 among the cowslips. The small farmhouses are neat 

 and good — one has a long stone wall in front, and, over 

 the road, tall Scotch firs above a green pond dappled by 

 the water crowfoot's white blossoms and bordered by 

 sallow and rush. Narrow copses of oak or wide hedges 

 of hazel and sallow line the road; and they are making 

 cask hoops under lodges of boughs at the woodsides. 

 Bluebells and primroses and cuckoo flowers are not to 

 be counted under the trees. The long moist meadows flow 

 among the woods up and down from farm to farm and 

 spire to tower. Each farmhouse group is new — this one 

 is roofed and walled with tiles; and opposite is a tangle 

 of grass and gorse, with fowls and hen-coops amongst it, 

 a sallowy pond, a pile of faggots, some crooked knees of 

 oak, some fresh-peeled timber : old grey hop poles lean 

 in a sheaf all round a great oak. The gates are of good 



