152 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



hend. Wc are not merely twentieth-century Londoners 

 b^ Kentish men or Welshmen. We belong to the days 

 of Wordsworth, of Elizabeth, of Richard Plantagenet, of 

 Harold, of the earliest bards. We, too, like Taliesin, have 

 borne a banner before Alexander, have been with our 

 Lord in the manger of the ass, have been in India, and 

 with the " remnant of Troia," and with Noah in the ark, 

 and our original country is " the region of the summer 

 stars." And of these many folds in our nature the face 

 of the earth reminds us, and perhaps, even where there are 

 no more marks visible upon the land than there were in 

 Eden, we are aware of the passing of time in ways too 

 difficult and strange for the explanation of historian and 

 zoologist and philosopher. It is this manifold nature that 

 responds with such indescribable depth and variety to the 

 appeals of many landscapes. 



We come to a huge, flat-bottomed, grassy coombe, 

 smooth as a racecourse, that winds out of the cornland 

 into the heart of the Downs. It is like the bed of a river 

 of great depth. At its entrance beeches clothe either side; 

 but presently they cease, and up the steep juniper slopes 

 go the paths of hares, of the herds and flocks of earliest 

 ages and of the men and women and children also, 

 whose children's children's children have forgotten them 

 though not perhaps their philosophy. The grass of the 

 slope is mingled with small sweet herbage, the salad 

 burnet rosy-stemmed, the orange bird's-foot trefoil, the 

 purple thyme, the fine white flax, the delicatest golden 

 hawk-bit, and basil and marjoram, and rosettes of crimson 

 thistles, all sunny warm and fragrant, glittering and glow- 

 ing or melting into a simmering haze, musical with grass- 

 hoppers and a-flutter with blue butterflies, so that the 



