HISTORY AND THE PARISH 153 



earth seems to be a thick-furred, genial animal. At length 

 the windings shut out the plain, and the coombe is a green 

 hall roofed by the hot blue sky. Its walls are steeper than 

 ever, and the burrowings of the rabbits have streaked the 

 grasses with long splashes — like those made by sea-birds 

 on rocks — of white chalk. The curves of these walls are 

 like those of the flight of the swifts that dive overhead. 

 Here there are no human paths, no sign of house, of 

 grave, of herd, of cultivation. It is the world's end, and 

 the rabbits race up and down as in a dream of solitude. 



Yet the mind is not discontented and unfed. This is 

 no boundless solitude of ocean where one may take a kind 

 of pleasure 



To float for ever with a careless course] 

 And think himself the only being alive. 



It is not an end but a beginning that we have reached. 

 These are the elements — pure earth and wind and sun- 

 light — out of which beauty and joy arise, original and 

 ancient, for ever young. Their presence restores us not 

 to the Middle Ages, not to the days of Mr. Doughty 's 

 heroic princes and princesses of Britain,^ not to any dim 

 archaeologist's world of reeking marsh and wood, of 

 mammoth and brutish men, but to a region out of space 

 and out of time in which life and thought and physical 

 health are in harmony with sun and earth, fragrant as 

 the flowers in the grass, blithe as the grasshopper, swift 

 as the hares, divine; and out of it all arises a vision of the 

 man who will embody this thought, a man whom human 

 infelicity, discontented with the past, has placed in a 

 golden age still farther back, for the sufficient reason 



1 The Daivn in Britain, by Charles M. Doughty. 



