Before the first brightening of the light on Sunday morning the rain ceased, and I returned to Dunbridge to pick up the road I had lost on Saturday evening. Above all, I wanted to ride along under Dean Hill, the level-ridged chalk hill dotted with yew that is seen running parallel to the railway a quarter of a mile on your left as you near Salisbury from Eastleigh. The sky was pale, scarcely more blue than the clouds with which it was here and there lightly whitewashed. For five miles I was riding against the stream of the river which rises near Clarendon and meets the Test near Dunbridge. The water and its alders, many of them prostrate, and its drab sedges mingled with intense green and with marsh-marigolds’ yellow, were seldom more than a hundred yards away on my right. Pewits wheeled over it with creaking wings and protests against the existence of man.

I did not stop for the villages. Butts Green, for example, where the Other Man had seen the fox weather-vane, began with an old thatched cottage[129] and a big hollow yew, but the green itself was dull, flat, and bare, and the cottages round it newish. Lockerley Green, a mile farther on, was much like it, except that the road traversed instead of skirting the green. Between these two, and beyond Lockerley Church, where the road touched the river and had a fork leading across to East Tytherley, there was a small, but not old, mill, and a miller too, and flour. As I looked back the small sharp spire of the church stuck up over the level ridgy ploughland in a manner which, I supposed, would have made for a religious person a very religious picture. No other building was visible. The railway on my left was more silent than the river on my right, among its willow and alder and tall, tufted grass, at the foot of gorse slopes.

After crossing the railway half a mile past Lockerley Green the road went close to the base of Dean Hill, separated from it by ploughland without a hedge. On the left, that is on the Dean Hill side, stood East Dean Church, a little rustic building of patched brick and plaster walls, mossy roof, and small lead-paned windows displaying the Easter decorations of moss and daffodils. It had a tiny bell turret at the west end, and a round window cut up into radiating panes like a geometrical spider’s web. Under the yew tree, amidst long grass,[130] dandelion, and celandine, lay the bones of people bearing the names Edney and Langridge. The door was locked. Its neighbours on the other side of the road were an old cottage with tiled roof and walls of herring-boned brick, smothered from chimney to earth with ivy, in a garden of plum blossom; and next to it, a decent, small home, a smooth clipped block of yew, and a whitewashed mud wall with a thatched coping. The other houses of East Dean, either thatched or roofed with orange tiles, were scattered chiefly on the right.

Presently I had the willows of the river as near me on the right as the green slope, the chalk pit, the sheep-folds, and yew trees of Dean Hill on the left; and the sun shone upon the water and began to slant down the hillside. The river was very clear and swift, the chalk of its bed very white, the hair of its waving weeds very dark green.

West Dean, where I entered Wiltshire, a mile from East Dean, is a village with a “Red Lion” inn, a railway station, a sawmill and timber-yard, and several groups of houses clustering close to both banks of the river, which is crossed by a road-bridge and by a white footbridge below. I went over river and railway uphill past the new but ivied church to look at the old farm-house, the old church, and the camp, which lie back from the[131] road on the left among oaks and thickets. On that Sunday morning cows pasturing on the rushy fields below the camp, and thrushes singing in the oaks, were the principal inhabitants of West Dean. I did not go farther in this direction, for the road went north to West Tytherley and the broad woods that lie east of it, the remnant of Buckholt Forest, but turned back and west, and then south-west again on my original road, in order to be on the road nearest to Dean Hill. This took me over broad and almost hedgeless fields, and through a short disconnected fragment of an avenue of mossy-rooted beeches, to West Dean Farm. Nothing lay between the houseless road and the hillside, which is thick here with yew, except the broad arable fields, with a square or two given up to mustard flowers and sheep, and West Dean Farm itself. It is a house of a dirty white colour amidst numerous and roomy outbuildings, thatched or mellow-tiled, set in a circle of tall beeches. The road bends round the farm group and goes straight to the foot of the hill, and then along it. I went slowly, looking up at the yews and thorns on the green wall of the hill, and its slanting green trackway, and the fir trees upon the ridge. Linnets twittered in companies or sang solitarily on thorn tips. Thrushes sang in the wayside yews. Larks rose and fell unceasingly.[132] The sheep-bells tinkled in the mustard. Away from the hill the land sloped gradually in immense arable fields, and immense grass fields newly rolled into pale green stripes, down to the river, and there rose again up to Hound Wood and Bentley Wood, where a white house shone pale in the north-east, four or five miles off.

For nearly two miles the road had not had a house upon it, and nothing separated me from the hill, the yew trees, and the brier and hawthorn thickets. In fact, West Dean Farm was the only house served by the three miles of road between West Dean and West Grimstead. Yet this did not save a chalk pit close to the road from being used as a receptacle for rubbish. Having reached the farm and the foot of the hill the road began to turn away again towards the river and to West Grimstead. It was a loose, flinty road, so that I had another reason for walking instead of riding. The larks that sang over me could not have wished for better dust baths than this road would make them, for the sun was gaining. It was almost a treeless road until I was close to West Grimstead, where there was an oak wood on the right, streaked with the silver of birch stems and tipped with the yellow flames of larches. The village consisted of a church, an inn called the “Spring Cottage,” and[133] many thatched cottages scattered along several by-roads on either side. It ended in an old thatched cottage with outbuildings, at the verge of a deep sand pit full of sand-martins’ holes. When I had passed it I stopped at a gate and looked at the orange pit wall on the far side, the cottage above the wall, and the elm between the road and the pit. A thrush and several larks were singing, and through their songs I heard a thin voice that I had not heard for six months, very faint yet unmistakable, though I could not at once see the bird—a sand-martin. I recognized the sound, as I always recognize at their first autumnal ascent above the horizon the dim small cluster of the Pleiades on a September evening. On such a morning one sand-martin seems enough to make a summer, and here were six, flitting in narrow circles like butterflies with birds’ voices.

I went on and found myself in a flat land of oak woods and of fields that were half molehills and half rushes, and the hedge banks had gorse in blossom. It was here that I joined the Southampton and Salisbury road, a yellow road between the gorsy, rolling fragments of Whaddon Common, which came to an end at a plantation of pines on and about some mounds like tumuli on the right hand.

Uphill to Alderbury I walked, looking back[134] south-eastward along the four-mile wall of Dean Hill which I had quitted a mile behind. Alderbury, its “Green Dragon,” its public seat and foursquare fountain of good water for man and beast (erected by Jacob, sixth Earl of Radnor), is on a hilltop overlooking the Avon, and immediately on leaving it I began to descend and to slant nearer and nearer the river. The hedges of the road guided my eyes straight to the cathedral spire of Salisbury, two or three miles off beneath me. On the right the sward and oaks of Ivychurch came down to the road: below on the left the sward was wider, the oaks were fewer, and many cows were feeding. A long cleft of rushy turf and oaks, then a broad ploughland succeeded the Ivychurch oaks, and the ploughland rose up into a round summit crested by a clump of pines and beeches. I remember seeing this field when it was being ploughed by two horses, and the ploughman’s white dog was exploring on one side or another across the slopes.

Over beyond the river the land swelled up into chalk hills, here smooth and green, with a clump on the ridge, and there wooded. The railway was now approaching the road from the right, and the narrow strip between road and railway was occupied by an old orchard and a large green chestnut tree. In the branches of the chestnut sang a chaffinch,[135] while a boy was trimming swedes underneath. I was now at the suburban edge of Salisbury, the villas looking out of their trees and lemon-coloured barberry at the double stream of Avon, at the willowy marshland, the cathedral, and the Harnham Down racecourse above.

I crossed over Harnham bridge where the tiled roofs are so mossy, and went up under that bank of sombre-shimmering ivy just to look from where the roads branch to Downton, Blandford, and Odstock. Southward nothing is to be seen except the workhouse and the many miles of bare down and sheepfolds. Northward the cathedral spire soars out of a city without a hill, dominated on the right or east by Burroughs Hill, a low but decided bluff, behind which are the broad woods of Clarendon. The road was deserted. It was on a Tuesday evening, after market, that I had last been there, when clergy with wives and daughters were cycling out past a wagon for Downton drawn by horses with red and blue plumelets; motor cyclists were tearing in; a tramp or two trudged down towards the bridge. In the city itself the cattle were being driven to the slaughter-house or out to the country, a spotted calf was prancing on the pavement, one was departing for Wilton in a crowded motor bus, a wet, new-born one stood in a cart with its mother,[136] a cow with udders wagging was being hustled up the Exeter road by motor cars and pursued at a distance by a man who called to it affectionately as a last resource; another calf was being held outside a pub while the farmer drank; black and white pigs were steered cautiously past plate glass; and in the market-place Sidney Herbert and Henry Fawcett on their pedestals were looking out over the dark, wet square at the last drovers and men in gaiters leaving it, and ordinary passengers crossing it, and a few sheep still bleating in a pen. And the green river meadows and their elms and willows chilled and darkened as the gold sun sank without staining the high, pale-washed sky, and the cathedral clock nervously and quietly said, “One-two, one-two, one-two” for the third quarter before dark.

But this was Sunday morning, and still early. I ate breakfast to the tune of the “Marseillaise,” sung slowly and softly to a child as a lullaby, and was soon out again, this time amidst jackdaws, rooks, clergy, and the black-dressed Sunday procession, diversified by women in violet, green, and curry colour. The streets, being shuttered and curtained, robbed of the crowd shopping, were cold and naked; even the inns of Salisbury, whose names are so genial and succulent—“Haunch of Venison,” “Round of Beef,” “Ox,” “Royal[137] George,” “Roebuck,” “Wool Pack”—were as near as possible dismal. Their names were as meaningless as those of the dead Browns, Dowdings, Burtons, Burdens, and Fullfords in St. Edmund’s Churchyard. If it had not been for the women it would have been a city of the dead or a city of birds. The people kept to the paths of the close. The lawns and trees were given over exclusively to the birds, especially those that are black, such as the rook and blackbird. Those that were not matrimonially engaged on the grass were cawing in the elms, beeches, and chestnuts of the cathedral. Missel-thrushes were singing across the close as if it had been empty. A lark from the fields without drifted singing over the city. The stockdoves cooed among the carved saints. There were more birds than men in Salisbury. Never had I seen the cathedral more beautiful. The simple form of the whole must have been struck out of glaucous rock at one divine stroke. It seemed to belong to the birds that flew about it and lodged so naturally in the high places. The men who crawled in at the doors, as into mines, could not be the masters of such a vision.

Nevertheless, I took the liberty of entering myself, chiefly to look again for those figures of Death and a Traveller, where the Traveller says,—

[138]
“Alas, Death, alas, a blissful thing that were
If thou wouldst spare us in our lustiness
And come to wretches that be so of heavy cheer.” ...

and Death retorts,—
“Graceless gallant, in all thy lust and pride,
Remember that thou shalt give due.
Death shall from thy body thy soul divide.
Thou must not him escape certainly.
To the dead bodies cast down thine eye,
Behold them well, consider and see,
For such as they are such shalt thou be.”

There is little more to be said about death than is said here. But I could not find the words, though I went up and down those streets of knights’, ladies’, and doctors’ tombs, and saw again old Eleonor Sadler, grim, black, and religious, kneeling at her book in a niche since 1622, and looking as if she could have been the devil to those who did not do likewise. I saw, too, the tablet of Henry Hele, who practised medicine felicitously and honourably, for fifty years, in the close and in the city; and the green lady with the draped harp mourning over Thomas, Baron Wyndham, Lord High Steward of Ireland (1681–1745), and the bust of Richard Jefferies,—
“Who, observing the works of Almighty God
With a poet’s eye, | Has |
enriched the literature of his country, | and |
won for himself a place amongst | those |
who have made men happier, | and wiser.”

[139]

If Jefferies had to be commemorated in a cathedral, it was unnecessary to drag in Almighty God. Perhaps the commemorator hoped thus to cast a halo over the man and his books; but I think “The Story of my Heart” and “Hours of Spring” will be proof against the holy water of these feeble and ill divided words.

Outside the city I had the road to Wilton, a road lined on both sides by elms, almost to myself. The rooks cawed in their nests in the elms, and the eight bells of Bemerton called to worshippers from among the trees, a field’s-breadth distant on the left. I was not tempted by the bells, yet this was one of those Sundays that help us to see beauty and a sort of sense in the lines of George Herbert, vicar of Bemerton,—
“Sundays the pillars are
On which heav’ns palace arched lies:
The other days fill up the spare
And hollow room with vanities.
They are the fruitful beds and borders
In God’s rich garden: that is bare
Which parts their ranks and orders.
The Sundays of man’s life,
Threaded together on time’s string,
Make bracelets to adorn the wife
Of the eternal, glorious King.
On Sundays heaven’s gate stands ope;
Blessings are plentiful and rife,
More plentiful than hope.”

[140]

Izaak Walton says that on the Sunday before his death Herbert rose up suddenly from his bed, called for one of his instruments, tuned it, and sang this verse: “Thus he sung on earth such hymns and anthems as the angels and he ... now sing in Heaven.” The bells, the sunshine after storm, the elm trees, and the memory of that pious poet, put me into what was perhaps an unconscious imitation of a religious humour. And in that humour, repeating the verses with a not wholly sham unction, I rode away from Bemerton. The Other Man, however, overtook me, and upset the humour. For he repeated in his turn, with unction exaggerated to an incredibly ridiculous degree, the sonnet on Sin which comes next to that on Nature in Herbert’s “Temple,”—
“Lord, with what care hast thou begirt us round.
Parents first season us: then schoolmasters
Deliver us to laws; they send us bound
To rules of reason, holy messengers,
Pulpits and Sundays, sorrow dogging sin,
Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes,
Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in,
Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,
Blessings beforehand, ties of gratefulness,
The sound of glory ringing in our ears:
Without, our shame; within, our consciences;
Angels and grace, eternal hopes and fears.
Yet all these fences and their whole array
One cunning bosom-sin blows quite away.”

[141]

At the conclusion of this, without pause or change of tone, he continued: “From Parents, Schoolmasters, and Parsons, from Sundays and Bibles, from the Sound of Glory ringing in our ears, from Shame and Conscience, from Angels, Grace, and Eternal Hopes and Fears, Good Lord, or whatever Gods there be, deliver us.” This so elated him that he rode on at a great pace, and I lost him. For I dismounted at Fugglestone St. Peter, a very small, short-spired church with its churchyard, huddled into a narrow wayside patch. Church and churchyard are usually locked, so that you must get over the wall, if you wish to walk about on the shaven turf amongst ivy and periwinkle and the headstones of the Wiltshires, Bennetts, Lakes, Tabors, and Hollys, and to see middle-aged George Williams’s uncomfortable words (in 1842),—
“Dangers stand thick through all the ground
To push us to the tomb,
And fierce diseases wait around
To hurry mortals home.”

and J. Harris’s double-edged epitaph (1793),—
“How strangely fond of life poor mortals be,
How few that see our beds would change with we.
But, serious reader, tell me which is best,
The painful journey or the traveller’s rest?”

Harris was trying to imagine what it would be like, lying there in Fugglestone Churchyard, and[142] having the laugh of people who were still perpendicular; but, of course, it is most likely that Harris never wrote it.

I did not go into Wilton, but kept on steadily alongside the Wylye. For three miles I had on my left hand the river and its meadows, poplars, willows, and elms—the railway raised slightly above the farther bank—and the waved green wall of down beyond, to the edge of which came the dark trees of Grovely. It was such another scene as the Wey and the natural terrace west of Farnham. The road was heavy and wet, being hardly above the river level, but that was all the better for seeing the maidenhair lacework of the greening willows, the cattle among the marsh-marigolds of the flat green meadows, the moorhen hurried down the swift water, the bulging wagons of straw going up a deep lane to the sheepfolds, and the gradual slope of the Plain where those sheepfolds were, on my right. This edge of the Plain above the Wylye is a beautiful low downland, cloven by coombs and topped by beech clumps; and where it was arable the flints washed by last night’s rain were shining in the sun. A few motor cyclists, determined men, passed me at twenty miles an hour through South Newton. Larks sang high, and hedge-sparrows sang low.

[143]

This was a great hare country, as I knew by two tokens. When I had last come to South Newton a band of shooters, retrievers, and beaters was breaking up. A trap weighted with two ordinary men and a polished, crimson-faced god of enormous size drove off. Lord Pembroke’s cart followed, full of dead hares.... Some years before that I was on Crouch’s Down, on the other side of Grovely Wood, enjoying the green road which runs between the ridge and the modern highroad. It was open land, with some arable below, the Grovely oaks and their nightingales above, and the spire of Salisbury far off before me. Out of a warm, soft sky descended a light whisking rain, and on the Down seven hares were playing follow-my-leader at full speed. All seven ran in a bunch round and round, sometimes encircling a grass tussock in rings so very small at times that only they knew which was leader. Suddenly one leaped out of this ring, and all pursued him in a long, open string like hounds. Several times this happened. For twenty, fifty, or a hundred yards they ran straight; then they turned suddenly back almost on their own traces, in the same open order, until their fancy preferred circles or zigzags. Again they set off on a long race towards a hillside beech clump, going down a cleft above Baverstock. They made a dozen sharp[144] turns in the cleft, always at full speed. Maintaining the same long drawn out line, they next made for the woods above. In this long run the line opened out still more, but no one gave up. They entered the woods, to reappear immediately one at a time, and took once more to encircling a tussock. As they were usually two hundred yards away on downland of nearly their own colour, I could not be sure how often they changed their leader, but I think they did at least once in mid-career. They were as swift and happy as birds, and made the earth seem like the air....

South Newton—church, smithy, “Bell” inn, and cottages—is built mostly on the right side of the road, away from the river and its willows, which are but a few yards off. The church, of flint and stone chequer, stands a little back, the tower nearest the road, on a gentle slope of flame-shaped yews and the tombs of many Blakes. Again the road touched the river, and I looked over it to Great Wishford, its cottages and hayricks clustering about the church tower, with flag flying, and to a deep recess in the Down behind. The village has a street full of different, pretty houses, mostly built of chipped flint alternating with stone, in squares, or bands, or anyhow.

From Wishford onward the river has a good[145] road on either side, each with a string of villages, one or two miles apart. The “Swan” and an orange-coloured plain small house with grass and a great cedar stand at the turning which leads over the river to Great Wishford and the right bank. I kept to the left bank, because I was about to leave the Wylye and go north up its tributary Winterbourne. From the “Swan” I began to climb up above the river, and had a steep meadow and the farm-yard and elm trees of Little Wishford between it and me, but on my right a steep bank of elms which had less for the eye than the farther side of the river, its clean wall of down, terraced below, and the trees of Grovely peeping over. Ahead I could see more and more of the long, broad vale of the Wylye and its willows contained within slopes, half of pasture, half arable; and above all, the curves of the Plain flowing into and across one another. The earth was hazy, the sky clouded, and no one who had ridden on that Good Friday and bad Saturday could have expected a fine day with any confidence.

Had I been walking, I should have turned off this road between the “Swan” and Little Wishford, on to the Plain, and so by a green road that goes high across it as far as Shrewton. But I now kept on until the road had risen, so as to touch the edge[146] of the Plain, the arable land, the home of pewits. Here I had below me the meeting of the Wylye and Winterbourne, the thatched roofs of Stapleford scattered round it, and the road going on westward with telegraph posts along the sparse, willowy vale. I turned out of this vale at Stapleford. It is a village of many crossing roads and lanes, of houses of flint and stone chequer, in groups or isolated, under its elms and high grassy banks. The church is kept open, a clean, greenish place with Norman arches on one side, and a window illuminated by a coat of arms—a ph?nix on a crown—and the words, “Foy pour devoir.” There are no other inscriptions. Outside I noticed the names of Goodfellow, Pavie, Barnett, Brown, Rowden, Gamlen, Leversuch. The lettering survived on the headstone of John Saph, who died in 1683, and his wife, Alice, who died in 1677.

I dipped to a withy bed, and went upstream along the Winterbourne to Berwick St. James, and as the village lies on the right bank my road took a right-angled turn by a chalk pit to cross the bridge, and another to keep its course. At first sight Berwick St. James offered an excellent dense group of cottages and farm buildings by the river, new and old thatched roofs, and walls of flint or of black boarding. The church tower peered up on the right, with a mill[147] bestriding the stream: on the left a white house and blossoming fruit trees stood somewhat apart in their enclosure of white mud wall. The sky over all was dim, the thin white clouds showing the blue behind them. The street ending in the “Boot” inn was a perfect neat one of flint and stone chequer and thatch. The church is kept locked. It was open at that moment, but occupied. Its broad tower, which is at the road end, is almost as broad as itself. It has a gray, weedy churchyard, far too large for the few big ivy-covered box tombs lying about in it like unclaimed luggage on a railway platform.

The Winterbourne guides you through the heart of the Plain. It has, I believe, no very strict boundaries, but the Plain may be said to consist of all that mass of downland in South Wiltshire, which is broken only by the comparatively narrow valleys of five rivers—the Bourn, the Avon, the Wylye, the Nadder, and the Ebble. Three of these valleys, however, those of the Bourn on the east, and of the Wylye and the Nadder on the south, have railways in them as well as rivers. The railways are more serious interruptions to the character of the Plain, and whether or not they must be regarded as the boundaries of a reduced Plain, certainly the core of the Plain excludes them. Even so it has to admit the Amesbury and Mili[148]tary Camp Light Railway, cutting across from the Bourn to the Avon, and there ceasing. Within this reduced space of fifteen by twenty miles the Plain is nothing but the Plain. As for the military camps, nothing may be seen of them for days beyond the white tents gleaming in the sun like sheep or clouds. When they are out of sight the tumuli and ancient earthworks that abound bring to mind more forcibly than anywhere else the fact that, as the poet says, “the dead are more numerous than the living.”

The valleys are rivers not only of waters, but of greenest grass and foliage. The greatest part of the Plain is all treeless pasture, treeless arable land. Some high places, as at meetings of roads, possess beeches or fir trees in line or cluster. Where the ground falls too steeply for cultivation a copse has been formed—a copse in one case, between Shrewton and Tilshead, of beautiful contour, following the steep wall of chalk for a quarter of a mile in a crescent curve, with level green at its foot, the high Down rising bare above it. A space here and there has been left to thorns and gorse bushes. In several places, as at Asserton Farm above Berwick St. James, plantations have been made in mathematical forms. But as you travel across the Plain you come rarely to a spot where the chief thing[149] for the eye is not an immense expanse of the colour of ploughed chalkland, or of corn, or of turf, varying according to season and weather, and always diversified by parallelograms of mustard yellow. Sometimes this expanse rolls but little before it touches the horizon; far more often, it heaves or billows up boldly into several long curving ridges that intersect or flow into one another. The highest of these may be crowned by dark beeches or carved by the ditch and rampart of an ancient camp. Hedges are few, even by the roads. The roads are among the noblest, visiting the rivers and their orchards and thatched villages, but keeping for the main part of their length high and dry and in long curves. They are travelled by an occasional (but not sufficiently occasional) motor car, or by a homeward going farm-roller with children riding the horses.

Next to the dead the most numerous things on the Plain are sheep, rooks, pewits, and larks. To-day they mingle their voices, but the lark is the most constant. Here, more than elsewhere, he rises up above an earth only less free than the heavens. The pewit is equally characteristic. His Winter and twilight cry expresses for most men both the sadness and the wildness of these solitudes. When his Spring cry breaks every now and then,[150] as it does to-day, through the songs of the larks, when the rooks caw in low flight or perched on their elm tops, and the lambs bleat, and the sun shines, and the couch fires burn well, and the wind blows their smoke about, the Plain is genial, and the unkindly breadth and simplicity of the scene in Winter or in the drought of Summer are forgotten. But let the rain fall and the wind whirl it, or let the sun shine too mightily, the Plain assumes the character by which it is best known, that of a sublime, inhospitable wilderness. It makes us feel the age of the earth, the greatness of Time, Space, and Nature; the littleness of man even in an aeroplane, the fact that the earth does not belong to man, but man to the earth. And this feeling, or some variety of it, for most men is accompanied by melancholy, or is held to be the same thing. This is perhaps particularly so with townsmen, and above all with writers, because melancholy is the mood most easily given an appearance of profundity, and, therefore, most easily impressive.

The Plain has not attracted many writers, though in the last few years have appeared Miss Ella Noyes’s careful collection of notes and observations, and Mr. W. H. Hudson’s “Shepherd’s Life,” the best book on the Plain, one of the best of all country books, and one that lacks all trace of writer’s[151] melancholy. John Aubrey wrote one or two of his casual immortal pages on it. Drayton called it the first of Plains, and gave some reasons for it in his great poem on this renowned isle of Great Britain. Hundreds of arch?ologists have linked themselves to it in libraries. But the most famous book in some way connected with it is Sir Philip Sidney’s “Arcadia.” Perhaps this is one of those famous books which are never buried because the funeral expenses would be too large, though much still remains to be done before we shall know, as we should like to know, why and how “Arcadia” and similar books appealed to the men and women of England from 1590 to 1680, during which ten editions were called for; what kind of truth and beauty they saw in it; what part of their humanity was moved by it; whether they detected the influence of Wilton and Salisbury Plain....

Our own attitude towards it is not so hard to explain. That it is called “Arcadia” and is by Sidney is something, and in these days of docile antiquarian taste it may be enough for the few or many who read it first in the most recent edition, the third issued during the last century and a half. I doubt whether even these will do more than dream and doze and wake, lazily turning over page after page—nearly seven hundred pages[152] of painfully small type—without ever making out the plot, often forgetting who is the speaker, where the scene, only for the sake of the most famous passage of all,—

“There were hills which garnished their proud heights with stately trees; humble valleys whose base estate seemed comforted with the refreshing of silver rivers; meadows enamelled with all sorts of eye-pleasing flowers; thickets which, being lined with most pleasant shade, were witnessed so too by the cheerful disposition of many well-tuned birds; each pasture stored with sheep feeding with sober security, while the pretty lambs with bleating oratory craved the dams’ comfort; here a shepherd’s boy piping, as though he never should be old; there a young shepherdess knitting, and withal singing, and it seemed that her voice comforted her hands to work, and her hands kept time to her voice-music.” ...

(A charming companion to this first view of Arcadia is where FitzGerald speaks of the home-brewed at Yardley, in the days before “he knew he was to die.”) For a page or two the least learned of us can enjoy the ghostly rustle of these vaporous, eloquent forms that never were alive, yet once gave joy to men who were friends of Shakespeare and Drake; the phantoms of their felicity[153] in gardens and fair women. Then the beauty of visible things, of dress, for example, abounds and is very real, especially Pyrocles’ dress in his Amazon’s disguise—the hair arrayed in “careless care” under a coronet of pearl and gold and feathers, the doublet “of sky-coloured satin, with plates of gold, and, as it were, nailed with precious stones.” The princeliness of the Arcadians’ manners and morals may seem to reflect Sidney’s self “divinely mild, a spirit without spot.” There are thoughts, too, beyond such as the convention demanded, as when Pyrocles says,—

“I am not yet come to that degree of wisdom to think light of the sex of whom I have my life, since if I be anything, which your friendship rather finds than I acknowledge, I was, to come to it, born of a woman, nursed of a woman.... Truly we men, and praisers of men, should remember that if we have such excellences it is reasonable to think them excellent creatures, of whom we are—since a kite never brought forth a good flying hawk.” And some of the situations, conventional enough, only the weary or those that never loved can pass unsaluted; such as Amphialus’ too felicitous courtship of Queen Helen on behalf of his foster-brother, Philoxenos. The conceits, too, do not tower so often, so bravely, so rashly, into the cloudy alti[154]tudes without meeting what would not have been found at home: as in Kalander’s hunting,—

“The wood seemed to conspire with them against his own citizens [that is, the stags], dispersing their noise through all his quarters, and even the nymph left to bewail the loss of Narcissus and became a hunter.”

The nymphs themselves, enchanted by the pleasant ways of the pastoral, are sometimes lured out of their fastnesses to bless it with a touch of eternal Nature or of true rusticity, as in the Eclogue in the third book: “The first strawberries he could find, were ever in a clean washed dish sent to Kala; thus posies of the spring flowers were wrapped up in a little green silk, and dedicated to Kala’s breasts; thus sometimes his sweetest cream, sometimes the best cake-bread his mother made, were reserved for Kala’s taste. Neither would he stick to kill a lamb when she would be content to come over the way unto him.”

Delightful, too, is the use of experience when it is said of Pyrocles that his mind was “all this while so fixed upon another devotion, that he no more attentively marked his friend’s discourse than the child that hath leave to play marks the last part of his lesson.”

[155]

This has nothing to do with the Plain. We know, indeed, that Sidney wrote it below there at Wilton, in his sister, the Countess of Pembroke’s house. But what has “Arcadia” to do with Wilton, save that it was written there? There, says Aubrey, the Muses appeared to Sidney, and he wrote down their dictates in a book, even though on horseback. “These romancy plaines and boscages did no doubt,” says he, a Wiltshire man, “conduce to the heightening of Sir Philip Sidney’s phansie.” It cannot be said that they did more, that they reflected themselves in the broad, meandering current of the “Arcadia.” At most, perhaps, after heightening the poet’s fancy, they offered no impediments to it. If Salisbury Plain was not Arcadia, it contained the elements of Arcadia and a solitude in which they could be mingled at liberty. Every one must wish for a larger leaven of passages like that one where he compares Pyrocles to the impatient schoolboy, for something to show us what he and the countess said and did at Wilton, and what the Plain was like, three hundred years ago, when the book was being written. Even so it is a better preparation for Salisbury Plain than it would be for Sedgemoor or Land’s End; but I shall not labour the point since I had seen the Plain before I had read the[156] book, and Berwick St. James is as little affected by “Arcadia” as “Arcadia” by Berwick St. James.

As soon as my road was outside Berwick St. James it mounted above the river and was absolutely clear of houses, hedges, and fences for a mile, and showed me nothing more than the bare and the green arable land flowing away on every side in curves like flight, and compact masses of beeches on certain ridges, like manes or combs. At the end of the mile my northward road ran into a westward road from Amesbury, turned sharp along it for a hundred yards or so, and then out of it sharp to the left and north again, thus seeing nothing of the village of Winterbourne Stoke but a group of sycamores and a thatched white mud wall round which it twisted. Out and up the road took me again to the high arable without a hedge, and the music of larks, and the mingling sounds of pewits and sheep-bells. Before me scurried partridges, scarce willing to give up their love-making in the sunlit and sun-warmed dust. Looking over my shoulder I saw two hills striped with corn, and one of them crested with beeches, curve up apart from one another, so as to frame in the angle thus made between them the bare flank of Berwick Down and the outline of Yarnbury Castle ramparts upon the bare ridge of it. Very far[157] northward hung the dark-wooded inland promontory of Martinsell, near Savernake, and in the east the Quarley and Figsbury range, their bony humps just tipped with dark trees.

The next village was five villages in one—Rollestone, Maddington, Shrewton, Orcheston St. George, and Orcheston St. Mary. Here many roads from the high land descended to the river and crossed mine. The cluster of villages begins with orchard and ends in a field where the grass is said to grow twelve feet high. After passing over the Winterbourne and running along under its willows to Shrewton’s little domed dungeon of blackened stone, and an inn that stands sideways to the road, with the sign of a Catherine-wheel, the road again bridges the river from waterside Shrewton to waterside Maddington. But I kept along the Shrewton bank on a by-road. The stream here flows as clear as glass over its tins and crockery, between roadside willows and a white mud wall, and I followed it round past the flint-towered church and the “Plume of Feathers” and its pair of peacock yews. I was looking for Orcheston St. Mary. One sunny February day, when the fields by the road hither from Tilshead were flooded with pools and channels of green, peacock blue, and purple by the Winterbourne, I had seen below me among[158] the loops of the water a tiny low-towered church with roof stained orange, and a white wall curving and long, and a protective group of elms, which was Orcheston St. Mary. I continued along the stream and its banks of parsley and celandine, its troop of willows, beeches, and elms, but found myself at Orcheston St. George. A cottage near the church bore upon its wall these words, out in stone, before Queen Victoria’s time,—
“Fear God
Honour the King
Do good to all men.”

Probably it dates from about the year of Alton Workhouse, from the times when kites and ravens abounded, and thrived on the corpses of men who were hanged for a little theft committed out of necessity or love of sport. The fear of God must have been a mighty thing to bring forth such laws and still more the obedience to them. And yet, thanks to our capacity for seeing the past and the remote in rose-colour, that age frequently appears as at least a silver age; perhaps even our own will appear German silver. I confess I did not think about the lad who was hanged for a hare when I caught sight of the church at Orcheston St. George, but rather of some imaginary, blissful time which at least lacked our tortures, our great[159] men, our shame and conscience. It is a flint church with an ivied tower standing on terms of equality among thatched farm buildings and elms. The church was stifling, for a stove roared among dead daffodils and moss and the bodies of Ambrose Paradice, gent, dead since 1727, and Joan his wife, and the mere tablet of John Shettler of Elston, who died at Harnham (“from the effects of an accident”) on December 6, 1861, when he was fifty-two, and went to Hazelbury Brian in Dorset to be buried. Outside, the sun was almost as warm on the daisies and on the tombstone of Job Gibbs, who died in 1817 at the age of sixty-four, and proclaimed, or the sexton did for him,—
“Ye living men the Tomb survey
Where you must quickly dwell.
Mark how the awful summons sounds
In ev’ry funeral knell.
Give joy or sorrow, care or pain,
Take life and blends away,
But let me find them all again
In that eternal day.”

Close by, Ann Farr from Shropshire, a servant for fifty years at the Rectory, had a tablet between her and oblivion.

From Orcheston St. George the road advances three miles with hardly a hedge. On the right rose and spread broad pastures mainly, on the left[160] arable lands, new ploughed, or green with young corn, or cut up into squares of swedes or mustard for the long-horned sheep. There was no flooded river now to shine in the sun. Clouds began to thicken over the sky. The dust whirled. The straw caught in the hawthorns fluttered. A motor car raced by me. Therefore I did not get off my bicycle to visit that crescent beech and fir wood against a concavity of the chalk upon my right. A farm road curves past it, the wood hanging above it as beautifully as if above a river. I hoped to reach Tilshead before it rained, or, better still, the elms and farm buildings at Joan-a-Gore’s at the crossing of the Ridge Way. Tilshead’s trees lay visible before me for a mile or more. Its street of cottages and houses that are more than cottages I entered before the rain. I even stopped at the church—a flint and stone one—to see the tower and the churchyard, and its white mud wall, and the chestnut tree, and the ash that weeps over the box tombs of people named Wilkins and Parham, and the graves of the Husseys and Laweses, and that boast of William Cowper the schoolmaster in 1804,—
“When the Archangel’s trump shall sound,
And slumbering mortals bid to rise,
I shall again my form assume
To meet my Saviour in the skies.”

[161]

A man was just stepping out of a motor car into the “Black Horse,” carrying a scarlet-hooded falcon upon his wrist; but I did not stop here, nor at the “Rose and Crown,” or the “Bell.”

On leaving Tilshead, as on leaving Berwick St. James, Winterbourne Stoke, and Orcheston, I was free of houses; and of the few that lay in the hollows of the Plain only one was visible—a small one on my right a quarter of a mile away among ricks and elm trees—until I came to Joan-a-Gore’s. It is a hedgeless road, with more or less wide margins of rough grass, along which proceed two lines of poplars, some dead, some newly planted, all unprosperous and resembling the sails of windmills. A league of ploughland on either hand was broken only by a clump or two on the high ridges and a rick on the lower. As it was Sunday no white and black teams were crossing these spaces, sowing or scarifying. The rooks of Joan-a-Gore’s flew back and forth, ignorant of the falconer; the pewit brandished himself in the air; the lark sang continually; on one of the dead poplars a corn bunting delivered his unvaried song, as if a handful of small pebbles dropped in a chain dispiritedly. Nobody was on the road, it being then two o’clock, except a young soldier going to meet a girl. The rain came, but was gone again before[162] I reached Joan-a-Gore’s. The farm-house, the spacious farm-yard and group of irregular, shadowy, thatched buildings, and the surrounding rookery elms, all on a gently-sloping ground next to the road—this is the finest modern thing on the Plain. The farm itself is but a small, slated house, gray-white in colour, with a porch and five front windows, half hid among elm trees; but the whole group probably resembles a Saxon chief’s homestead. The trees make a nearly continuous copse with the elms and ashes that stand around and above the thatched cart lodges and combined sheds and cottages at Joan-a-Gore’s Cross. No hedge, wall, or fence divides this group from my road or from the Ridge Way crossing it, and I turned into one of the doorless cart lodges to eat. I sat on a wagon shaft, looking out north over the Ridge Way and the north edge of the Plain. Where it passed the cart lodge the Ridge Way was a dusty farm track; but on the other side of the crossing it was a fair road, leading past a new farm group towards Imber. Chickens peeked round me in the road dust and within the shed. Sparrows chattered in the thatch. The bells of sheep folded in neighbouring root fields tinkled. In the rookery the rooks cawed, and nothing intimated that the falcon had killed one. The young soldier had met his[163] girl, and was walking back with her hand in his. The heavy dark sagging clouds let out some rain without silencing the larks. As the sun came out again a trapful of friends of the cottagers drove up. The trap was drawn up alongside of me with a few stares: the women went in; the men put away the horse and strolled about. Well, I could not rest here when I had finished eating. Perhaps Sunday had tainted the solitude and quiet; I know not. So I mounted and rode on north-westward.

The road was beginning to descend off the Plain. The poplars having come to an end, elms lined it on both sides. When the descent steepened the roadside banks became high and covered in arum, parsley, nettle, and ground ivy, and sometimes elder and ivy. No hedgerow on the left hid the great waves of the Plain towards Imber, and the fascinating hollow of the Warren close at hand. The slabby ploughland sinks away to a sharp-cut, flat-bottomed hollow of an oblong tendency, enclosed by half-wooded, green terraced banks all round except at the entrance, which is towards the road. This is the Warren, a most pleasant thing to see, a natural theatre unconsciously improved by human work, but impossible to imitate entirely by art, and all the better for being empty.

Nearing the foot of the descent the road on the[164] left is blinded by a fence, so that I could hardly see the deep wooded cleave parallel to me, and could only hear the little river running down it to Lavington. Very clear and thin and bright went this water over the white and dark stones by the wayside, as I came down to the forge at West Lavington and the “Bridge” inn. West Lavington is a street of about two miles of cottages, a timber-yard, inns, a great house, a church, and gardens, with interruptions from fields. All Saints’ Church stands upon a steep bank on the left, a towered church with a staircase corner turret and an Easter flag flying. Round about it throng the portly box tombs and their attendant headstones, in memory of the Meads, Saunderses, Bartlets, Naishes, Webbs, Browns, Allens, and the rest. Among the Browns is James Brown, shepherd “for thirty-nine years,” who died in 1887, and was then but forty-six. The trees and thatched and tiled roofs of the village hid the Plain from the churchyard. Inside, the church wall was well lined with tablets to the Tinkers, the Smiths, and the family of Amor; but the principal thing is the recumbent marble figure of Henry Danvers, twenty-one years old when he died in 1654. He is musing over a book which appears to be slipping from his grasp. The figure of his mother, Eliza[165]beth, near him is also holding but not reading a book. Between the two an earlier female effigy, head on cushion, slumbers in a recess. Under one of the largest tablets a tiny stone with quaint lettering was inset to keep in mind Henevera Yerbury, who died at Coulston on March 4, 1672.

Instead of going straight on through Potterne and Devizes, I turned to the left by the Dauntsey Agricultural College, and entered a road which follows the foot of the Plain westward to Westbury and Frome. Thus I had the north wall of the Plain always visible on my left as I rode through Little Cheverell, Erlestoke, Tinhead, and Edington. The road twisted steeply downhill between high banks of loose earth and elm roots, half draped by arum, dandelion, ground ivy, and parsley, and the flowers of speedwell and deadnettle; then up again to Little Cheverell. Here I mounted a bank of nettles and celandines under elm trees into the churchyard, and between two pairs of pollard limes to the door of the church, and walked round it and saw the two box tombs smothered in ivy, and the spotted old carved stones only two feet out of the ground. Behind the church rises Strawberry Hill. A cow was lowing in the farmyard over the road. Fowls were scratching deeper and deeper the holes among the elm roots on the church bank.

[166]

Then for a distance the road traversed hedgeless arable levels that rose gently in their young green garments up to the Plain. I looked back, and saw the vast wall of the Plain making an elbow at West Lavington, and crooking round to a clump on a straw-coloured hill above Urchfont, the farthest point visible. Before me stretched the woods of Erlestoke Park, crossing the road and slanting narrow and irregular up and along the hillside, lining it with beech and fir for over a mile, under the name of Hill Wood. The road dipped steeply through the grounds of the park, and its high banks of gray sand, dressed in dog’s mercury and ivy, and overhung by pine trees, shut out everything on either hand. Several private bridges crossed the deep road, and a woman had stopped that her child might shout, “Cuckoo! Cuckoo!” under the arch of one of them. Emerging from these walls, the road cut through a chain of ponds. Erlestoke Park lay on both sides. On the right its deer fed by the new church under a steep rise of elms and sycamores; on the left rooks cawed among the elms and chestnuts scattered on lawn that sloped up to Hill Wood.

A timber-yard, a “George and Dragon,” and many neat thatched cottages compose the wayside village of Erlestoke. Water was flashing down the gutters.[167] Quite a number of people were on the road, but no one could tell me the meaning of the statuary niched on the cottage walls. It must have come from “some old ancient place,” they said. An old man who had dwelt for eighteen years in one of the cottages thus adorned, and had worked as a boy with old men that knew the place, could tell me no more. Some of the figures were nudes—one a female, with the coy hands of Venus, rising from her bath—others classical, and symbolic or grotesque: all astonishing in that position, ten feet up on a cottage wall, and unlikely to have come from the old church in Erlestoke Park.

Not a mile of this road was without cottagers strolling with their children or walking out to see friends in the beautiful weather. But just outside Erlestoke I met two slightly dilapidated women, not cottage women, with a perambulator, and twenty yards behind them two weatherbeaten, able-bodied men in caps, better dressed than the women. As I went by, one of them gave a shout, which I did not take as meant for me. He continued to shout what I discovered to be “Sir” in a loud voice until I turned round and had to get down. They advanced to meet me. The shorter man, a stocky fellow of not much past thirty, with very little nose, thin lips, and a strong, shaven chin, hastened[168] up to me and inquired, in an unnecessarily decided manner, the road to Devizes, and if there were many houses on the way. The taller man, slender and very upright, with bright blue eyes, had by this time come up, and the two began to beg, telling rapidly, loudly, emphatically, and complainingly, a combined story into which the Titanic was introduced. One of them pointed out that he was wearing the button of the Seamen’s Guild. They wanted me to look at papers. The two women, who were still walking on, they claimed as their wives. The more they talked the less inclined did I feel to give them money. Though they began to call down a blessing on me, I still refused. They persisted. The shorter one was not silent while I mounted my bicycle. So I rode away out of reach of their blessings without giving them anything. I tried to explain to myself why. For sixpence I might have purchased two loaves or three pints for them, and for myself blessings and possibly some sort of glow. I did not know nearly enough of mankind to condemn them as mere beggars; besides, mere beggars must live, if any one must. But they were very glib and continuous. Also they were hearty men in good health—which should have been a reason for giving them what I could afford. The strongest reason against it was probably alarm at[169] being given some responsibility at one blow for five bodies in some ways worse off than myself, and shame, too, at the act of handing money and receiving thanks for it. My conscience was uneasy. I could not appease it with sixpence, nor with half a sovereign, which might have been thought generous if I had told the story. If I was to do anything I ought to have seen the thing through, to have accompanied these people and seen that they slept dry and ate enough, and got work or a pension. To give them money was to take mean advantage of the fact that in half a mile or so I could stow them away among the mysteries and miseries of the world. Too late I concluded that I ought to have listened to their story to the end, to have read their papers and formed an opinion, and to have given what I could, because in any case I should be none the worse, and they might be the better, if only to the extent of three pints between them. I made a resolution—a sort of a resolution—to give sixpence in future to every beggar, and leave the question of right or wrong till—
“When the Archangel’s trump shall sound
And slumbering mortals bid to rise,”

and the schoolmaster’s expectation is answered. Nevertheless, I was uneasy—so uneasy that the next beggar got nothing from me. It was simpler to[170] pass by with a helpless “Que sais-je?” shrug, than to stop and have a look at him and say something, while I felt in my pockets and made the choice between my coppers and my smallest silver.

Thus I rode up hill through more steep banks of gray sand draped in ivy, overhung with pine trees. Dipping again, I came to a park-like meadow, a pond, and a small house above rather stiff, ineffectual green terraces, on my right; while on the left the wall of the Plain was carved from top to bottom by three parallel even rolls like suet puddings, and these again carved across horizontally. A little farther on Coulston Hill was hollowed out into a great round steep bay which had once been a beech wood. Now all the beeches were lying anyhow, but mostly pointing downward, on the steep where they had fallen or slid, some singly, some in raft-like masses. Not a tree remained upright. The bared, blackish earth and the gray stems—of the colour of charred wood and ashes—suggested fire. The disorder of the strewn debris suggested earthquake. All was silent. A stiff man of fifty was endeavouring to loiter without stopping still in the road while his daughter of eighteen tried to keep her distance behind him by picking anemones without actually stopping.

[171]

Before Tinhead there were more vertical rolls and corresponding troughs on the hillside, and at the foot again three or four wide terraces, and below them a cornfield reaching to the road. To the low, dark-blue elm country away from the Plain—that is, northward—and to the far wooded ridge on its horizon, the westering light was beginning to add a sleeplike softness of pale haze. Over the low hedges I saw league after league of this lower land, and the drab buttresses of Beacon Hill near Devizes on its eastern edge. It had the appearance of a level, uninhabitable land of many trees. Several times a hollow cleft in the slope below the road—a cleft walled by trees, but grass-bottomed—guides the eye out towards it. All along good roads led down to the vale, and an equal number of rough roads climbed the hillside up to the Plain. I was to go down, not up, and I looked with regret at the clear ridge and the rampart of Bratton Castle carved on it against the sky, the high bare slopes, the green magnificent gulleys and horizontal terraces, the white roads, and especially a rough cartway mounting steeply from Edington between prodigious naked banks. For I had formerly gone up this cartway on a day so fine that for many nights afterwards I could send myself to sleep by thinking of how I climbed, seeing only these precipitous[172] banks and the band of sky above them, until I emerged into the glory and the peace of the Plain, of the unbounded Plain and the unbounded sky, and the marriage of sun and wind that was being celebrated upon them. But it was no use going the same way, for I was tired and alone, and it was near the end of the afternoon, though still cloudily bright and warm. I had to go down, not up, to find a bed that I knew of seven or eight miles from Tinhead and Edington.

These two are typical downside villages of brick and thatch, built on the banks of the main road, a parallel lane or two, and some steep connecting lanes at right angles. When I first entered them from below I was surprised again and again how many steps yet higher up the downside they extended. From top to bottom the ledges and inclines on which they stand, and the intervening spaces of grass and orchard, cover about half a mile. Tinhead has an “Old George” inn of an L shape, with a yard in the angle. Edington, almost linked to Tinhead by cottages scattered along the road, has a “Plough” and “Old White Horse.” They were beginning to advertise the Tinhead and Bratton inns as suitable for teas and week-end parties. Hence, perhaps, the prefix “Old.” For hereby is the first station since Lavington on the[173] line that goes parallel to the wall of the Plain and a mile or two below the road, all along the Pewsey vale to Westbury.

I turned away from the hills through Edington, which has a big towered church among its farmyards, cottage gardens, and elm slopes—big enough to seat all Edington, men and cattle. Like Salisbury Cathedral, this church looks as if it had been made in one piece. All over, it is a uniform rough gray without ivy or moss or any stain. On first entering the churchyard, what most struck my eye was the name of the Rev. Hussy Cave-Browne-Cave, for his name is on the fifth step of the cross erected during his vicarship; and next to that a prostrate cross within a stone kerb, six yards long by three yards wide, in memory of a member of the Long family. The church is the centre of a village of big box tombs, some ornamented by carving, one covered by a stone a foot thick, mossed, lichened, stained orange and black, pitted deep by rain, and retaining not a letter of its inscription. I saw the names Pike, Popler, Oram, and Fatt. Inside, out of the rain, lie the Longs, Carters, and Taylers, the days of their lives conspicuously recorded, and more than this in the case of George Tayler, since he died in 1852, and left money for a sixpenny cake to be given to each Sunday-school teacher,[174] and a threepenny one to each scholar, once a year, “immediately after the sermon” (I think, at Easter). Mr. Tayler was either an enemy to sermons, or did not know as much as Sir Philip Sidney about schoolboys. One transept is the exclusive domain of an Augustinian canon, his head on a cushion, his feet against a barrel, while the coping-stone of his monument is capped by a barrel and a tree sprouting from it. The locked chancel is peopled by effigies of great or of rich men lying on their backs or kneeling and clasping their hands in prayer, as they have done for centuries; one of them a Welshman from Glamorgan, Sir Edward Lewys. Round about I read the names Lewis, Price, Roberts, Phillips, and Ellis. And speaking of names, I noticed that the landlord of the “Plough” was Pavy, a name which I had seen at Stapleford, and long before that in the epitaph Ben Jonson wrote on “a child of Queen Elizabeth’s Chapel,” a boy actor, Salathiel Pavy—
“Weep with me all you that read
This little story;
And know, for whom a tear you shed,
Death’s self is sorry.
’Twas a child, that so did thrive
In grace and feature,
As Heaven and nature seemed to strive
Which owned the creature.
[175]
Years he numbered scarce thirteen
When fates turned cruel;
Yet three filled zodiacs had he been
The stage’s jewel;
And did act, what now we moan,
Old men so duly,
As, sooth, the Parc? thought him one,
He played so truly.
So, by error, to his fate
They all consented;
But viewing him since, alas, too late
They have repented;
And have sought, to give new birth,
In baths to steep him;
But, being so much too good for earth,
Heaven vows to keep him.”

The conceit and the babbling metre play most daintily with sadness; yet I think now it would touch us little had we not a name to attach to it, the name of a boy who acted in Jonson’s “Cynthia’s Revels” and “Poetaster” in 1600 and 1601.

A motor car overtook me in the village, scattering a group of boys. “Look out!” cried one, and as the thing passed by, turned to the next boy with, “There’s a fine motor; worth more than you are; cost a lot of money.” Is this not the awakening of England? At least, it is truth. One pink foxy boy laughed in my face as if there had been iron bars or a wall of plate glass dividing us;[176] another waited till I had started, to hail me, “Long-legs.”

Rapidly I slid down, crossed the railway, and found myself in a land where oaks stood in the hedges and out in mid-meadow, and the banks were all primroses, and a brook gurgled slow among rush, marigold, and willow. High above me, on my left hand, eastward, was the grandest, cliffiest part of the Plain wall, the bastioned angle where it bends round southward by Westbury and Warminster, bare for the most part, carved with the White Horse and with double tiers of chalk pits, crowned with the gigantic camps of Bratton, Battlesbury, and Scratchbury, ploughed only on some of the lower slopes, and pierced by the road to Imber. The chimneys of Trowbridge made a clump on ahead to my right. In the west the dark ridge of the Mendips made the horizon.

I turned out of my way to see Steeple Ashton. It has no steeple, being in fact Staple Ashton, but a tower and a dial on a church, a very big church, bristling with coarse crockets all over, and knobby with coarse gargoyles, half lion and half dog, some spewing down, some out, some up. It is not a show village, like Lacock, where the houses are packed as in a town, and most of the gardens invisible; but a happy alternation of cottages of[177] stone or brick (sometimes placed herring-bone fashion) or timber work, vegetable gardens, orchard plots, and the wagon-maker’s. On many a wagon for miles round the name of Steeple Ashton is painted. It is on level ground, but well up towards the Plain, over the wall of which rounded clouds, pure white and sunlit, were heaving up. Rain threatened again, but did no more. The late afternoon grew more and more quiet and still, and in the warmth I mistook a distant dog’s bark, and again a cock’s crowing, for the call of a cuckoo, mixed with the blackbird’s singing. I strained my ears, willing to be persuaded, but was not. I was sliding easily west, accompanied by rooks going homeward, and hailed by thrushes in elm trees beside the road—through West Ashton and downhill on the straight green-bordered road between Carter’s Wood and Flowery Wood. I crossed the little river Biss and went under the railway to North Bradley. This is a village built partly along the road from Westbury to Trowbridge, partly along two parallel turnings out of it. The most conspicuous houses on the main road are the red brick and stone villas with railings and small gardens, bearing the following names: The Laurels, East Lynn, Cremont, Lyndhurst, Hume Villa, Alcester Cottage, Rose Villa, and Frith House, all[178] in one row. On a dusty, cold day, when sparrows are chattering irresolutely, this is not a cheerful spot; nor yet when an organ-grinder is singing and grinding at the same time, while his more beauteous and artistic-looking mate stands deceitfully by and makes all the motions but none of the music of a baritone in pain. To the outward eye, at least, the better part of North Bradley is the by-road which the old flat-fronted asylum of stone faces across a small green, the church tower standing behind, half hid by trees. I went down this road, past farms called Ireland and Scotland on the left, and on the right a green lane, where, among pots and pans, a gypsy caravan had anchored, belonging to a Loveridge of Bristol. Venus, spiky with beams, hung in the pale sky, and Orion stood up before me, above the blue woods of the horizon. All the thrushes of England sang at that hour, and against that background of myriads I heard two or three singing their frank, clear notes in a mad eagerness to have all done before dark; for already the blackbirds were chinking and shifting places along the hedgerows. And presently it was dark, but for a lamp at an open door, and silent, but for a chained dog barking, and a pine tree moaning over the house. When the dog ceased, an owl hooted, and when the owl ceased I could just hear the river Frome roaring steadily over a weir far off. Before I settled into a chair I asked them what the weather was going to be like to-morrow. “Who knows?” they said; “but we do want sun. The grass isn’t looking so well as it was a month ago: it’s looking browny.” Had any eggs been found? “Not one; but we’ve heard of them being found, and we’ve been looking out for plovers’ eggs.” I asked what they did with the song birds’ eggs, and if they were ever eaten. The idea of eating such little eggs disgusted every one over fifteen; but they were fond of moorhens’, and had once taken twenty-two from a single nest before the bird moved to a safe place. Yes, they had plenty of chicks, and some young ducks half grown. The turkeys were laying, but it was too early to let them sit.... Again I heard the weir, and I began to think of sleep.