Next day the wind has flown and the snow is again almost rain: there is ever a hint of pale sky above, but it is not as luminous as the earth. The trees over the road have a beauty of darkness and moistness. Beyond them the earth is a sainted corpse, with a blue light over it that is fast annihilating all matter and turning the landscape to a spirit only. Night and the snow descend upon it, and at dawn the nests are full of snow. The yews and junipers on a league of Downs are chequered white upon white slopes, and the green larches support cirrus clouds of snow. In the garden the daffodils bend criss-cross under snow that cannot quite conceal the yellow flowers. But the snow has ceased. The sky is at first pale without a cloud and tender as from a long imprisonment; it deepens in hue as the sun climbs and gathers force. The crooked paths up the Downs begin to glitter like streaks of lightning. The thrushes sing. From the straight dark beeches the snow cannot fall fast enough in great drops, in showers, in masses that release the boughs with a quiver and a gleam. The green leaves close to the ground creep out, and against them the snow is blue. A little sighing wind rustles ivy and juniper and yew. The sun mounts, and from his highest battlement of cloud blows a long blast of light over the pure land. Once more the larch is wholly green, the beech rosy brown with buds. A cart goes by all a-gleam with a[41] load of crimson-sprouting swedes and yellow-sprouting mangolds that seem to be burning through the net of snow above them. Down each side of every white road runs a stream that sings and glitters in ripples like innumerable crystal flowers. Water drips and trickles and leaps and gushes and oozes everywhere, and extracts the fragrance of earth and green and flowers under the heat that hastens to undo the work of the snow. The air is hot and wet. The snow is impatient to be water again. It still makes a cape over the briers and brambles, and there is a constant drip and steam and song of drops from the crossing branches in the cave below. Loud sounds the voice of leaf and branch and imprisoned water in the languor and joy of their escape. On every hand there is a drip and gush and ooze of water, a crackle and rustle and moan of plants and trees unfolding and unbending and greeting air and light; a close, humid, many-perfumed host; wet gloom and a multitudinous glitter; a movement of water and of the shadows like puffs of smoke that fleet over the white fields under the clouds. And over and through it a cuckoo is crying and crying, first overhead, then afar, and gradually near and retreating again. He is soon gone, but the ears are long afterwards able to extract the spirit of the song, the exact interval of it, from among all the lasting sounds, until we hear it as clearly as before, out of the blue sky, out of the white cloud, out of the shining grey water. It is a word of power—cuckoo! The melting of the snow is faster than ever, and at the end of the day there is none left except in some hollows of the Downs on the slopes behind the topmost of the beeches that darkly fringe the[42] violet sky. In the misty shutting of the light there are a thousand songs laced by cuckoos’ cries and the first hooting of owls, and the beeches have become merely straight lines of pearl in a mist of their own boughs. Below them, in the high woods, goes on the fall of the melting snow through the gloomy air, and the splash on the dead leaves. This gloom and monotonous sound make an exquisite cloister, visited but not disturbed by the sound of the blackbirds singing in the mist of the vale underneath. Slowly the mist has deepened from the woods to the vale and now the eye cannot see from tree to tree. Then the straight heavy rain descends upon the songs and the clatterings of blackbirds, and when they are silenced the moorhen’s watery hoot announces that the world belongs to the beasts and the rainy dark until to-morrow.
Beautiful upon the waters, beautiful upon the mountains, is the cuckoo’s song, and most rare over the snow. But of all places and hours I should choose the crags of Land’s End in a dawn of June; and let it be the end of that month and the wind be grey and cold, so that the ships stagger in the foam and crag-like waves as they catch the early light tenderly upon their sails. The cold beams, the high precipices yet full of shadow and of the giddy calling of daw and gull, the black but white-lipped water and the blacker cormorant flying straight across it just over the foam, the sky golden yet still pallid and trembling from the dungeon of night—through it floats that beloved voice breaking, breaking, and the strong year at the summit of its career has begun to decline. The song is memorable and fair also when the drenched[43] gardens toss and spread their petals in the grass. Many a one hears it who will not hear it again, and many that once expected it impatiently hears it no more because he is old and deaf or because his heart is closed. There is not a broad and perfect day of heat and wind and sunshine that is not haunted by that voice seeming to say the earth is hollow under our feet and the sky hollow over our heads.
There are whole nights when the cuckoo will not sleep, and the woods on either side of a road twenty miles long emit the cry of these conquerors under the full moon and the white stars of love. If you pause it will appear that it is not a silence that this song rules over; for what was a silence was full of sounds, as many sounds as there are leaves, sounds of creeping, gliding, pattering, rustling, slow wormlike continuous noises and sudden sounds. And strangely at length is the glorious day reared high upon the ruins of this night, of which the survivors slink away into the old forgotten roads, the dense woods, the chimneys of deserted houses.
It is a jolly note only when the bird is visible close at hand and the power of his throat is felt. Often two or three will answer one another, or for half a day will loiter about a coombe for the sake of an echo. It is one of the richest sounds in nature when two sing together, the second note of one being almost blended with the first of the other; and so they continue as if themselves entranced by the harmony, and the navvy leans upon his pick to listen.
On the day after the great melting of the snow the[44] white beam tree, at the edges of high woods and in the midst of the beeches, has its hour, when its thousands of large white buds point upward like a multitudinous candelabrum. For me the white beam is always associated with wayfaring. Its white buds are the traveller’s joy of spring. The buds like blossoms or flames bewitch from afar off. They are always upon sloping ground and usually upon hillsides in the chalk land. In the autumn their leaves often shrivel before falling, and turn to a colour that looks like pink almond blossom by contrast with juniper and yew. When they have fallen, they are as much to be noticed. They lie commonly with their white undersides uppermost, and though rain soaks them and wind scatters them and they are trodden down, they preserve their whiteness until the winter or the following spring. It is a tree that belongs, above all others except the yew, to the Pilgrims’ Way, and it is impossible to forget these leaves lying white on the untouched wayside sward, among the dewy purple and crimson and gold of other leaves, sparkling in the sun and entering into all the thoughts and fancies and recollections that come to one who goes in solitude along that old road when the scent of the dying year is pungent as smoke and sweet as flowers.
KENT, SURREY AND HAMPSHIRE.
 
The beam tree is bright on the soft hills all through the days of rain following upon the snow and sun. There are days when earth is absorbed in her delights of growth and multiplication. The rain is a veil which she wraps[45] about her that she may toil and sing low at her myriad divine domesticities untroubled. Delicate snails climb the young stalks of grass and flower, and their houses, pearly, chocolate, tawny, pure or ringed or chequered, slide after them. The leaves, with their indescribable charm of infinitely varied division, of wild clematis, maple, brier, hawthorn, and many more, come forth into the rain which hangs on their drooping points and on the thorns. The lichen enjoys the enduring mist of the woods; the blackthorns are crusted and bearded with lichens of fleshy green-silver and ochre which grow even on the thorns themselves and round the new leaves and flowers. The birch is now an arrested shower of green, but not enough to hide the white limbs of the nymph in the midst of it. The beech trunk is now most exquisitely coloured: it is stained and spotted and blotched with grey and rough silver and yellow-green lichen, palest green mould, all the greens of moss, and an elusive dappling and graining of greys, of neutral tints and almost blacks in the wood itself, still more diversified by the trickling rain and the changing night. The yew bark is plated and scaled and stained with greens and reds and greys, powdered with green mould, and polished in places to the colour of mahogany. Even the long-deserted thistly cornfields are dim purple with ground-ivy flowers and violets. The marsh, the pasture, the wood, the hedge, has each its abundance of bloom and of scent; so, too, has the still water and the running water. But this is the perfect hour of the green of grass, so intense that it has an earthly light of its own in the sunless mist. It is best seen in meadows bounded on two or three sides by the[46] sheer dark edges of woods; for in that contrast the grass seems a new element, neither earth, nor water, nor sky—under our feet like the earth, gleaming and even as water, remote and celestial as the sky. And the voices of the green growing in the rain are innumerable. The very ground has now one voice of its own, the gurgle of its soaking hollow places.
HAMPSHIRE.
 
The fields where the green is now greenest, those bounded on two or more sides by woods, are of a kind not peculiar to Hampshire. They are usually on the greensand and lie in smooth, often winding, hollows like the beds of rivers. Sometimes the banks of these beds are steep, and they are clothed in woods or in hedges of hornbeam, hazel, ash and thorn that have grown almost to woods. The meadows are green broad rivers running up between the dark trees that bathe their roots in primroses. Sometimes there is a stream of water running down the midst of such a field, but as the stream, being a boundary, is often lined with bushes, the particular charm is lost. In the perfect examples there is the smoothness of the long hollowed meadow, the green, the river-like form, the look of being a court or cloister between the trees. Another kind of field of great charm is made by the convexity of the land rising up from one side or both of such a hollow meadow. These heaving fields, some of a regular domed shape, are favourites of the sunset light, in spring when they are grassy, in August[47] when they bear corn: at noon when there are cattle grazing on the steep slope, their shadows are an exact inversion of themselves, as in water.
Out of the rain and mist spring has now risen full-grown, tender and lusty, fragrant, many-coloured, many-voiced, fair to see, so that it is beyond a lover’s power to make even an inventory of her lovely ways. She is tall, she is fresh and bold, sweet in her motion and in her tranquillity; and there is a soft down upon her lip as there is a silken edge to the young leaves of the beeches.
KENT.
 
Even the motor road is pleasant now when the nightingales sing out of the bluebell thickets under oak and sweet chestnut and hornbeam and hazel. Presently it crosses a common, too small ever to draw a crowd, a rough up-and-down expanse of gorse and thorn, pierced by grassy paths and surrounded by turf that is rushy and mounded by old ant heaps; and here, too, there are nightingales singing alone, the sweeter for the contrast between their tangled silent bowers and the sharp, straight white road. The common is typical of the lesser commons of the south. Crouch’s Croft in Sussex is another, in sight of the three dusk moorland breasts of Crowborough; gorse-grown, flat, possessing a pond, and walled by tall hollies in a hedge. Piet Down, close by, is a fellow to it—grass and gorse and irregular pine—a pond, too—rough, like a fragment of Ashdown or Woolmer, and bringing a wild sharp flavour into the mellow cultivated[48] land. Yet another is at Stone Street, very small, a few oaks up to their knees in blackthorn, gorse and bramble, with dusty edge and the hum of the telegraph wire for a song.
After the little common and long meadows, oak and ash, an old stone house with seven hundred years of history quiet within its walls and dark tiles—its cedar and yew and pine, its daisied grass, its dark water and swans—the four oast cones opposite, all taste more exquisitely. How goodly are the names hereabout!—Dinas Dene, the coombe in which the old house stands; Balk Shaw, Cream Crox, Dicky May’s Field, Ivy Hatch, Lady Lands, Lady’s Wood, Upper and Lower Robsacks, Obram Wood, Ruffats, Styant’s Mead, the Shode, and, of course, a Starvecrow. Almost due west goes one of the best of footpaths past hop garden, corn, currant plantations, rough copses, with glimpses of the immense Weald to the east, its trees massed like thirty miles of wood, having sky and cloud over its horizon as if over sea, and southward the wild ridge of Ashdown. Then the path enters tall woods of ash and oak, boulder-strewn among their anemone and primrose, bluebell and dog’s mercury, and emerges in a steep lane at the top of which are five cowled oast houses among cherry blossom and under black firs. Beyond there is a hollow winding vale of meadow and corn, its sides clothed in oak, hazel and thorn, revealing primroses between. Woods shut it away from the road and from all houses but the farm above one end. A few cattle graze there, and the sun comes through the sloping woods and makes the grass golden or pale.
Then the North Downs come in sight, above a church[49] tower amid stateliest pale-foliaged beeches and vast undulations of meadow. They are suffused in late sunshine, their trees misty and massed, under a happy sky. Those beeches lie below the road, lining the edge of one long meadow. The opposite sun pours almost horizontal beams down upon the perfectly new leaves so as to give each one a yellow-green glow and to some a silver shimmer about the shadowy boles. For the moment the trees lose their anchor in the solid earth. They are floating, wavering, shimmering, more a?rial and pure and wild than birds or any visible things, than aught except music and the fantasies of the brain. The mind takes flight and hovers among the leaves with whatsoever powers it has akin to dew and trembling lark’s song and rippling water; it is throbbed away not only above the ponderous earth but below the firmament in the middle world of footless fancies and half thoughts that drift hither and thither and know neither a heaven nor a home. It is a loss of a name and not of a belief that forbids us to say to-day that sprites flutter and tempt there among the new leaves of the beeches in the late May light.
Almost every group of oast houses here, seen either amongst autumn fruit or spring blossom, is equal in its effect to a temple, though different far, even when ivy-mantled as they occasionally are, from the grey towered or spired churches standing near. The low round brick tower of the oast house, surmounted by a tiled cone of about equal height, and that again crested with a white cowl and vane, is a pleasant form. There are groups of three which, in their age, mellow hue, roundness, and rustic dignity, have suggested the triple mother goddesses[50] of old religions who were depicted as matrons, carrying babes or fruit or flowers, to whom the peasant brought thank-offerings when sun and rain had been kind. Those at Kemsing, for example, stand worthily beside the perfect grey-shingled spire, among elm and damson, against the bare cloudy Down. And there are many others near the Pilgrims’ Way of the same charm.
That road, in its winding course from Winchester to Canterbury, through Hampshire, Surrey and Kent, sums up all qualities of roads except those of the straight highway. It is a cart-way from farm to farm; or a footpath only, or a sheaf of half-a-dozen footpaths worn side by side; or, no longer needed except by the curious, it is buried under nettle and burdock and barricaded by thorns and traveller’s joy and bryony bines; it has been converted into a white country road for a few miles of its length, until an ascent over the Downs or a descent into the valley has to be made, and then once more it is left to footsteps upon grass and bird’s foot trefoil or to rude wheels over flints. Sometimes it is hidden among untended hazels or among chalk banks topped with beech and yew, and the kestrel plucks the chaffinch there undisturbed. Or it goes free and hedgeless like a long balcony half-way up the Downs, and unespied it beholds half the South Country between ash tree boles. Church and inn and farm and cottage and tramp’s fire it passes like a wandering wraith of road. Some one of the little gods of the earth has kept it safe—one of those little and less than omnipotent gods who, neglecting all but their own realms, enjoy the earth in narrow ways, delighting to make small things fair, such as a group of trees, a[51] single field, a pure pool of sedge and bright water, an arm of sea, a train of clouds, a road. I see their hands in many a by-way of space and moment of time. One of them assuredly harbours in a rude wet field I know of that lies neglected between two large estates: three acres at most of roughly sloping pasture, bounded above by the brambly edge of a wood and below by a wild stream. Here a company of meadow-sweet invades the grass, there willow herb tall with rosy summits of flowers, hoary lilac mint, dull golden fleabane, spiry coltstails. The snake creeps careless through these thickets of bloom. The sedge-warbler sings there. One old white horse is content with the field, summer and winter, and has made a plot of it silver with his hairs where he lies at night. The image of the god is in the grey riven willow that leans leafless over the stream like a peasant sculpture of old time. There is another of these godkins in a bare chalk hollow where the dead thistles stick out through a yard of snow and give strange thoughts of the sailless beautiful sea that once rippled over the Downs: one also in the smell of hay and mixen and cow’s breath at the first farm out of London where the country is unsoiled. There is one in many a worthless waste by the roadside, such as that between two roads that go almost parallel for a while—a long steep piece, only a few feet broad, impenetrably overgrown by blackthorn and blackberry, but unenclosed: and one in each of the wayside chalk-pits with overhanging beech roots above and bramble below. One, too, perhaps many, were abroad one August night on a high hillside when the hedge crickets sang high up in the dogwood and clematis like small but deafening[52] sewing machines, and the glowworms shone in the thyme, and the owl’s crying did not rend the breathless silence under the full moon, and in the confused moonlit chequer of the wood, where tree and shadow were equals, I walked on a grating of shadows with lights between as if from under the earth; the hill was given over to a light happiness through which I passed an unwilling but unfeared intruder.
In places these gods preside over some harmony of the earth with the works of men. There is one such upon the Pilgrims’ Way, where I join it, after passing the dark boughs and lightsome flowers of cherry orchards, grass full of dandelions, a dark cluster of pines, elms in groups and cavalcades, and wet willowy meadows that feed the Medway. Just at the approach there is a two-storied farm with dormers in the darkly mellowed roof, protected by sycamores and chestnuts, and before it a weather-boarded barn with thatched roof, and then, but not at right angles, another with ochre tiles, and other outbuildings of old brick and tile, a waggon lodge of flint and thatch beside a pond, at the edge of a broad unhedged field where random oaks shadow the grass. Behind runs the Pilgrims’ Way, invisible but easily guessed under that line of white beam and yew, with here and there an ash up which the stout plaited stems of ivy are sculptured, for they seem of the same material as the tree, and both of stone. Under the yew and white beam the clematis clambers over dogwood and wayfaring trees. Corn grows up to the road and sometimes hops; beyond, a league of orchard is a-froth round farmhouses or islands of oak; and east and west sweeps the crescent of the North Downs.
[53]
With the crescent goes the road, half-way up the sides of the hills but nearly always at the foot of the steepest slopes where the chalk-pits are carved white, like the concave of a scallop shell, out of the green turf. Luxuriant hedges bar the view except at gateways and stiles. At one place the upper hedge gives way to scattered thickets scrambling up the hill, with chalky ruts and rabbit workings between. Neither sheep nor crops cover the hill, nor yet is it common. Any one can possess it—for an hour. It is given up to the rabbits until Londoners can be persuaded to build houses on it. At intervals a road as old as the Way itself descends precipitously in a deep chalk groove, overhung by yew and beech, or hornbeam, or oak, and white clouds drifting in a river of blue sky between the trees; and joins farther south the main road which winds, parallel with the Pilgrims’ Way and usually south of it, from Winchester, through Guildford, Dorking, Westerham, Maidstone, Ashford, and Canterbury to Dover Strait. Not only chalk-pits and deep roads hollow the hills. For miles there is a succession of small smooth coombes, some grown with white thorn, some grassy, above the road, alternating with corresponding smooth breasts of turf. Towers and spires, but chiefly towers, lie beneath, and in the mile or so between one and the next there are red farms or, very rarely, a greater house at the end of a long wave of grass among trees. Above, the white full-bosomed clouds lean upon the green rampart of the hills and look across to the orchards, the woods beyond, the oaken Weald and its lesser ridges still farther, and then the South Downs and a dream of the south sea.
Rain falls, and in upright grey sheaves passes slowly[54] before the fresh beech leaves like ghosts in shadowy procession; and once again the white clouds roll over the tops of the trees, and the green is virginal, and out of the drip and glimmer of the miles of blissful country rises the blackbird’s song and the cuckoo’s shout. The rain seems not only to have brightened what is to be seen but the eye that sees and the mind that knows, and suddenly we are aware of all the joy in the grandeur and mastery of an oak’s balance, in those immobile clouds revealed on the farthest horizon shaped like the mountains which a child imagines, in the white candles of the beam tree, in the black-eyed bird sitting in her nest in the hawthorn with uplifted beak, and in the myriad luxuriant variety of shape and texture and bright colour in the divided leaves of wood sanicle and moschatel and parsley and cranesbill, in the pure outline of twayblade and violet and garlic. Newly dressed in the crystal of the rain the landscape recalls the earlier spring; the flowers of white wood-sorrel, the pink and white anemone and cuckoo flower, the thick-clustered, long-stalked primroses and darker cowslips with their scentless sweetness pure as an infant’s breath; the solitary wild cherry trees flowering among still leafless beech; the blackbirds of twilight and the flower-faced owls; the pewits wheeling after dusk; the jonquil and daffodil and arabis and leopard’s bane of cottage gardens; the white clouds plunged in blue floating over the brown woods of the hills; the delicate thrushes with speckled breasts paler than their backs, motionless on dewy turf; and all the joys of life that come through the nostrils from the dark, not understood world which is unbolted for us by the delicate and savage fragrances[55] of leaf and flower and grass and clod, of the plumage of birds and fur of animals and breath and hair of women and children.
How can our thoughts, the movements of our bodies, our human kindnesses, ever fit themselves with this blithe world? Is it but vain remorse at what is lost, or is it not rather a token of what may yet be achieved, that makes these images blind us as does the sight of children dressed for a play, some solemn-thoughtful, some wholly gay, suddenly revealed to us in brilliant light after the night wind and rain?
But at morning twilight I see the moon low in the west like a broken and dinted shield of silver hanging long forgotten outside the tent of a great knight in a wood, and inside are the knight’s bones clean and white about his rusted sword. In the east the sun rises, a red-faced drover and a million sheep going before him silent over the blue downs of the dawn: and I am ill-content and must watch for a while the fraying, changeful edges of the lesser clouds drift past and into the great white ones above, or hear rebellious music that puts for one brief hour into our hands the reins of the world that we may sit mightily behind the horses and drive to the goal of our dreams.
A footpath leads from the Pilgrims’ Way past the divine undulations and beech glades of a park—a broad piece of the earth that flows hither and thither in curves, sudden or slow but flawless and continuous, and everywhere clothed in a seamless garment of grass. The path crosses the white main road into a lesser one that traverses a common of beech and oak and birch. The leaves make[56] an unbroken roof over the common: except the roads there is not a path in it. For it is a small and narrow strip of but a few acres, without any open space, gloomy, much overgrown by thickets. Last year’s leaves lie undisturbed and of the colour of red deer under the silky green new foliage and round the huge mossy pedestals of beech and in caves behind the serpentine locked roots. No child’s shout is heard. No lover walks there. The motor-car hurries the undesirable through and down into the Weald. And so it is alone and for themselves that the beeches rise up in carven living stone and expand in a green heaven for the song of the woodwren, pouring out pearls like wine.
Southward, on either side of the steep road, the slope is, below the beeches, given to corn and hops; at the foot are all the oaks and pasture of the Weald, diversified by hop gardens on many of the slanting fields that break up its surface. Looking back from here the hills above are less finely modelled than the downs still farther behind us in the north. But they also have their shallow coombes, sometimes two tiers of them, and they are indented by deep, wide-mouthed bays. One of them begins in copses of oak and hazel and sallow, a little arable, a farm, three oast cones, and a little steep orchard in a hollow of their own, which give way to hops, followed by grass and then a tortuous ploughland among the oaks and firs of the great woods that cover the more precipitous sides of the upper end of the bay. Exquisitely cultivated, this bay is yet a possession of cuckoo and nightingale, singing under the yellow-green and black-branched oaks and above the floor of bluebell and dark dog’s mercury.
[57]
Out of the coombe a deep lane ascends through beech, hazel and beam to another common of heather, and whinberry bathing the feet of scattered birch, and squat oak and pine, interrupted by yellow gravel pits.
Beyond is a little town and a low grey spire, neighboured by sycamores that stretch out horizontal boughs of broad leaves and new yellow-green flower tassels over long grass. Past the town—rapidly and continually resuming its sleep after the hooting of motor-cars—begins a wide and stately domain. At its edge are cottages doddering with age, but trim and flowery, and assuredly wearing the livery of the ripe, grave house of brick that stands on the grassy ascent above them, among new-leaved beech masses and isolated thorns dreaming over their shadows. That grove of limes, fair and decorous, leading up to the house is the work of Nature and the squire. His chestnut and pine plantations succeed. And now a pollard beech, bossy-rooted on a mound of moss and crumbling earth, its grotesque torso decorated as by childish hands with new leaves hanging among mighty boughs that are themselves a mansion for squirrel and jay and willow wren and many shadows, looks grimly down at the edge of a wood and asks for the wayfarer’s passport—has he lived well, does he love this world, is he bold and free and kind?—and if he have it not seals him with melancholy as he enters among the innumerable leaves of innumerable beeches beginning to respond to the straight, still, after-sunset rain, while the last cuckoos cry and the last footsteps and wheels of the world die away behind. The foliage has a pale, almost white, light of its own among the darkly dripping boughs, and[58] when that is gone the rain and leaf under a spongy grey sky have a myriad voices of contentedness. Below, invisible in the dark rain but not unfelt, is the deep hollow land of the Weald. The owls whimper and mew and croon and hoot and shriek their triumphs.
SURREY.
 
In the morning a storm comes up on bellying blue clouds above the pale levels of young corn and round-topped trees black as night but gold at their crests. The solid rain does away with all the hills, and shows only the solitary thorns at the edge of an oak wood, or a row of beeches above a hazel hedgerow and, beneath that, stars of stitchwort in the drenched grass. But a little while and the sky is emptied and in its infant blue there are white clouds with silver gloom in their folds; and the light falls upon round hills, yew and beech thick upon their humps, the coombes scalloped in their sides tenanted by oaks beneath. By a grassy chalk pit and clustering black yew, white beam and rampant clematis, is the Pilgrims’ Way. Once more the sky empties heavy and dark rain upon the bright trees so that they pant and quiver while they take it joyfully into their deep hearts. Before the eye has done with watching the dance and glitter of rain and the sway of branches, the blue is again clear and like a meadow sprinkled over with blossoming cherry trees.
The decent vale consists of square green fields and park-like slopes, dark pine and light beech: but beyond that the trees gather together in low ridge after ridge so[59] that the South Country seems a dense forest from east to west. On one side of the hill road is a common of level ash and oak woods, holly and thorn at their edges, and between them and the dust a grassy tract, sometimes furzy; on the other, oaks and beeches sacred to the pheasant but exposing countless cuckoo flowers among the hazels of their underwood. Please trespass. The English game preserve is a citadel of woodland charm, and however precious, it has only one or two defenders easily eluded and, when met, most courteous to all but children and not very well dressed women. The burglar’s must be a bewitching trade if we may judge by the pleasures of the trespasser’s unskilled labour.
In the middle of the wood is a four-went way, and the grassy or white roads lead where you please among tall beeches or broad, crisp-leaved shining thorns and brief open spaces given over to the mounds of ant and mole, to gravel pits and heather. Is this the Pilgrims’ Way, in the valley now, a frail path chiefly through oak and hazel, sometimes over whin and whinberry and heather and sand, but looking up at the yews and beeches of the chalk hills? It passes a village pierced by straight clear waters—a woodland church—woods of the willow wren—and then, upon a promontory, alone, within the greenest mead rippled up to its walls by but few graves, another church, dark, squat, small-windowed, old, and from its position above the world having the characters of church and beacon and fortress, calling for all men’s reverence. Up here in the rain it utters the pathos of the old roads behind, wiped out as if writ in water, or worn deep and then deserted and surviving only as tunnels under the hazels.[60] I wish they could always be as accessible as churches are, and not handed over to land-owners—like Sandsbury Lane near Petersfield—because straight new roads have taken their places for the purposes of tradesmen and carriage people, or boarded up like that discarded fragment, deep-sunken and overgrown, below Colman’s Hatch in Surrey. For centuries these roads seemed to hundreds so necessary, and men set out upon them at dawn with hope and followed after joy and were fain of their whiteness at evening: few turned this way or that out of them except into others as well worn (those who have turned aside for wantonness have left no trace at all), and most have been well content to see the same things as those who went before and as they themselves have seen a hundred times. And now they, as the sound of their feet and the echoes, are dead, and the roads are but pleasant folds in the grassy chalk. Stay, traveller, says the dark tower on the hill, and tread softly because your way is over men’s dreams; but not too long; and now descend to the west as fast as feet can carry you, and follow your own dream, and that also shall in course of time lie under men’s feet; for there is no going so sweet as upon the old dreams of men.