river-crossings, as I climbed where they had climbed, whence they also had seen a wide plain, as I suffered the fatigue they suffered, and laboriously chose, as they had chosen, the proper soils for going, something of their much keener life would wake again in the blood I drew from them, and that in a sort I should forget the vileness of my own time, and renew for some few days the better freedom of that vigorous morning when men were already erect, articulate, and worshipping God, but not yet broken by complexity and the long accumulation of evil." The "differences of this island" fascinate him. "Surely," he says, "a nation grows great in this way, by many provinces reacting one upon the other, recognized by the general will, sometimes in conflict with it." He is considering the West Country, which no one can get into "without touching his youth again and putting his fingers to earth, and getting sustenance from it"; and in the same essay, "On the Approach to Western England," he alludes to the Welsh Marches, "and how, between a village and a village, one changes from the common English parish, with the Squire's house and the church and the cottages and all, into the hard slate roofs and the inner flame of Wales." When he is living in the Midlands, he has sung, "the great hills of the South Country" come back into his mind; but as a rule he is not contentious once he is out of Sussex, and plainly he feels that love of England which, says he, somewhat mysteriously, "has in it the love of landscape, as has the love of no other country; it has in it, as has the love of no other country, the love of friends." He delights in the variety of England as he does in the variety of the separate
