I slept under the shadow of Tenterden steeple and very early in the morning set out for Appledore, where I crossed the canal and came into the Marsh. I cannot hope to express my enthusiasm for this strange and mysterious country so full of the music of running water, with its winding roads, its immense pastures, its cattle and sheep and flowers, its far away great hills and at the end, though it has no end, the sea. It mixes with the sea indeed as the sky does, so that no man far off can say this is land or this is water. It is famous as a fifth part of the world different from its fellows. And indeed, if it resembles anything I know it is not with the wide moors of Somerset, Sedgemoor, or the valley of the Brue, nor with the great windy Fenland in the midst of which Ely rises like a shrine or a sanctuary, I would compare it, but with the Campagna of Rome, whose tragic mystery it seems to have borrowed, at least in part, whose beauty it seems to wear, a little provincially, it is true, and whose majesty it apes, but cannot quite command. It is the Campagna in little; the great and noble mountains, the loveliest in the world are sunk to hills pure and exquisite upon which, too, we may still see the cities, here little towns and villages, as Rye, Winchelsea, Appledore, Lympne or Hythe, dear places of England of my heart, and all between them this mysterious and lowly thing not quite of this world, a graveyard one might think, as the Campagna is, a battlefield as is the Trasimeno plain, a gate and certainly an exit not only out of England but from the world and life itself.