As one wanders about England here and there, one comes to understand that if its landscape is unique in its various charm and soft beauty, it is also inhuman in this, that most often it is without the figure of man, the fields are always empty or nearly always, the hills are uniformly barren of cities or towns or villages, it is a landscape without the gesture of human toil and life, without meaning that is, and we can bear it so. But no man could live in the Marsh for a day without that gesture of human life that is there to be seen upon every side. Lonely as it is, difficult as it is to cross, because of its chains and twisting lines of runnels, man is more visibly our comrade there than anywhere else in England I think, and this though there be but few men through all the Marsh. He and his beasts, his work too, and his songs, redeem the Marsh for us from fear, a fear not quite explicable, perhaps, to the mere passenger, but that anyone who has lingered there during a month of spring will recognise as always at his elbow and only kept out of the soul by the humanity which has redeemed this mysterious country, the shepherd with his flock, the dairyman with his cows, the carter with his great team of oxen in the spring twilight returning from the fields. And then there are the churches, whose towers stand up so strong out of the waters and the mist so that their heads are among the stars, and whose bells are the best music because they tell not only of God and his Saints but of man, of the steading and of home. [Illustration: A CORNER OF ROMNEY MARSH]