Here leaps ashore the full Sou'west All heavy-winged with brine, Here lies above the folded crest The Channel's leaden line; And here the sea-fogs lap and cling, And here, each warning each, The sheep-bells and the ship-bells ring Along the hidden beach. We have no waters to delight Our broad and brookless vales-- Only the dewpond on the height Unfed, that never fails, Whereby no tattered herbage tells Which way the season flies-- Only our close-bit thyme that smells Like dawn in Paradise. Here through the strong and salty days The unshaded silence thrills; Or little, lost, Down churches praise The Lord who made the Hills: But here the Old Gods guard their round, And, in her secret heart, The heathen kingdom Wilfrid found Dreams, as she dwells, apart. [Sidenote: WHEATEARS] Of old the best wheatear country was above Rottingdean; but the South Down shepherds no longer have the wheatear money that used to add so appreciably to their wages in the summer months. A combination of circumstances has brought about this loss. One is the decrease in wheatears, another the protection of the bird by law, and a third the refusal of the farmers to allow their men any longer to neglect the flocks by setting and tending snares. But in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries, wheatears were taken on the Downs in enormous quantities and formed a part of every south county banquet in their season. People visited Brighton solely to eat them, as they now go to Greenwich for whitebait and to Colchester for oysters. This is how Fuller describes the little creature in the _Worthies_--"_Wheatears_ is a bird peculiar to this County, hardly found out of it. It is so called, because fattest when Wheat is ripe, whereon it feeds; being no bigger than a Lark, which it equalleth in _fineness_ of the flesh, far exceedeth in the _fatness_ thereof. The worst is, that being onely seasonable in the heat of summer, and naturally larded with lumps of fat, it is soon subject to corrupt, so that (though abounding within _fourty_ miles) _London Poulterers_ have no mind to meddle with them, which no care in carriage can keep from Putrefaction. That _Palate-man_ shall pass in silence, who, being seriously demanded his judgment concerning the abilities of a great _Lord_, concluded him a man of very weak parts, '_because once he saw him, at a_ great Feast, _feed on_ CHICKENS _when there were_ WHEATEARS _on the Table_.' I will adde no more in praise of this _Bird_, for fear some _female Reader_ may fall in _longing_ for it, and unhappily be disappointed of her desire." A contemporary of Fuller, John Taylor, from whom I have already quoted, and shall quote again, thus unscientifically dismisses the wheatear in one of his doggerel narratives:--