How difficult it is to say what one really feels about the landscapes and the countrysides and the subtle souls of Europe! I think that all men who are of European blood feel those countrysides and the soul of them very strongly; but I think that they feel as I feel now, as I write, a difficulty of expression. There is something in it like the difficulty of approaching a personality. One may admire, or reverence, or even love, but the personality is different from one’s own; it has a chastity of its own that must be respected, it has its boundaries and its honour, and one always fears that one will transgress such boundaries if one so much as speaks of the new thing one has come upon and desired to describe. With distant travel it is not so. One comes far over seas to a quite strange land and one treats it brutally. One’s appreciation is a sort of conquest; and you will note that those who speak of the Colonies, or of America, or of Africa, or of Asia speak of them with a hard intolerance as of something quite alien, or with a conventional set of phrases, as of something not worth the real expression of emotion. Now it is not so with our ancient provinces of Europe. A man coming out of the Cis-Alpine Gaul into old Italy across the Apennines feels something; indeed he feels it! What it is he feels very few men have written down; none has said it fully. You get out of one thing into something other when you climb up out of the Valley of the Parma and cross the High Apennines and look southward into the happy Garfagnana, and hear the noise of the little Serchio beginning in its meads. In the same way no one has described (to my knowledge at least) that shock of desolation and yet of mystery which comes upon a man when he crosses the River Couesnon and passes from Normandy into Brittany. Normandy is rich, Brittany is poor. Normandy loves ritual, Brittany religion. Normandy can make things, Brittany prayers. Normandy lives by Brittany in the matter of the soul, Brittany not by Normandy in the matter of the body. What Norman ever gave a Breton anything? You cross that river and everything changes. The men and women have dreamier eyes, the little children play more wonderfully, everybody is poor. Or, again, the passage from the hard industry of the Lancashire Plain suddenly on to the moors, where the farming men and women are so quiet and silent and self-respectful and seem so careful rather to preserve what they own than to add to it. Or, again, the startling passage over Carter Fell from the Englishmen of Rede-Dale to the Scotchmen of Jedburgh; or the sharp passage from the violent, active, sceptical, cruel, courageous, well-fed, ironical Burgundians into the gentle Germans of the Vosges: here is a boundary which is not marked in any political way, and yet how marked it is!