The boundary into this particular land is not only fetched by men on
foot; in no matter what kind of travel one pursues, one recognises that
boundary in a flash as one traverses it. It is not only the orchards,
nor the abrupt and pointed hills, nor those domestic towns, happy with
memories, nor those clear waters, nor those meadows, bounded by careful
walls of stone, but something much more which tells one that one has
got into the enchanted land. That spirit in it which made the stuff of
our early history, which gave us the landing of Joseph of Arimathea and
the glorious bush of Glastonbury and the cycle of the Round Table and
those good verses with regard to passion unrestrained:
... well you wot that of such life
There comes but sore battaille and strife
And blood of men and hard Travail....
And the prophecies of Merlin, and the story of Tristan and Iseult and
all the vision of immortality and of resurrection inhabits it still.
I never can believe (I speak for myself alone) that man can be
dissociated from his earth any more than I can believe that the soul
can be dissociated from the body. When men say to me that there is no
soul, they can go on saying. But when men say that the soul can neglect
the body then there is matter for argument; and when the argument is
finished one finds it is not so. Now thus it is with the earth that
breeds us and into which if we are content to die at home (and since
we must die somewhere, better die there) we should at last return. The
landscapes of Europe make European men, and it is not for nothing that
the climate and the shapes of the hills and the nature of the building
stuff change just where man changes.
There is enchantment upon every high place of England, but the
enchantment of the Devonshire Moors and of the Tors to the North and
upwards from them is different from the enchantment of the Downs. There
is a great delight in the proper fireplaces of the English people, but
who, thoroughly alive, could mistake a fireplace in the West Riding for
a fireplace on the Western Rother or either of these for a fireplace
a little before Sherborne in the tumbles and the hollows where Dorset
and Somerset meet? There is a richness of the speech and a contentment
of the tongue which any man from the new countries might think common
to all English agricultural men: yet there was a man from Sussex who,
hearing the Sussex tongue in the Choughs at Yeovil, felt himself indeed
come home. Our provinces differ very much.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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