THE CAUSES OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF WINCHESTER AND CANTERBURY, AND OF THEIR POSITION AS TERMINI OF THE OLD ROAD The Straits of Dover fill the history of this island because they have afforded our principal gate upon a full life. All isolated territories--valleys difficult of entry, peninsulas, islands--have this double quality: they are not sufficient to live a full life of themselves, but, receiving sufficient material of civilisation from the larger world outside, they will use it intensively and bring it to the summit of perfection. Cut off, they wither. Nowhere does humanity fall more abject and lethargic than in such defended places, if the defence be too long maintained. But let them admit from time to time the invasion of armies or ideas, and nowhere does humanity flourish more densely or higher. The arts, the fierce air of patriotism, in whose heat alone the gems of achievement can form, the solution of abstract problems, the expression of the soul in letters--for all these things seclusion provides a special opportunity. It protects their origins from the enemies of seeds, it nurtures their growth with the advantage of a still air, it gives them a resting-place for their maturity. The valleys prove my thesis. The abandoned valleys of Savoy and Piedmont are goitrous, smitten, sterile. They are the places where, in the Middle Ages, vapid degradations of religion (the Waldensian for instance) could arise; they are the back-waters of Europe. Contrast with them the principal and open valleys; the valley of the Grésivaudan, a trench sown with wealth and vigour, the dale which is the backbone of strong Dauphiné, or that valley of the Romanche from which the Revolution sprang, or that of the Ticino which comes down from the Alps to the Italian plain, rejoicing like a virgin stepping forward into the ample day of her womanhood, arms open and all informed with life. Remember the Limagne and the Nemosian vineyard; I could think that God had made these half-secluded places to prop up our fading memories of Paradise. And as the valleys, so the islands also prove it. Consider Crete, Cyprus, Sicily--for the matter of that our own island--what they can be when they are linked with neighbouring civilisation, and what when they are cut off. The place of landing, therefore, is always capital and sacred for islands, and with us that place was chiefly the Kentish shore. It might seem natural that some special haven upon that shore should absorb our traditions and receive our principal road. It was not so. Canterbury, and no port, received that road and became the nucleus of worship in the island. Why?