In summer I saw it at the end of one of those days of sun and wind and perfectly clear air when the earth appears immensely heavy and great and strong--so that for a moment it is possible to know the majesty of its course in space--and the sheep very light, like mere down, as they crawl in a flock over the grass. Swathes and wisps of white cloud were strewn over the high blue sky as if by haymakers. But the lanes were deep, and for miles at a time nearly shut out the sky, and all the day the lanes were empty and wholly mine. Here the high banks were thickly grown with wild parsnip, and its umbels of small yellow-green flowers, fragrant and a little over-sweet, were alive and, as it were, boiling over with bees and the sunniest flies. There the hazel was laced with white bryony, whose leaves and pale tendrils went hovering and swimming and floating over the hedge. In one place an elder-tree stood out of the hedge, stiff, with few branches, and every leaf upon them red as a rose. Wherever there was a waste strip beside the road the tall yellow ragwort grew densely, each of the nearer flowers as hard and clear as brass, the farther ones dimly glowing and half lost in the green mist of their leaves and the haze of the brightness of their multitudes. Where the road changed into an unused lane the grass was tall, and under the hazels, yet fully seen, were the wild basil and marjoram and centaury and knapweed and wood-betony, and over them hung moths of green crimson-spotted silk. There, too, were the plants that smell most of the dry summer--the white parsleys and the white or rosy cow-parsnip, the bedstraws white and yellow, the yellow mugwort. Now and then the hedges gave way and on either hand was open turf; sloping steep and rough on one side, grooved by ancient paths of men and cattle, dotted by thorns, with the freshly flowering traveller’s-joy over them, ash-trees at the top; on the other side, level, skirted by cloudy wych-elms and having at one corner a white inn half shadowed by a walnut, and two sycamores and cattle below them; and at another, a stately autumnal house veiled by the cedars and straight yews on its darkly glowing lawn. All these things I saw as if they had been my own, as if I were going again slowly through old treasures long hidden away, so that they were memoried and yet unexpected. Nothing was too small to be seen, and ascending the chalk hill among the beeches every white flint was clear on the sward, each in its different shape--many chipped as the most cunning chisel would be proud to chip them; one, for example, carved by the loss of, two exquisitely curved and balanced flakes into the likeness of a moth’s expanded upper wings.