Beyond the spire a huge woody mound rises up from the low flowing land, huge and carved all round by an entrenchment as if by the weight of a crown that it had worn for ages. Certainly it wears no crown to-day. Not a human being lives there; they have all fled to the riverside and the spire, leaving their ancient home to the triumphs of the wide-flowering traveller’s-joy, to the play of children on the sward within its walls, and to the archæologist: and very sad and very noble it looks at night when it and the surrounding Downs lift up their dark domes of wood among the mountains of the sky, and the great silence hammers upon the ears. Then a hedgeless road traverses without interrupting the long Downs. One after another, lines of trees thin and dark and old come out against the pale bright sky of late afternoon and file away, beyond the green turf and roots and the grey or yellow stubble. As the sun sets, dull crimson, at the foot of a muslin of grey and gold which his course has crimsoned, the low clouds on the horizon in the north become a deathly blue white belonging neither to day nor to night, while overhead the light-combed cloudlets are touched faintly with flame. Now the glory and the power of the colour in the west, and now the pallid north, fill the brain to overflowing with the mingling of distance, of sublime motion, and of hue, and intoxicate it and give it wings, until at last when the west is crossed by long sloping strata as of lava long cooled they seem the bars of a cage impassable. But even they are at last worn away and the sky is as nothing compared with earth. For there, as I move, the infinite greys and yellows of the crops, the grass, the bare earth, the clumps of firs, the lines of beeches and oaks, play together in the twilight, and the hills meet and lose their lines and flow into one another and build up beautiful lines anew, the outward and visible signs of a great thought. Out of the darkness in which they are submerged starts a crying of pewits and partridges; and overhead and close together the wild duck fly west into the cold gilded blue.