s the Campagna in
little; the great and noble mountains, the loveliest in the world are
sunk to hills pure and exquisite upon which, too, we may still see the
cities, here little towns and villages, as Rye, Winchelsea, Appledore,
Lympne or Hythe, dear places of England of my heart, and all between
them this mysterious and lowly thing not quite of this world, a
graveyard one might think, as the Campagna is, a battlefield as is the
Trasimeno plain, a gate and certainly an exit not only out of England
but from the world and life itself.

As one wanders about England here and there, one comes to understand
that if its landscape is unique in its various charm and soft beauty,
it is also inhuman in this, that most often it is without the figure
of man, the fields are always empty or nearly always, the hills are
uniformly barren of cities or towns or villages, it is a landscape
without the gesture of human toil and life, without meaning that is,
and we can bear it so. But no man could live in the Marsh for a day
without that gesture of human life that is there to be seen upon every
side. Lonely as it is, difficult as it is to cross, because of its
chains and twisting lines of runnels, man is more visibly our comrade
there than anywhere else in England I think, and this though there be
but few men through all the Marsh. He and his beasts, his work too,
and his songs, redeem the Marsh for us from fear, a fear not quite
explicable, perhaps, to the mere passenger, but that anyone who has
lingered there during a month of spring will recognise as always at
his elbow and only kept out of the soul by the humanity which has
redeemed this mysterious country, the shepherd with his flock, the
dairyman with his cows, the carter with his great team of oxen in the
spring twilight returning from the fields. And then there are the
churches, whose towers stand up so strong out of the waters and the
mist so that their heads are among the stars, and whose bells are the
best music because they tell not only of God and his Saints but of
man, of the steading and of home.

[Illustration: A CORNER OF ROMNEY MARSH]

Take Appledore, for instance, with its fine old church, with its air
of the fourteenth century and its beautiful old ivy grown
tower, once a port they say, on the verge of the Marsh; what
could be more nobly simple and homely? Within, you may, if you
will, find, in spite of everything, all our past, the very altar at
which of old was sa