nd of what men? Those seventeen miles of richest
pasture which lie in an infinite peace between Appledore and
Dungeness, to whom do we owe them and their blessedness? That wall at
Dymchurch which saves the marshes, Romney, Welland, Guildford and
Denge, who contrived it and first took advantage of those great banks
of shingle and of sand which everywhere bar out the great tides of the
straits and have thus created and preserved this strange fifth part of
the world? Was it the Romans? May we see in Romney Marsh the greatest
material memorial of their gigantic energy and art to be found in the
western provinces, a nobler and a greater work than the Wall as well
as a more lasting? And if this be so, how well is the Marsh named
after them, for of all they did materially in our island, this work of
reclamation was surely the worthiest to bear their name.

But to these questions there can perhaps never be an answer. Certainly
the very aspect of the Marsh recalls nothing so much as the Campagna
of Rome, in its nobility, loneliness and infinite subjection to the
sun, the clouds, and the sky, so that at evening there we might almost
think that Rome herself lay only just beyond that large horizon, and
that with an effort we might reach the great gate of San Giovanni e'er
darkness fell. It is as though in the Marsh our origins for once and
unmistakably were laid bare for us and we had suddenly recognised our
home.

CHAPTER IX

RYE AND WINCHELSEA

Out of the vagueness and loneliness of the Marsh, with its strange
level light and tingling silence, I climbed one spring evening at
sunset into the ancient town of Rye, and at first I could not believe
I was still in England. No one I think can wander for more than a few
days about the Marsh, among those half deserted churches, far too big
for any visible congregation, whose towers in a kind of despair still
stand up before God against the sea, raging and plotting far off
against the land, without wondering at last into what country he has
strayed. In Rye all such doubt is resolved at once, for Rye is pure
Italy, or at least it seems so in the evening dusk. When I came up
into it in the spring twilight out of the Marsh, I was reminded of one
of those Italian cities which stand up over the lean shore of the
Adriatic to the south of Rimini, but it was not of them I thought when
in the morning sunlight I saw those red roofs piled up one upon
another from the plain: it was of Sie