y and become a mere asylum
of landless men. From the mean and crowded streets he seeks with an
ever increasing eagerness the space of the Downs, from the noise and
confusion and throng, this silence and this emptiness; from the
breathless street, this free and nimble air, which is better than
wine. And so to-day more than ever the Downs have come to stand as a
symbol of an England half lost, which might seem to be passing away,
but that is, as indeed these hills assure us, eternal and
indestructible, the very England of our hearts, which cannot die.
There are some doubtless who grumble at this invasion and are fearful
lest even this last nobility should be destroyed by the multitude or
this last sanctuary desecrated by the rapacity of the rich, or this
last silence broken by the brutal noise of the motor car. But the
Downs are too strong, they have seen too many civilisations pass away,
and the men and the ages that built upon their hill-sides have become
less than a dream in the morning. They remain. And is it nothing that
in our day if a man hears a bird sing in a London street in spring it
is of the Downs he thinks, if the wind comes over the gardens in some
haggard suburb it is these hills which rise up in his mind, these
hills, which stand there against the south, our very own from
everlasting to everlasting.

But to possess the Downs at least as a symbol, to dream of them as a
refuge, it is not necessary to know them in all their secret places,
to have seen all their little forgotten homesteads, or to be able to
recognise all their thousand steep tracks one from another.

For me indeed the Downs, long as I have known them, remain most dear
as a spectacle, but this you will miss altogether if you are actually
upon them, lost amid their rolling waves of green turf with only the
sky and the wind and the sun for companions. Therefore when I set out
from Lewes to go westward I did not take the way up past the race-
course over the battlefield south of Mount Harry towards Ditchling
Camp and Beacon. Let me confess it, I followed the road. And what a
road! In all South England I know no other that offers the traveller
such a spectacle, where above him, in full view, that great rampart
stands up like a wall, peak speaks to peak, till presently with a
majesty and a splendour, not to be matched I think in our island,
Chanctonbury stands forth like a king crowned as with laurel towering
upon the horizon.

Now this road I