grandeur, only the most spacious repose. Perhaps it is due to this
quality that the Wealden folk, accustomed to be overshadowed by this
unruffled range, are so deliberate in their mental processes and so
averse from speculation or experiment. There is a hypnotism of form: a
rugged peak will alarm the mind where a billowy green undulation will
lull it. The Downs change their complexion, but are never other than
soothing and still: no stress of weather produces in them any of that
sense of fatality that one is conscious of in Westmoreland.
Thunder-clouds empurple the turf and blacken the hangers, but they
cannot break the imperturbable equanimity of the line; rain throws over
the range a gauze veil of added softness; a mist makes them more
wonderful, unreal, romantic; snow brings them to one's doors. At sunrise
they are magical, a background for Malory; at sunset they are the lovely
home of the serenest thoughts, a spectacle for Marcus Aurelius. Their
combes, or hollows, are then filled with purple shadow cast by the
sinking sun, while the summits and shoulders are gold.

[Sidenote: GILBERT WHITE IN SUSSEX]

Gilbert White has an often-quoted passage on these hills:--"Though I
have now travelled the Sussex downs upwards of thirty years, yet I still
investigate that chain of majestic mountains with fresh admiration year
by year, and I think I see new beauties every time I traverse it. This
range, which runs from Chichester eastward as far as East Bourn, is
about sixty miles in length, and is called the South Downs, properly
speaking, only round Lewes. As you pass along you command a noble view
of the wild, or weald, on one hand, and the broad downs and sea on the
other. Mr. Ray used to visit a family [Mr. Courthope, of Danny] just at
the foot of these hills, and was so ravished with the prospect from
Plumpton Plain, near Lewes, that he mentions those scapes in his _Wisdom
of God in the Works of the Creation_ with the utmost satisfaction, and
thinks them equal to anything he had seen in the finest parts of Europe.
For my own part, I think there is somewhat peculiarly sweet and amusing
in the shapely-figured aspect of the chalk hills in preference to those
of stone, which are rugged, broken, abrupt, and shapeless. Perhaps I may
be singular in my opinion, and not so happy as to convey to you the same
idea; but I never contemplate these mountains without thinking I
perceive somewhat analogous to growth in their gentle swelling