n twenty
centuries in duration--does not seem so very long compared with that of
the huge earthen wall I am standing on, which dates back to prehistoric
times.

Standing here, knee-deep in the dead ruddy bracken, in the "coloured
shade" of the oaks, idly watching the leaves fall fluttering to the
ground, thinking in an aimless way of the remains of the two ancient
cities before me, the British and the Roman, and of their comparative
antiquity, I am struck with the thought that the sweet sensations
produced in me by the scene differ in character from the feeling I have
had in other solitary places. The peculiar sense of satisfaction, of
restfulness, of peace, experienced here is very perfect; but in the
wilderness, where man has never been, or has at all events left no trace
of his former presence, there is ever a mysterious sense of loneliness,
of desolation, underlying our pleasure in nature. Here it seems good
to know, or to imagine, that the men I occasionally meet in my solitary
rambles, and those I see in the scattered rustic village hard by, are of
the same race, and possibly the descendants, of the people who occupied
this spot in the remote past--Iberian and Celt, and Roman and Saxon and
Dane. If that hard-featured and sour-visaged old gamekeeper, with the
cold blue unfriendly eyes, should come upon me here in my hiding-place,
and scowl as he is accustomed to do, standing silent before me, gun in
hand, to hear my excuses for trespassing in his preserves, I should say
(mentally): This man is distinctly English, and his far-off progenitors,
somewhere about sixteen hundred years ago, probably assisted at the
massacre of the inhabitants of the pleasant little city at my feet. By
and by, leaving the ruins, I may meet with other villagers of different
features and different colour in hair, skin, and eyes, and of a
pleasanter expression; and in them I may see the remote descendants of
other older races of men, some who were lords here before the Romans
came, and of others before them, even back to Neolithic times.

This, I take it, is a satisfaction, a sweetness and peace to the soul
in nature, because it carries with it a sense of the continuity of
the human race, its undying vigour, its everlastingness. After all the
tempests that have overcome it, through all mutations in such immense
stretches of time, how stable it is!

I recall the time when I lived on a vast vacant level green plain,
an earth which to the eye