Of some steep mossy hill, where ivy dun
Would hide us up, although spring leaves were none;
And where dark yew trees as we rustle through,
Will drop their scarlet berry cups of dew?
O thou wouldst joy to live in such a place;
Dusk for our loves, yet light enough to grace
Those gentle limbs on mossy bed reclin'd:
For by one step the blue sky should'st thou find,
And by another in deep dell below,
See, through the trees, a little river go
All in its midday gold and glimmering."

But the great poet and novelist of Box Hill came later. Mr. George
Meredith lived his long life and died at last, on May 18, 1909, at his
house, Flint Cottage, near Burford Bridge. It was by Box Hill that he
imagined the gayest and wisest of novels and some of the most glorious
of all English poetry. Here, in his chalet looking out over the Surrey
hills, he wrote _The Thrush in February_:--

"I know him, February's thrush,
And loud at eve he valentines
On sprays that paw the naked bush
Where soon will sprout the thorns and bines.

Now ere the foreign singer thrills
Our vale his plain-song pipe he pours
A herald of the million bills;
And heed him not, the loss is yours.

My study, flanked with ivied fir
And budded beech with dry leaves curled,
Perched over yew and juniper,
He neighbours, piping to the world:--

The wooded pathways dank on brown,
The branches on grey cloud a web,
The long green roller of the down,
An image of the deluge-ebb:"--

The lines ring with the bird's song; the light of all February evenings
is on the hill. But if you are to take the heart of the poem, you must
choose the last eight lines:--

"For love we Earth, then serve we all;
Her mystic secret then is ours:
We fall, or view our treasures fall,
Unclouded, as beholds her flowers.

Earth, from a night of frosty wreck,
Enrobed in morning's mounted fire,
When lowly, with a broken neck,
The crocus lays her cheek to mire."

The noblest philosophy of poetry belongs to this Surrey hill, and so
does the most wonderful love-song of its century, the long, enchanted
cadences of _Love in the Valley_:--

"Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping
Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star.
Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried,
Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown evejar.
Darker gro