e and hotels, and began to noise
its beauty up and down the London world--it was just the outermost ripple
of the vast disturbance of the French Revolution which touched the little
spot, part of the free new eager spirit which sent men questing for a
loveliness they could neither make nor control, and of which they must be
humble and passive spectators, and part also of vast causes and changes,
which drove Englishmen to seek their holidays within their own shores.

Before closing this second chapter on Lynton, I cannot forbear to speak
yet further of the beautiful scenery in which it lies. There is
Summerhouse Hill, or Lyn Cleave, as it is more charmingly and
appropriately called, the great rocky height, a thousand feet above
Lynmouth, which looks down on the two villages and which divides the
valleys of the East and West Lyn. Lying on the short dry springy turf,
in the mellow sunlight of late afternoon, you can look along the velvety
wooded valley of the East Lyn, where the stream is hidden by the tufted
banks of the trees, and by shifting ever so slightly on your elbows as
you lie at ease you can look into the bare brown rocky valley of the West
Lyn, and see the gleam of the river foaming over its rocks a thousand
feet below. All round is the cawing of rooks, as they sail majestically
back to their nests, grave and cheerful with their abundance of food and
their security of tenure. England belongs to the rooks, says a friend of
mine. We English may live here, we may build houses and farms, we may
plough and sow and reap, we may make revolutions or wars, sending our
armies marching through the countryside in creeping dusty columns, but we
are only illusions on the page of history, shadows flitting across the
face of the land; the rooks are perpetual, ineradicable, and possessive.
They feed behind our plough; they flock in our green trees; they build in
our valleys and in the shelter of our houses; summer and winter they are
seen flying under our English skies; they mate and nest and bicker round
our cathedrals and our cottages; they are noisy and turbulent and
unrestrained before us, as if we were no more than the hedges we plant
and prune; they are irrepressible as street-arabs, and arrogant as
monarchs. If all human life were by some unimagined catastrophe swept
from the length and breadth of England, the cawing of the rooks would
sound as certainly, and they would fly forth to their morning meal and
back across