Alice Lorraine: A Tale of the South Downs

								

Westward of that old town Steyning, and near Washington and Wiston, the
lover of an English landscape may find much to dwell upon. The best way
to enjoy it is to follow the path along the meadows, underneath the
inland rampart of the Sussex hills. Here is pasture rich enough for
the daintiest sheep to dream upon; tones of varied green in stripes
(by order of the farmer), trees as for a portrait grouped, with the
folding hills behind, and light and shadow making love in play to one
another. Also, in the breaks of meadow and the footpath bendings,
stiles where love is made in earnest, at the proper time of year, with
the dark-browed hills imposing everlasting constancy.
Any man here, however sore he may be from the road of life, after
sitting awhile and gazing, finds the good will of his younger days
revive with a wider capacity. Though he hold no commune with the
heights so far above him, neither with the trees that stand in quiet
audience soothingly, nor even with the flowers still as bright as
in his childhood, yet to himself he must say something--better said
in silence. Into his mind, and heart, and soul, without any painful
knowledge, or the noisy trouble of thinking, pure content with his
native land and its claim on his love are entering. The power of the
earth is round him with its lavish gifts of life,--bounty from the lap
of beauty, and that cultivated glory which no other land has earned.
Instead of panting to rush abroad and be lost among jagged obstacles,
rather let one stay within a very easy reach of home, and spare an
hour to saunter gently down this meadow path. Here in a broad bold gap
of hedge, with bushes inclined to heal the breach, and mallow-leaves
hiding the scar of chalk, here is a stile of no high pretence, and
comfortable to gaze from. For hath it not a preface of planks,
constructed with deep anatomical knowledge, and delicate study of
maiden decorum? And lo! in spite of the planks--as if to show what
human nature is--in the body of the stile itself, towards the end of
the third bar down, are two considerable nicks, where the short-legged
children from the village have a sad habit of coming to think. Here,
with their fingers in their mouths, they sit and muse, and scrape their
heels, and stare at one another, broadly taking estimate of life. Then
with a push and scream, the scramble and the rush down hill begin,
ending (as all troubles should) in a brisk pull-up of laughter.
However, it might be too much to say that the cleverest child beneath
the hills, or even the man with the licence to sell tea, coffee, snuff,
and tobacco, who now comes looking after them, finds any conscious
pleasure, or feels quickening influence from the scene. To them it is
but a spread of meadows under a long curve of hill, green and mixed
with trees down here, brown and spotted with furze up there; to the
children a play-ground; to the men a farm, requiring repairs and a good
bit of manure.
So it is: and yet with even those who think no more of it, the place,