sed together in a black fraternization towards which each
advanced half-way.

The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other
things sank blooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and
listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but
it had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the
crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one
last crisis--the final overthrow.

It was a spot which returned upon the memory of those who loved it
with an aspect of peculiar and kindly congruity. Smiling champaigns of
flowers and fruit hardly do this, for they are permanently harmonious
only with an existence of better reputation as to its issues than the
present. Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve
a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness,
emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity. The
qualifications which frequently invest the facade of a prison with far
more dignity than is found in the facade of a palace double its size
lent to this heath a sublimity in which spots renowned for beauty of
the accepted kind are utterly wanting. Fair prospects wed happily
with fair times; but alas, if times be not fair! Men have oftener
suffered from the mockery of a place too smiling for their reason
than from the oppression of surroundings oversadly tinged. Haggard
Egdon appealed to a subtler and scarcer instinct, to a more recently
learnt emotion, than that which responds to the sort of beauty called
charming and fair.

Indeed, it is a question if the exclusive reign of this orthodox
beauty is not approaching its last quarter. The new Vale of Tempe
may be a gaunt waste in Thule; human souls may find themselves in
closer and closer harmony with external things wearing a sombreness
distasteful to our race when it was young. The time seems near, if it
has not actually arrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a
sea, or a mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping
with the moods of the more thinking among mankind. And ultimately,
to the commonest tourist, spots like Iceland may become what the
vineyards and myrtle-gardens of South Europe are to him now; and
Heidelberg and Baden be passed unheeded as he hastens from the Alps to
the sand-dunes of Scheveningen.

The most thorough-going ascetic could feel that he had a natural right
to wander on Egdon: he was keeping within the line of l