ossom, which scents the breeze.
There above rises the heath, yellow-mantled with gorse, and beyond, if I
walk for an hour or two, I shall come out upon the sandy cliffs of
Suffolk, and look over the northern sea. . . .

I am in Wensleydale, climbing from the rocky river that leaps amid broad
pastures up to the rolling moor. Up and up, till my feet brush through
heather, and the grouse whirrs away before me. Under a glowing sky of
summer, this air of the uplands has still a life which spurs to movement,
which makes the heart bound. The dale is hidden; I see only the brown
and purple wilderness, cutting against the blue with great round
shoulders, and, far away to the west, an horizon of sombre heights. . . .

I ramble through a village in Gloucestershire, a village which seems
forsaken in this drowsy warmth of the afternoon. The houses of grey
stone are old and beautiful, telling of a time when Englishmen knew how
to build whether for rich or poor; the gardens glow with flowers, and the
air is delicately sweet. At the village end, I come into a lane, which
winds upwards between grassy slopes, to turf and bracken and woods of
noble beech. Here I am upon a spur of the Cotswolds, and before me
spreads the wide vale of Evesham, with its ripening crops, its fruiting
orchards, watered by sacred Avon. Beyond, softly blue, the hills of
Malvern. On the branch hard by warbles a little bird, glad in his leafy
solitude. A rabbit jumps through the fern. There sounds the laugh of a
woodpecker from the copse in yonder hollow. . . .

In the falling of a summer night, I walk by Ullswater. The sky is still
warm with the afterglow of sunset, a dusky crimson smouldering above the
dark mountain line. Below me spreads a long reach of the lake, steel-
grey between its dim colourless shores. In the profound stillness, the
trotting of a horse beyond the water sounds strangely near; it serves
only to make more sensible the repose of Nature in this her sanctuary. I
feel a solitude unutterable, yet nothing akin to desolation; the heart of
the land I love seems to beat in the silent night gathering around me;
amid things eternal, I touch the familiar and the kindly earth. Moving,
I step softly, as though my footfall were an irreverence. A turn in the
road, and there is wafted to me a faint perfume, that of meadow-sweet.
Then I see a light glimmering in the farmhouse window--a little ray
against the blackness of the great hillside, b