ltural and not commercial in origin; he looked at the land
rather than the towns, even if he looked at it with a somewhat more
sharp and utilitarian eye. His first remark for some hours was uttered
when we were crossing the more coarse and desolate heights of Salisbury
Plain. He remarked that he had always thought that Salisbury Plain was
a plain. This alone showed that he was new to the vicinity. But he also
said, with a critical frown, "A lot of this land ought to be good land
enough. Why don't they use it?" He was then silent for some more hours.

At an abrupt angle of the slopes that lead down from what is called
(with no little humour) Salisbury Plain, I saw suddenly, as by accident,
something I was looking for--that is, something I did not expect to see.
We are all supposed to be trying to walk into heaven; but we should be
uncommonly astonished if we suddenly walked into it. As I was leaving
Salisbury Plain (to put it roughly) I lifted up my eyes and saw the
White Horse of Britain.

One or two truly fine poets of the Tory and Protestant type, such as
Swinburne and Mr. Rudyard Kipling, have eulogized England under the
image of white horses, meaning the white-maned breakers of the Channel.
This is right and natural enough. The true philosophical Tory goes back
to ancient things because he thinks they will be anarchic things. It
would startle him very much to be told that there are white horses of
artifice in England that may be older than those wild white horses of
the elements. Yet it is truly so. Nobody knows how old are those strange
green and white hieroglyphics, those straggling quadrupeds of chalk,
that stand out on the sides of so many of the Southern Downs. They are
possibly older than Saxon and older than Roman times. They may well be
older than British, older than any recorded times. They may go back, for
all we know, to the first faint seeds of human life on this planet. Men
may have picked a horse out of the grass long before they scratched a
horse on a vase or pot, or messed and massed any horse out of clay. This
may be the oldest human art--before building or graving. And if so, it
may have first happened in another geological age, before the sea burst
through the narrow Straits of Dover. The White Horse may have begun in
Berkshire when there were no white horses at Folkestone or Newhaven.
That rude but evident white outline that I saw across the valley may
have been begun when Britain was not an isla