necessarily obscure. Let me expand them. I mean that
the unexpected turning of the ways in such a port is perpetually
revealing something new; that the little spaces frame, as it were, each
unexpected sight: thus at the end of a street one will catch a patch of
the Fens beyond the river, a great moving sail, a cloud, or the
sculptured corner of an excellent house.

The same history also that permitted continual encroachment upon the
public thoroughfares and that built up a gradual High Street upon the
line of some cow-track leading from the fields to the ferry, the spirit
that everywhere permitted the powerful or the cunning to withstand
authority--that history (which is the history of all our little English
towns) has endowed Lynn with an endless diversity.

It is not only that the separate things in such towns are delightful,
nor only that one comes upon them suddenly, but also that these separate
things are so many. They have characters as men have. There is nothing
of that repetition which must accompany the love of order and the
presence of strong laws. The similar insistent forms which go with a
strong civilisation, as they give it majesty, so they give it also
gloom, and a heavy feeling of finality: these are quite lacking here in
England, where the poor have for so long submitted to the domination of
the rich, and the rich have dreaded and refused a central government.
Everything that goes with the power of individuals has added peculiarity
and meaning to all the stones of Lynn. Moreover, a quality whose absence
all men now deplore was once higher in England than anywhere else, save,
perhaps, in the northern Italian hills. I mean ownership, and what comes
from ownership--the love of home.

You can see the past effect of ownership and individuality in Lynn as
clearly as you can catch affection or menace in a human voice. The
outward expression is most manifest, and to pass in and out along the
lanes in front of the old houses inspires in one precisely those
emotions which are aroused by a human crowd.

All the roofs of Lynn and all its pavements are worthy (as though they
were living beings) of individual names.

Along the river shore, from the race of the ebb that had so nearly
drowned me many years before, I watched the walls that mark the edge of
the town against the Ouse, and especially that group towards which the
ferry-boat was struggling against the eddy and tumble of the tide.

They were walls of e