cling plain is like water in its tracklessness. There are no short
cuts nor footpaths in the fen. You may strike out for the village that
on clear days looks so close at hand, and follow a flood-bank for miles
without drawing a pace nearer to the goal. Or you may find yourself
upon the edge of one of the great lodes or levels, and see the
pale-blue stripe of water lie unbridged, like a pointed javelin of
steel, to the extreme verge of the horizon. The few roads run straight
and strict upon their reed-fringed causeways; and there is an infinite
sense of tranquil relief to the eye in the vast green levels, with
their faint parallel lines of dyke or drift, just touched into
prominence here and there by the clump of poplars surrounding a lonely
grange, or the high-shouldered roof of a great pumping-mill. And then,
to give largeness to what might else be tame, there is the vast space
of sky everywhere, the enormous perspective of rolling cloud-bank and
fleecy cumulus: the sky seems higher, deeper, more gigantic, in these
great levels than anywhere in the world. The morning comes up more
sedately; the orange-skirted twilight is more lingeringly withdrawn.
The sun burns lower, down to the very verge of the world, dropping
behind no black-stemmed wood or high-standing ridge; and how softly the
colour fades westward out of the sky, among the rose-flushed
cloud-isles and green spaces of air! And out of all this spacious
tracklessness comes a sense of endless remoteness. While the roads
converge like the rays of a wheel upon the inland town, each a stream
of hurrying life, here the world flows to you more rarely and
deliberately. Indeed, there seems no influx of life at all, nothing but
a quiet interchange of voyagers. Promotion arrives from no point of the
compass; nothing but a little tide of homely life ebbs and flows in
these elm-girt villages above the fen. Of course, the anxious and
expectant heart carries its own restlessness everywhere; but to read of
the rush and stress of life in these grassy solitudes seems like the
telling of an idle tale. And then the silence of the place! The sounds
of life have a value and a distinctness here that I have never known
elsewhere. I have lived much of my life in towns; and there, even if
one is not conscious of distinct sound, there is a blurred sense of
movement in the air, which dulls the ear. But here the sharp song of
the yellow-hammer from the hedge, or the cry of the owl from the
s