times and in the reign of William
the Conqueror (I have told elsewhere how not only the Danes, but Saxon
Earl Harold, drove his ships into the harbour on a fierce raiding
expedition), but it is now an inland village, and between it and the
sea lie two miles of flat land of the most wonderful luxuriance. _De
gustibus_ indeed, and to me Porlock is one of the most beautiful spots
in all England. It lies in a green bay--what was a bay eight centuries
ago--between two towering headlands. On three sides of it rise the
heights of Exmoor, barren, beautiful, and windswept; before it stretch
the lands over which the Danes sailed, running out to a thin strip of
marshland, and then a silvery flat beach, and then the tremulous silver
curve of the sea, not like the line of wave that breaks at the foot of
cliffs, but a true marshland sea, seeming to come from nowhere,
infinitely smooth and faint and distant from the level shore to the dim
horizon.

There are many kinds of beauty in the world: beauty of hot suns and
delicate mists, of sea and shore, mountain and lake and city; there is
the beauty of barren moors and of green orchards, and of flat fertile
marshlands where streams run amid a luxuriance of tangled growth,
kingcups and meadowsweet and loose-strife and forget-me-nots, and
feathery willows and rushes where the reed-warblers sing. And at
Porlock there is such a gathering up of these different beauties that
it is difficult to describe the pleasure that one has in it. I have
told you how it is fenced by Exmoor, and lies within sight of Dunkery
Beacon, the highest point of the moors; but it is impossible to convey
adequately the peculiar beauty of those great smooth dipping curves,
the satisfying breadth and harmony of their line, the way the sunlight
lies upon them, and the rich deep shadows that slide into their folds.
And below, round Porlock, lie the orchards. I came there once in the
spring, and as we turned the last angle of the stony road I saw before
me such a sweep of blossom, such a foam of cherry and pear, white above
the luxuriant grass, and of that delicate flushed rose of the
apple-blossom, so exquisite a range of green, the hazy green of willows
and the bright clear green of hawthorn, that it seemed impossible it
should lie just under those miles on miles of moor where nothing
bloomed but furze and heather.

The green fields that stretched away to the sea were just such fields
as in the "Romaunt of the Ros