lapse wave-like into the valleys, that we see the
line of beauty a hundred times repeated, yet each
time with some new inflection, some grace
peculiar to itself. Persons are found to say that the
Downs are naked and monotonous; yet see the
variety of colours which this golden autumn day
brings out on them: the great breadths of tawny
harvest grain, burning like a close dull fire,
which here and there spurts out into the
vermilion flames of the poppy; the lighter and
fresher yellow of the stubble, where the reaper's
sickle has lately passed, and the land now lies
open to the winds, the sunlight, and the feeding
birds; the dark brown of the earth turned
upwards by the plough in fallow fields; the ochrey
tints of haystacks lying in sheltered nooks among
the folds of the hills; the manifold greens and
purples of vegetable produce in the unenclosed
market-gardens; the dark verdure of the patches
of gorse and nettles; the tender crimson, azure,
and yellow of the thickly-scattered wild flowers;
and here, looking seaward, through a rift in the
long uplands, that square of steely blue,
swimming on the faint and far horizon into the milder
blue of heaven. Turn inward again, and mark
the changes wrought in the landscape by the
shadows of the travelling clouds; and, as the
windborne darkness floats down one smooth slope and
up another, observe how the similitude of dusky
forests grows momentarily in bare places, and, ere
the eye can fix it, glides away. Pleasant sounds,
too, have the Downs, especially in the summer
and autumn seasons. For then the winds come
with a wild and yet a gentle tumult, and far
away through the pure thin air you hear the
long sweep of the scythe through the grass, or
the shorter and crisper bite of the sickle into
the corn, or the hum of the bees about the
clover, and the chattering of the unseen
grasshoppers. When you have perceived and heard all
this, you will acknowledge—if you are a candid
man—that the Sussex Downs have their attractions.

If you are also a geologist, you may investigate
the chalk formation, and the other mineral
riches of the soil; or meditate on Gilbert White's
singular speculations with respect to the hills
having been formed by a process "somewhat
analogous to growth," since they "carry at
once the air of vegetative dilatation and
expansion," or by fermentation, resulting from
adventitious moisture.

But there are other things to note in these
wide solitudes. Sprinkled about their many
thousand acres of hill and dale, extending fifty-
three miles in length, with an average breadth
of four miles and a half, are numerous old
villages, nestling sometimes at the bottom of
great hollows, sometimes in quiet recesses with
trees about them, and an ancient church, with
grey flint walls and red-tiled roof, where the
curious may find good store of ancestral brasses.
Old battle-fields, famous in history; remains of
British and Roman camps; barrows where the
bones of rival chiefs lie crumbling; ruins of
Saxon monasteries, Norman towers, and mediæval
crosses; quaint towns hidden among the hills,
with hostelries such as Chaucer's pilgrims might
have put up at, if they had gone that way;
priories converted into farm-houses, where the
moat yet lingers, though the stormy days of
civil war have passed; Elizabethan mansions,
with wainscoted apartments; countless drowsy,
picturesque, out-of-the-way spots, where you
may fancy yourself a Rip Van Winkle gone to
sleep backwards, and waking up in the far-off
Past; stud the Downs in all directions, and add
a human interest to inanimate nature. At the
Wallands, now cultivated ground, the Danes,
under King Magnus, were defeated and their
leader captured. The little village of Beddingham
is one of the places mentioned in King
Alfred's will. Near Ringmer is a house where
Gilbert White used to pass much of his time;
and close by is the pine grove mentioned in the
Natural History of Selbome. At Hurstmonceux,
on the Hastings road, is the old ruined castle of
the Dacres, one of whom, in the reign of Henry
the Eighth, was executed for killing the servant
of a neighbouring gentleman. In the vicinity of
the little town of Lindfield is a great rock poised
on a smaller mass, like the rocking stones of
Cornwall; and near Uckfield are some singular
sand rocks, resembling those of Tunbridge Wells.
The Devil's Dyke, as all men know, is famous
for a legend which ascribes its formation to the
Prince of Darkness, who, irritated by the
extraordinary piety of the people inhabiting the
Downs and the Weald, began digging a vast trench
to let the sea in, but was put to flight by an ancient
lady suddenly exhibiting a candle in a sieve,
which the foolish old gentleman mistook for the
sun miraculously rising at midnight. The Weald,
we may observe in passing, is that sylvan country
which extends to the north of the Downs, until
it terminates in the line of woody hills called
Forest Ridge. The Weald itself in the Saxon
times was one vast forest, inhabited only by
hogs and deer; but in later times it has been
brought into cultivation. Drayton, in his
Polyolbion, personifies the various woods with which
Sussex abounds as nymphs or daughters of the
great Weald, and introduces them lamenting
their threatened ruin:

These forests, as I say, the daughters of the Weald,
(That in their heavy breasts had long their grief
conceal'd,)
Foreseeing their decay each hour so fast come on,
Under the axe's stroke fetch'd many a grievous
  groan,
Whenas the anvil's weight and hammer's dreadful
  sound
Even rent the hollow woods and shook the queachy
  ground;
So that the trembling nymphs, oppress' d through
  ghastly fear,
Ran madding to the Downs, with loose dishevell'd
  hair.
The Sylvans that about the neighbouring woods
  did dwell,
Both in the tufty frith and in the mossy fell,