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.
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