IN THE WOODS, FARCHYNYS, BARMOUTH ESTUARY
The thought of steam and electricity never truly touches the primitive sense of distance; and here, even the milestones among the foxgloves are somewhat insolent, when they say that the town under that farthest hill is thirty miles away; for the hill, unknown to me, is farther away than any place I have ever seen, and I would rather say that it is thirty years away and in the dim future or the dim past.
In their shape, there is something human, or suggesting human work, in these hills. Castles, or less noble masonry, noble when fallen, look thus in their ruins, and become thus tricked with delicate verdure and flowers. A great plough driven at random through frosty country would have turned up half-mile clods like these. And at twilight there is a ridge like an extended giant with raised knees and chin thrown back; and often I have seen a horned summit, like a Pan, capture the white moon.
This mountain ahead is not only old, but with its uncovered rock and broken boulders and hoary streams and twisted trees, that look as if a child had gathered garlands and put them in play upon the ancient stems, it declares mightily, if vaguely, the immense past which it has seen. There are English hills which remind us that this land also was once in Arcady: they are of a golden age,—the age of Goldsmith, of Walton, of Chaucer if you like, or of Theocritus; but they speak of nothing since; they bear no wrinkles, no wounds, no trophies. But by this mountain you cannot be really at ease until in some way you have travelled through all history. For it has not been as nothing to it that Persia, Carthage, Greece and Rome, and Spain have been great and are not. It has been worn by the footprints of time which have elsewhere but made the grass a little deeper or renewed the woods. It has sat motionless, looking on the world; it has grown wrinkled; it is all memory. Were it and its fellows to depart, we should not know how old we were; for we should have only books. Therefore I love it. It offers no illusions. Its roads are winding and rough. The grass is thin; the shelter scarce; the valley crops moderate; the cheese and mutton good; the water pure; the people strong, kind, intelligent, and without newspapers; the fires warm and bright and large, and throwing light and shadow upon pewter and brass and oak and books. It offers no illusions; for it is clear, as it is not in a city or in an exuberant English county, that the world is old and troubled, and that light and warmth and fellowship are good. Sometimes comes a thought that it is a huge gravestone, so is it worn, so obscure and brief its legend. It belongs to the past, to the dead; and the dead, as they are more numerous, so here they are greater than we, and we only great because we shall one day be of their number. You cannot look at it without thinking that the time will come when it may be, and we are not, nor the races of men—
INCOMING TIDE, NEAR BARMOUTH
sed haec prius fuere: nunc recondita
senet quiete.
And hearing an owl among its oak trees, its age was quaintly expounded to me by that passage in the Mabinogion where the Eagle of Gwernabwy seeks a wife.