And fierce diseases wait around
To hurry mortals home.”
and J. Harris’s double-edged epitaph (1793),—
“How strangely fond of life poor mortals be,
How few that see our beds would change with we.
But, serious reader, tell me which is best,
The painful journey or the traveller’s rest?”
Harris was trying to imagine what it would be like, lying there in Fugglestone Churchyard, and having the laugh of people who were still perpendicular; but, of course, it is most likely that Harris never wrote it.
I did not go into Wilton, but kept on steadily alongside the Wylye. For three miles I had on my left hand the river and its meadows, poplars, willows, and elms—the railway raised slightly above the farther bank—and the waved green wall of down beyond, to the edge of which came the dark trees of Grovely. It was such another scene as the Wey and the natural terrace west of Farnham. The road was heavy and wet, being hardly above the river level, but that was all the better for seeing the maidenhair lacework of the greening willows, the cattle among the marsh-marigolds of the flat green meadows, the moorhen hurried down the swift water, the bulging wagons of straw going up a deep lane to the sheepfolds, and the gradual slope of the Plain where those sheepfolds were, on my right. This edge of the Plain above the Wylye is a beautiful low downland, cloven by coombs and topped by beech clumps; and where it was arable the flints washed by last night’s rain were shining in the sun. A few motor cyclists, determined men, passed me at twenty miles an hour through South Newton. Larks sang high, and hedge-sparrows sang low.