Thence descending from the wold he would go through Alford, and on across the sparsely populated pasture-lands, till he came at last to
Some lowly cottage whence we see
Stretched wide and wild the waste enormous marsh,
Where from the frequent bridge,
Like emblems of infinity,
The trenchèd waters run from sky to sky.
This describes the third section of Lincolnshire called the Marsh, a strip between five and eight miles wide, running parallel with the coast from Boston to Grimsby, and separating the wolds from
the sandbuilt ridge
Of heaped hills that mound the sea.
This strip of land is not marsh in the ordinary sense of the word, but a belt of the richest grass land, all level and with no visible fences, each field being surrounded by a broad dyke or ditch with deep water, hidden in summer by the tall feathery plumes of the “whispering reeds.” Across this belt the seawind sweeps for ever. The Poet may allude to this when, in his early poem, “Sir Galahad,” he writes:
But blessed forms in whistling storms
Fly o’er waste fens and windy fields;
and “the hard grey weather” sung by Kingsley breeds a race of hardy gray-eyed men with long noses, the manifest descendants of the Danes who peopled all that coast, and gave names to most of the villages there, nine-tenths of which end in “by.”
This rich pasture-land runs right up to the sand-dunes,—Nature’s own fortification made by the winds and waves which is just outside the Dutch and Roman embankments, and serves better than all the works of man to keep out the waters of the North Sea from the low-lying levels of the Marsh and Fen.
The lines in the “Lotos-Eaters”:
They sat them down upon the yellow sand
Between the sun and moon upon the shore,