Megalithic Poems

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nigelswift N
nigelswift Nov 6, 2006 20:01:13
Replying to Littlestone

In his his biography of Richard Jefferies (1909) -

The Downs in this immediate country of Richard Jeffries are among the highest, most spacious, and most divinely carved in rolling ridge and hollowed flank, and their summits commune with the finest summits of the more southerly downs - Inkpen, Martinsell, Tan Hill … Jeffries often thought of the sea upon these hills. The eye expects it. There is something oceanic in their magnitude, their solitude … They are never abrupt, but, flowing on and on, make a type of infinity … they have a hugeness of undivided surface for which there is no comparison on earth.

L Littlestone
Littlestone Nov 6, 2006 20:25:31
Replying to nigelswift

Jeffries often thought of the sea upon these hills."
"As I gaze I think of the great hill where so often in the old days I watched the red clouds of the morning, inhaling deeply. On this hill I used to bury my face in the thyme and listen to the song of the lark.
Through the hollow of the valley beyond are more meads, and oaks; and, over these, far away, the sunny haze has thickened till the hills are a mere line. On the top of the right side of the valley is a clump of trees: from thence, from underneath, in a rocky cell, and at their very roots, rises a clear and cool spring. A rugged path, encumbered with brambles, winds down to it, to the bottom of the steep face of stone where the water, with the moss-grown rock perpendicular to it, imperceptibly issues, with neither bubble nor sound."*

* The Old House at Coate. ISBN 0 9506563 8 0. Page 44.