is nothing? Do you not know many an isolated hill often dark with
pines, but, more often still, lonely and naked where they lie of whom
we are come, with their enemies, and they call the place Battlebury or
Danesbury, or for ever deserted like all battlefields it is nameless?
If you know not these you know not England of my heart, though you
know those populous graveyards about the village churches where the
grass is so lush and green and the dead are more than the living;
though you know that marvellous tomb, the loveliest thing in all my
country, where the first Earl of Salisbury lies in the nave of the
great church he helped to build; though you know that wonder by the
roadside where Somerset and Wiltshire meet; though you know the
beauty that is fading and crumbling in the little church under the
dark woods where the dawn first strikes the roots of the Quantock
Hills.

There is so much to know, and all must be got by heart, for all is a
part of us and of that mighty fruitful and abiding past out of which
we are come, which alone we may really love, and which holds for ever
safe for us our origins.

After all, we live a very little time, the future is not ours, we hold
the present but by a brittle thread; it is the past that is in our
hearts. And so it is that to go afoot through Southern England is not
less than to appeal to something greater and wiser than ourselves, out
of which we are come, to return to our origins, to appeal to history,
to the divine history of the soul of a people.

There is a _genius loci_. To look on the landscapes we have always
known, to tread in the footsteps of our fathers, to follow the Legions
down the long roads, to trudge by the same paths to the same goal as