I saw six or seven separate eternities in cresting as many different
hills. One cannot find anything more infinite than a finite horizon, free
and lonely and innocent. The Dutch veldt may be a little more desolate
than Birmingham. But I am sure it is not so desolate as that English hill
was, almost within a cannon-shot of High Wycombe.

I looked across a vast and voiceless valley straight at the moon, as if at
a round mirror. It may have been the blue moon of the proverb; for on
that freezing night the very moon seemed blue with cold. A deathly frost
fastened every branch and blade to its place. The sinking and softening
forests, powdered with a gray frost, fell away underneath me into an abyss
which seemed unfathomable. One fancied the world was soundless only
because it was bottomless: it seemed as if all songs and cries had been
swallowed in some unresisting stillness under the roots of the hills. I
could fancy that if I shouted there would be no echo; that if I hurled
huge stones there would be no noise of reply. A dumb devil had bewitched
the landscape: but that again does not express the best or worst of it.
All those hoary and frosted forests expressed something so inhuman that it
has no human name. A horror of unconsciousness lay on them; that is the
nearest phrase I know. It was as if one were looking at the back of the
world; and the world did not know it. I had taken the universe in the
rear. I was behind the scenes. I was eavesdropping upon an unconscious
creation.

I shall not express what the place expressed. I am not even sure that it
is a thing that ought to be expressed. There was something heathen about
its union of beauty and death; sorrow seemed to glitter, as it does in
some of the great pagan poems. I understood one of the thousand poetical
phrases of the populace, "a God-forsaken place." Yet something was
present there; and I could not yet find the key to my fixed impression.