levels run, stretches up to the Wash. So slight is the fall of the
land towards the sea, that the tide steals past me in the huge
Hundred-foot cut, and makes itself felt as far south as Earith
Bridge, where the Ouse comes leisurely down with its clear pools
and reed-beds. At the extremity of the southernmost of all the
fingers of the Isle, a big hamlet clusters round a great ancient
church, whose blunt tower is visible for miles above its grove of
sycamores. More than twelve centuries ago an old saint, whose name
I think was Owen, though it was Latinised by the monks into Ovinus,
because he had the care of the sheep, kept the flocks of St.
Etheldreda, queen and abbess of Ely, on these wolds. One does not
know what were the visions of this rude and ardent saint, as he
paced the low heights day by day, looking over the monstrous lakes.
At night no doubt he heard the cries of the marsh-fowl and saw the
elfin lights stir on the reedy flats. Perhaps some touch of fever
kindled his visions; but he raised a tiny shrine here, and here he
laid his bones; and long after, when the monks grew rich, they
raised a great church here to the memory of the shepherd of the
sheep, and beneath it, I doubt not, he sleeps.

What is it I see from my low hills? It is an enchanted land for me,
and I lose myself in wondering how it is that no one, poet or
artist, has ever wholly found out the charm of these level plains,
with their rich black soil, their straight dykes, their great
drift-roads, that run as far as the eye can reach into the
unvisited fen. In summer it is a feast of the richest green from
verge to verge; here a clump of trees stands up, almost of the hue
of indigo, surrounding a lonely shepherd's cote; a distant church
rises, a dark tower over the hamlet elms; far beyond, I see low
wolds, streaked and dappled by copse and wood; far to the south, I