perceive at so great a distance, the two great schools of the rich; he
has within one view the principal Castle of the Kings, the place of
their council, and the cathedral of their capital city: so true is it
that the Thames made England.

Then, if you consider the upper half of that valley, the view is from
the ridge of the Berkshire hills, or, better still, from Cumnor, or from
the clump of trees above Faringdon. From such look-outs the astonishing
loneliness which England has had the strength to preserve in this
historic belt of land profoundly strikes a man. You can see to your left
and, a long way off, the hill where, as is most probable, Alfred thrust
back the Pagans, and so saved one-half of Christendom. Oxford is within
your landscape. The roll upwards in a glacis of the Cotswold, the nodal
point of the Roman roads at Cirencester, and the ancient crossings of
the Thames.

From the Cotswold again westward you look over a sheer wall and see one
of those differences which make up England. For the passage from the
Upper Thames to the flat and luxuriant valley floor of the Severn is a
transition (if it be made by crossing the hills) more sudden than that
between many countries abroad. Had our feudalism cut England into
provinces we should here have two marked provincial histories marching
together, for the natural contrast is greater than between Normandy and
Brittany at any part of their march or between Aragon and Castile at any
part of theirs. I do not know what it is, but the view of the jagged
Malvern seen above the happy mists of autumn, when these mists lie like
a warm fleece upon the orchards of the vale, preserving them of a
morning until the strengthening of the sun, the sudden aspect, I say, of
those jagged peaks strikes one like a vision of a new world. How many
men have thought it! How often it ought to be written down! It hangs in