SALISBURY AS I SEE IT

The Salisbury of the villager--The cathedral from the meadows--Walks to
Wilton and Old Sarum--The spire and a rainbow--Charm of Old Sarum--The
devastation--Salisbury from Old Sarum--Leland's description--Salisbury
and the village mind--Market-day--The infirmary--The cathedral--The
lesson of a child's desire--In the streets again--An Apollo of the downs


To the dwellers on the Plain, Salisbury itself is an exceedingly
important place--the most important in the world. For if they have seen
a greater--London, let us say--it has left but a confused, a
phantasmagoric image on the mind, an impression of endless thoroughfares
and of innumerable people all apparently in a desperate hurry to do
something, yet doing nothing; a labyrinth of streets and wilderness of
houses, swarming with beings who have no definite object and no more to
do with realities than so many lunatics, and are unconfined because they
are so numerous that all the asylums in the world could not contain
them. But of Salisbury they have a very clear image: inexpressibly rich
as it is in sights, in wonders, full of people--hundreds of people in
the streets and market-place--they can take it all in and know its
meaning. Every man and woman, of all classes, in all that concourse, is
there for some definite purpose which they can guess and understand; and
the busy street and market, and red houses and soaring spire, are all
one, and part and parcel too of their own lives in their own distant
little village by the Avon or Wylye, or anywhere on the Plain. And that
soaring spire which, rising so high above the red town, first catches
the eye, the one object which gives unity and distinction to the whole
picture, is not more distinct in the mind than the entire Salisbury with