with an ever increasing eagerness the space of the Downs, from the noise and confusion and throng, this silence and this emptiness; from the breathless street, this free and nimble air, which is better than wine.  And so to-day more than ever the Downs have come to stand as a symbol of an England half lost, which might seem to be passing away, but that is, as indeed these hills assure us, eternal and indestructible, the very England of our hearts, which cannot die.  There are some doubtless who grumble at this invasion and are fearful lest even this last nobility should be destroyed by the multitude or this last sanctuary desecrated by the rapacity of the rich, or this last silence broken by the brutal noise of the motor car.  But the Downs are too strong, they have seen too many civilisations pass away, and the men and the ages that built upon their hill-sides have become less than a dream in the morning.  They remain.  And is it nothing that in our day if a man hears a bird sing in a London street in spring it is of the Downs he thinks, if the wind comes over the gardens in some haggard suburb it is these hills which rise up in his mind, these hills, which stand there against the south, our very own from everlasting to everlasting.

But to possess the Downs at least as a symbol, to dream of them as a refuge, it is not necessary to know them in all their secret places, to have seen all their little forgotten homesteads, or to be able to recognise all their thousand steep tracks one from another.

For me indeed the Downs, long as I have known them, remain most dear as a spectacle, but this you will miss altogether if you are actually upon them, lost amid their rolling waves of green turf with only the sky and the wind and the sun for companions.  Therefore when I set out from Lewes to go westward I did not take the way up past the race-course over the battlefield south of Mount Harry towards Ditchling Camp and Beacon.  Let me confess it, I followed the road.  And what a road!  In all South England I know no other that offers the traveller such a spectacle, where above him, in full view, that great rampart stands up like a wall, peak speaks to peak, till presently with a majesty and a splendour, not to be matched I think in our island, Chanctonbury stands forth like a king crowned as with laurel towering upon the horizon.

Now this road I followed passes westward out of Lewes and then turns swiftly north, climbing as it goes, under the Downs beyond Offham, turning west again under Mount Harry and so on past Courthouse Farm and Plumpton church, which stands lonely in a field to the north of the road, till suddenly by Westmaston church under Ditchling Beacon it turns north again towards the Weald and enters the very notable village of Ditchling.  All that way is worth a king’s ransom, for it gives you all the steepness of the Downs upon their steepest side, their sudden north escarpment, towering up over the Weald some seven hundred feet or more.  On a spring morning early I know no way more joyful.