When one has pushed one’s way through the brambles and the rounded great roots which have grown upon this street—­where no man has walked perhaps for about a thousand years—­one gets to the place where it tops the hill, and here one sees the way in which the line of it was first struck out.  From where one stands, right away like a beam, leading from rise to rise, it runs to the cathedral town.  You see the spot where it enters the eastern gate of the Roman walls; you see at the end of it, like the dot upon an “i,” the mass of the cathedral.  Then, if you turn and look northward, you see from point to point its taut stretch across the weald to where, at the very limit of the horizon, there is a gap in the chain of hills that bars your view.

The strict design of such a thing weighs upon one as might weigh upon one four great lines of Virgil, or the sight of those enormous stones which one comes upon, Roman also, in the Algerian sands.  The plan of such an avenue by which to lead great armies and along which to drive commands argues a mixture of unity and of power as intimate as the lime and the sand of which these conquerors welded their imperishable cement.  And it does more than this.  It suggests swiftness and certitude of aim and a sort of eager determination which we are slow to connect with Government, but which certainly underlay the triumph of this people.  A road will give one less trouble if it winds about and feels the contours of the land.  It will pay better if it is of earth and broken stones instead of being paved, nor would any one aiming at wealth or comfort alone laboriously raise its level, as the level of this road is raised.  But in all that the Romans did there was something of a monument.  Where they might have taken pipes down a valley and up the opposing side they preferred the broad shoulders of an arcade, and where a seven-foot door would have done well enough to enter their houses by they were content with nothing less than an arch of fifty.  In all their work they were conscious of some business other than that immediately to hand, and therefore it is possible that their ruins will survive the establishment of our own time as they have survived that of the Middle Ages.  In this wild place, at least, nothing remained of all that was done between their time and ours.

These things did the sight on either side of the summit suggest to me, but chiefly there returned as I gazed the delicious thought that learned men, laborious and heavily endowed, had denied the existence of this Roman road.

See with what manifold uses every accident of human life is crammed!  Here was a piece of pedantry and scepticism, which might make some men weep and some men stamp with irritation, and some men, from sheer boredom, fall asleep, but which fed in my own spirit a fountain of pure joy, as I considered carefully what kind of man it is who denies these things; the kind of way he walks; the kind of face he has; the