But imagine this:  a great, rich, wooded, watered plain; on the far horizon the shadowy forms of hills; behind you, gently rising heights, with dingles and folds full of copsewood, rising to soft green downs.  There, on the skirts of the upland, above the plain, below the hill, sits the little village, with a stately Perpendicular church tower.  The village itself of stone houses, no two alike, all with character; gabled, mullioned, weathered to a delicate ochre—­some standing back, some on the street.  Intermingled with these are fine Georgian houses, with great pilasters, all of stone too; in the centre of the street a wall, with two tall gate-posts, crowned with stone balls; a short lime avenue leads to a stately, gabled manor-house, which you can see through great iron gates.  The whole scene incredibly romantic, exquisitely beautiful.

My favourite walk is this.  I leave the little town by a road which winds along the base of the hill.  I pass round a shoulder, wooded and covered to the base with tangled thickets, where the birds sing shrilly.  I turn up to the left into a kind of “combe.”  At the very farthest end of the little valley, at the base of the steeper slopes but now high above the plain, stands an ancient church among yews.  On one side of it is a long, low-fronted, irregular manor-house, with a formal garden in front, approached by a little arched gate-house which stands on the road; on the other side of the church, and below it, a no less ancient rectory, with a large Perpendicular window, anciently a chapel, in the gable.  In the warm, sheltered air the laurels grow luxuriantly; a bickering stream, running in a deep channel, makes a delicate music of its own; a little farther on stands a farm, with barn and byre; in the midst of the buildings is a high, stone-tiled dovecote.  The roo-hooing of the pigeons fills the whole place with a slumberous sound.  I wind up the hill by a little path, now among thickets, now crossing a tilted pasture.  I emerge on the top of a down; in front of me lie the long slopes of the wold, with that purity and tranquillity of outline which only down-land possesses.  Here on a spur stands a grass-grown camp, with ancient thorn-trees growing in it.  Turning round, the great plain runs for miles, with here and there a glint of water, where the slow-moving Avon wanders.  Hamlets, roads, towers lie out like a map at my feet—­all wearing that secluded, peaceful air which tempts me to think that life would be easy and happy if it could only be lived among those quiet fields, with the golden light and lengthening shadows.

I find myself wondering in these quiet hours—­I walk alone as a rule—­what this haunting, incommunicable sense of beauty is.  Is it a mere matter of temperament, of inner happiness, of physical well-being; or has it an absolute existence?  It comes and goes like the wind.  Some days one is acutely, almost painfully, alive to it—­ painfully, because it makes such constant and insistent