... well you wot that of such life There comes but sore battaille and strife And blood of men and hard Travail....
And the prophecies of Merlin, and the story of Tristan and Iseult and all the vision of immortality and of resurrection inhabits it still.
I never can believe (I speak for myself alone) that man can be dissociated from his earth any more than I can believe that the soul can be dissociated from the body. When men say to me that there is no soul, they can go on saying. But when men say that the soul can neglect the body then there is matter for argument; and when the argument is finished one finds it is not so. Now thus it is with the earth that breeds us and into which if we are content to die at home (and since we must die somewhere, better die there) we should at last return. The landscapes of Europe make European men, and it is not for nothing that the climate and the shapes of the hills and the nature of the building stuff change just where man changes.
There is enchantment upon every high place of England, but the enchantment of the Devonshire Moors and of the Tors to the North and upwards from them is different from the enchantment of the Downs. There is a great delight in the proper fireplaces of the English people, but who, thoroughly alive, could mistake a fireplace in the West Riding for a fireplace on the Western Rother or either of these for a fireplace a little before Sherborne in the tumbles and the hollows where Dorset and Somerset meet? There is a richness of the speech and a contentment of the tongue which any man from the new countries might think common to all English agricultural men: yet there was a man from Sussex who, hearing the Sussex tongue in the Choughs at Yeovil, felt himself indeed come home. Our provinces differ very much.
I have sometimes wondered whether in the process of time these little intimate differences of ours will survive. I wish they would! I wish they would, by the Lord! The Greeks were a little people, yet their provinces have survived, and the contempt that Aspasia felt for the Peloponnesus is (or should be) yet recorded. The hill tribes behind the Phoenician coast were a little people, but the fame of their religion, of their civil wars, has survived that of the merchants of Tyre. Rome, Veii, and the others were little places like Arundel and Pulborough, quite close together; but they were talked of, and men know much of them to-day.