A Shepherds Life | Page 8

site. That ancient, beautiful
carcass, which had long made their mouths water, on which they have
now fallen like a pack of hungry hyenas to tear off the old hide of green
turf and burrow down to open to the light or drag out the deep, stony

framework. The beautiful surrounding thickets, too, must go, they tell
me, since you cannot turn the hill inside out without destroying the
trees and bushes that crown it. What person who has known it and has
often sought that spot for the sake of its ancient associations, and of the
sweet solace they have found in the solitude, or for the noble view of
the sacred city from its summit, will not deplore this fatal amiability of
the authorities, this weak desire to please every one and inability to say
no to such a proposal!
But let me now return to the object which brings me to this spot; it was
not to lament the loss of the beautiful, which cannot be preserved in our
age--even this best one of all which Salisbury possessed cannot be
preserved--but to look at Salisbury from this point of view. It is not as
from "the meadows" a view of the cathedral only, but of the whole
town, amidst its circle of vast green downs. It has a beautiful aspect
from that point: a red-brick and red-tiled town, set low on that
circumscribed space, whose soft, brilliant green is in lovely contrast
with the paler hue of the downs beyond, the perennial moist green of its
water-meadows. For many swift, clear currents flow around and
through Salisbury, and doubtless in former days there were many more
channels in the town itself. Leland's description is worth quoting:
"There be many fair streates in the Cite Saresbyri, and especially the
High Streate and Castle Streate.... Al the Streates in a maner, in New
Saresbyri, hath little streamlettes and arms derivyd out of Avon that
runneth through them. The site of the very town of Saresbyri and much
ground thereabout is playne and low, and as a pan or receyvor of most
part of the waters of Wiltshire."
On this scene, this red town with the great spire, set down among
water-meadows, encircled by paler green chalk hills, I look from the
top of the inner and highest rampart or earth-work; or going a little
distance down sit at ease on the turf to gaze at it by the hour. Nor could
a sweeter resting-place be found, especially at the time of ripe
elder-berries, when the thickets are purple with their clusters and the
starlings come in flocks to feed on them, and feeding keep up a
perpetual, low musical jangle about me.
It is not, however, of "New Saresbyri" as seen by the tourist, with a
mind full of history, archaeology, and the aesthetic delight in cathedrals,
that I desire to write, but of Salisbury as it appears to the dweller on the

Plain. For Salisbury is the capital of the Plain, the head and heart of all
those villages, too many to count, scattered far and wide over the
surrounding country. It is the villager's own peculiar city, and even as
the spot it stands upon is the "pan or receyvor of most part of the waters
of Wiltshire," so is it the receyvor of all he accomplishes in his
laborious life, and thitherward flow all his thoughts and ambitions.
Perhaps it is not so difficult for me as it would be for most persons who
are not natives to identify myself with him and see it as he sees it. That
greater place we have been in, that mighty, monstrous London, is ever
present to the mind and is like a mist before the sight when we look at
other places; but for me there is no such mist, no image so immense
and persistent as to cover and obscure all others, and no such mental
habit as that of regarding people as a mere crowd, a mass, a monstrous
organism, in and on which each individual is but a cell, a scale. This
feeling troubles and confuses my mind when I am in London, where we
live "too thick"; but quitting it I am absolutely free; it has not entered
my soul and coloured me with its colour or shut me out from those who
have never known it, even of the simplest dwellers on the soil who, to
our sophisticated minds, may seem like beings of another species. This
is my happiness--to feel, in all places, that I am one with them. To say,
for instance, that I am going to Salisbury to-morrow, and catch the
gleam in the children's eye and watch them, furtively watching me,
whisper to one another that there will be something for