person on a heath in raiment of modern cut and colours has more or
less an anomalous look. We seem to want the oldest and simplest human
clothing where the clothing of the earth is so primitive.

To recline on a stump of thorn in the central valley of Egdon, between
afternoon and night, as now, where the eye could reach nothing of the
world outside the summits and shoulders of heathland which filled the
whole circumference of its glance, and to know that everything around
and underneath had been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the
stars overhead, gave ballast to the mind adrift on change, and
harassed by the irrepressible New. The great inviolate place had
an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a
particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the
moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea
changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people
changed, yet Egdon remained. Those surfaces were neither so steep as
to be destructible by weather, nor so flat as to be the victims of
floods and deposits. With the exception of an aged highway, and a
still more aged barrow presently to be referred to--themselves almost
crystallized to natural products by long continuance--even the
trifling irregularities were not caused by pickaxe, plough, or spade,
but remained as the very finger-touches of the last geological change.


The above-mentioned highway traversed the lower levels of the heath,
from one horizon to another. In many portions of its course it
overlaid an old vicinal way, which branched from the great Western
road of the Romans, the Via Iceniana, or Ikenild Street, hard by.
On the evening under consideration it would have been noticed that,
though the gloom had increased sufficiently to confuse the minor