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Excerpt from Alice Lorraine: A Tale of the South Downs
However, it might be too much to say that the cleverest child beneath the hills, or even the man with the licence to sell tea, coffee, snuff, and tobacco, who now comes looking after them, finds any conscious pleasure, or feels quickening influence from the scene. To them it is but a spread of meadows under a long curve of hill, green and mixed with trees down here, brown and spotted with furze up there; to the children a play-ground; to the men a farm, requiring repairs and a good bit of manure.
So it is and yet with even those who think no more of it, the place, if not the scenery, has its aftermath of in¿uence. In later times, when sickness, absence, or the loss of Sight debars them, men will feel a deep impression of a thing to long for. To be longed for with a yearning stronger than mere admiration, or the painter's taste can form. For he, whatever pleasure rises at the beauty of the scene, loses it by thinking of it; even as the joy of all things dies in the enjoying.
But to those who there were born (and never thought about it), in the days of age or ailment, or of better fortune even in a brighter Climate, how at the sound of an ancient name, or glimpse of faint resemblance, or even on some turn of thought untraced and unaccountable - again the hills and valleys Spread, to aged vision truer than they were to youthful eyesight; again the trees are rustling in the wind as they used to rustle again the sheep climb up the brown turf in their snowy zigzag. A thousand winks of childhood widen into one clear dream of age.
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