Or an old and unusually
curious church, much churchwardened, and beside it a fragment of
fifteenth-century domestic architecture amongst the not
unpicturesque lath and plaster of an Essex farm, and looking
natural enough among the sleepy elms and the meditative hens
scratching about in the litter of the farmyard, whose trodden
yellow straw comes up to the very jambs of the richly carved
Norman doorway of the church. Or sometimes 'tis a splendid
collegiate church, untouched by restoring parson and architect,
standing amid an island of shapely trees and flower-beset
cottages of thatched grey stone and cob, amidst the narrow
stretch of bright green water-meadows that wind between the
sweeping Wiltshire downs, so well beloved of William Cobbett. Or some
new-seen and yet familiar cluster of houses in a grey village of the
upper Thames overtopped by the delicate tracery of a
fourteenth-century church; or even sometimes the very buildings of the
past untouched by the degradation of the sordid utilitarianism that
cares not and knows not of beauty and history: as once, when I was
journeying (in a dream of the night) down the well-remembered reaches
of the Thames betwixt Streatley and Wallingford, where the foothills
of the White Horse fall back from the broad stream, I came upon a
clear-seen mediaeval town standing up with roof and tower and spire
within its walls, grey and ancient, but untouched from the days of its
builders of old.
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