 to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical
possibilities.
    This obscure, obsolete, superseded country figures in Domesday. Its
condition is recorded therein as that of heathy, furzy, briary wilderness -
Bruaria. Then follows the length and breadth in leagues; and, though some
uncertainty exists as to the exact extent of this ancient lineal measure, it
appears from the figures that the area of Egdon down to the present day has but
little diminished. Turbaria Bruaria - the right of cutting heath-turf - occurs
in charters relating to the district. »Overgrown with heth and mosse,« says
Leland of the same dark sweep of country.
    Here at least were intelligible facts regarding landscape - far-reaching
proofs productive of genuine satisfaction. The untameable, Ishmaelitish thing
that Egdon now was it always had been. Civilization was its enemy; and ever
since the beginning of vegetation its soil had worn the same antique brown
dress, the natural and invariable garment of the particular formation. In its
venerable one coat lay a certain vein of satire on human vanity in clothes. A
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
