And the downs themselves will not yield
all their beauty at once; you must live among them to thoroughly know
and love them; cold and grey and monotonous as they look at first, in
the autumn especially, you will see what a variety of colours they can
show when the fields are golden with corn, and the downs themselves
richly dotted with wild flowers, and the clouds cast fleeting shadows
over the slopes, and the purple and green of the nearer hills melt away
into delicate blues and rosy greys in the distance. And then in winter
the clouds play such tricks with the soft rounded hills and their white
chalk sides, which chalk will reveal itself in all its nakedness every
here and there, that it is often easy to imagine yourself in
Switzerland, and difficult exceedingly to tell where the downs end and
the clouds begin, so softly have they blended together, those grey
clouds, those white and purple downs. No, the downs are not monotonous
to those who look with careful eyes, at least, though the casual
observer may see nothing in them but multitudes of sheep. Unique they
may be, unlike the rest of England they certainly are, but not
monotonous.
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