The roll upwards in a glacis of the Cotswold, the nodal
point of the Roman roads at Cirencester, and the ancient crossings of
the Thames.
From the Cotswold again westward you look over a sheer wall and see one
of those differences which make up England. For the passage from the
Upper Thames to the flat and luxuriant valley floor of the Severn is a
transition (if it be made by crossing the hills) more sudden than that
between many countries abroad. Had our feudalism cut England into
provinces we should here have two marked provincial histories marching
together, for the natural contrast is greater than between Normandy and
Brittany at any part of their march or between Aragon and Castile at any
part of theirs. I do not know what it is, but the view of the jagged
Malvern seen above the happy mists of autumn, when these mists lie like
a warm fleece upon the orchards of the vale, preserving them of a
morning until the strengthening of the sun, the sudden aspect, I say, of
those jagged peaks strikes one like a vision of a new world. How many
men have thought it! How often it ought to be written down! It hangs in
the memory of the traveller like a permanent benediction, and remains in
his mind a standing symbol of peace.
I have no space to speak of how from Beeston you see all Cheshire; the
Vale Royal to your left, and the main plain of the county to your right.
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