Page:Our Common Land (and other short essays).djvu/162

While house is being added to house and field to field, while one small farm after another is being swallowed up in the big estate, there are yet left for the common inheritance of Englishmen who have small chance of ever owning even a little garden of their very own, some few moorland spaces, set with gorse and heather, fringed by solemn rank of guardian fir-trees, where in the sandy banks their children yet may hollow caves, where the heath-bell waves in the faint evening breeze, and from which—oh, wondrous joy to us Londoners—still the far blue distance may be seen, witness to us for ever, as it lies there still, and calm, and bright, that the near things which overshadow us, which seem so tremendous, like tall London houses, built by man, and covering so large a portion of our horizon and sky, hemming us in with terrible oppressive sense of dreariness, may fade back and back from us in distance, till they become even lovely in God's fair sunlight, little jagged peaks only against