Who knows? If Julaber is not a corruption of Laberius as
the old antiquaries asserted, and as the people here about believe,
one likes to think it might be, for no other explanation of this
strange name is forthcoming.
So I went on through King's wood, and as I came out of it southward I
saw a wonderful thing. For I saw before me that division or part of
the world which stands quite separate from any other and is not
Europe, Asia, Africa nor America, but Romney Marsh. It lay there
under the sunset half lost in its own mists, far off across the near
meadows of the Weald, for I was now upon the southern escarpment of
the North Downs and in the foreground rose the town of Ashford where
I was to sleep. It was twilight and more, however, before I reached
it, for in those woods I heard for the first time that year the
nightingale, and my heart, which all day had been full of Rome, was
suddenly changed, so that I went down through the dusk to Ashford,
singing an English song:
By a bank as I lay, I lay,
Musing on things past, heigh ho!
In the merry month of May
O towards the close of day--
Methought I heard at last--
O the gentle nightingale,
The lady and the mistress of all musick;
She sits down ever in the dale
Singing with her notes smale
And quavering them wonderfully thick.
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