Then one sunny afternoon I went out by the road past Camber Castle
across Rye Foreign for Winchelsea on its hill some two miles from Rye
to the west.
There is surely nothing in the world quite like Winchelsea. Lovelier by
far than Rye, not only in itself, but because of what it offers you,
those views of hill and marsh and sea with Rye itself, like I know not
what little masterpiece of Flemish art, in the middle distance
eastward, Winchelsea is a place never to be left or at worst never to
be forgotten. One comes to it from Rye on a still afternoon of spring
when the faint shadows are beginning to lengthen, expecting little. In
fact, if the traveller be acceptable, capable of appreciating anything
so still and exquisite, Winchelsea will appear to him to be, as it is
one of the loveliest things left to us in England, place, as Coventry
Patmore so well said, in a trance, La Belle an Bois dormant. Nowhere
else in England certainly have I found just that exquisite stillness,
that air of enchantment, as of something not real, something in a
picture or a poem, inexplicable and inexpressible.
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